Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers

No book was more accessible or familiar to the American founders than the Bible, and no book was more frequently alluded to or quoted from in the political discourse of the age. How and for what purposes did the founding generation use the Bible? How did the Bible influence their political culture?

Shedding new light on some of the most familiar rhetoric of the founding era, Daniel Dreisbach analyzes the founders' diverse use of scripture, ranging from the literary to the theological. He shows that they looked to the Bible for insights on human nature, civic virtue, political authority, and the rights and duties of citizens, as well as for political and legal models to emulate. They quoted scripture to authorize civil resistance, to invoke divine blessings for righteous nations, and to provide the language of liberty that would be appropriated by patriotic Americans.

Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers broaches the perennial question of whether the American founding was, to some extent, informed by religious--specifically Christian--ideas. In the sense that the founding generation were members of a biblically literate society that placed the Bible at the center of culture and discourse, the answer to that question is clearly "yes." Ignoring the Bible's influence on the founders, Dreisbach warns, produces a distorted image of the American political experiment, and of the concept of self-government on which America is built.

• In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783
• Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father
• Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution
• Last Call for Liberty: How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat
• The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Bibliographies in the History of)
• The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America
• Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (Critical America)
• Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution
• American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism
• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)