The atmosphere reminds of me of a church pancake supper. The 50 people attending are mostly at or near retirement age, and overwhelmingly white, though there is a young Asian-American woman in killer boots, and several fashionably dressed moms with their young children in tow. By and large, these seem like people who would make wonderful neighbors--civic-minded, polite, outgoing. The conversation at the tables, however, doesn't center around the pastor's last sermon but on which Democratic politician the speaker hates most ("Obama claims to be a constitutional scholar. He knows just enough to undermine it") and the viciousness of media bias against good candidates like Christine O'Donnell ("She'd be fine elsewhere, but in Delaware she's not going to win").

But what's striking is how much these people hunger to understand America and its Constitution. "I have a master's degree," one man said to me, "and nine-tenths of this information I never got in any formal education. That's not good when you live in a country that you don't understand." There's a palpable yearning for tools to understand and change the terrible mess we're in.

Given that curiosity, it's quite striking that the seminar, which begins at 8:30 a.m., takes until 1:30 to get to the actual Constitution.

That's because we have to learn the basic truth about the Constitution: God wrote it. It comes directly from the government instituted by Moses when he led the Children of Israel out of Egypt. That system was re-instituted in England around 450 A.D. by the Anglo-Saxon rulers Hengist and Horsa. The Founding Fathers, led by Thomas Jefferson, copied the Constitution directly from the "ancient constitution" of the Anglo-Saxons.

At this point a faint alarm bell should be ringing. First of all, just for the record, Jefferson didn't take any part in writing the Constitution. He was in France, and when he read the Constitution he had mixed feelings about it. (Jefferson did actually write the words "a wall of separation between church and state," which Judge Pearce and the NCCS generally regard as a pernicious myth.)

But the louder alarm should come from maps and displays in the materials that suggest, without quite saying, that the Anglo-Saxons were in fact the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. On page 20 of our workbook, a map shows an arrow marked "Northern Tribes of Israel," running from Palestine to the Caucasus region. That arrow stops in 721 B.C.; another arrow begins at the same place at the same time: "Migration of Celts, Angli, Sacki, etc." It stretches to Northern Europe and then to England. NCCS Founder W. Cleon Skousen's big textbook, The Making of America, says that "many have thought the Yinglings, or Anglo-Saxons, included a branch of the ancient Israelites because they came from the territory of the Black Sea . . . and because they preserved the same unique institutes of government as those which were given to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. But whether related or not, there is certainly irrefutable evidence of a cross-fertilization of laws and cultural values between these two peoples." (Princeton historian Sean Wilentz's recent piece on Skousen is here.)