Review of In God We Don't Trust
A Review of In God We Don’t Trust
By Tim Huber
Author and attorney David Bercot is the thorough type. When he grew curious about theology, he set out to read all the works of Christians who lived in the first centuries after Christ’s death. He wound up writing Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up. That emphasis on primary sources led him to write several other books and eventually to become an Anabaptist. Bercot applied his brand of rigor both to his speaking engagements and his children’s homeschooling. It was only a matter of time before the two connected. When the U.S. history textbooks he used came to the colonial era and the American Revolution, Bercot was troubled. He felt they glorified war and promoted the idea that it was God’s purpose for Europeans to kill America’s native people and take their land, refuse to pay taxes and use violence to gain independence.
“My main concern is countering the God-and-country textbooks that are definitely infiltrating Anabaptist circles,” said Bercot, who lives in Amberson, Pa., and attends an independent Anabaptist house church. So he decided to write his own book, In God We Don’t Trust, challenging common assumptions about America’s founding, from Jamestown to the writing of the U.S. Constitution. The provocative title flips a phrase so enshrined in Americans’ consciousness that it’s minted on every coin. Bercot believes the colonists’ war for independence and other actions reveal a lack of trust in God. “Doing things from a human perspective and pulling a thin Christian veneer over it — taking up arms and killing the enemy and giving all the credit to God that we were victorious — that is what they did,” he said. “They didn’t trust in God, but when they were successful, they gave God the victory.”
Bercot doesn’t limit his critique to religious textbooks. He believes secular textbooks bear just as much guilt for romanticizing American revolutionaries who put more faith in gunpowder than in God. “We get the impression [that the laws the colonists objected to] applied only to the 13 colonies, but in most cases they applied to all British territories,” he said. “The Stamp Act — that applied in Nova Scotia and Jamaica, but only in America did people resort to violence.”
Researching the book coincided with a series of lectures Bercot has offered over the past 10 years. As both historian and attorney, he delved into original laws and charters, with surprising results. “I saw the English were originally in the right, and I didn’t expect that,” he said. “That wasn’t my original thesis, and I kept digging and finding more and more of that. They were taxing their own people [in Britain] at a far higher rate than the colonists. The colonists were paying a pittance compared to their English counterparts.”
The result is a 300-page work that includes a detailed index and hundreds of footnotes. “Since [this book] really steps on toes, I wanted to be 100 percent sure my evidence would stand up to withering cross-examination,” he said. “I feel very confident it will stand up to detractors.”
James Juhnke, professor emeritus of history at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan., who co-authored with Carol Hunter The Missing Peace: The Search for Nonviolent Alternatives in United States History, said Bercot takes Jesus’ teachings seriously. “He turns conventional nationalistic interpretations upside down,” Juhnke said. “Because the American Revolution is one of the most sacred events for the national civil religion, it is a controversial attack on a holy patriotic icon.”
Juhnke said academic historians may be put off by the use of the conservative evangelical language Bercot employs, but such an application is bound to produce lively and beneficial dialogue. Bercot knows there are many who won’t appreciate his critique of the U.S. founding fathers. “The irony is I’m coming from a conservative Christian perspective, but the book will not be popular in evangelical fundamentalist circles,” he said. In God We Don’t Trust is published by Scroll Publishing Co.
