Several interlocking narratives and rhetorics are at work in the Vision America program. One critical piece of the puzzle is a traditionalist, triumphalist historical narrative in which the United States was given to Christians by God to establish a providential nation based on biblical precepts. (No apologies -- nor even passing reference -- to the land's prior occupants.) Founded as a city upon a hill (the oft-repeated image deriving from John Winthrop's 1630 shipboard speech to the English colonists he was bringing to the new world) and as a refuge for puritans escaping religious persecution, "America was not an accident," as one speaker at the conference put it.