LF: The Founders’ Go-To Text

In his illuminating Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers, Daniel L. Dreisbach shows how early Americans used the Bible both as an intellectual sourcebook and as a tool for moral instruction. He thinks “the Bible was the most authoritative, accessible, and familiar book in eighteenth-century America.” But be comforted, O Unbeliever! This book is not a work of Christian apologetics.

“A claim of biblical influence,” Dreisbach writes, “does not suggest that the founders were theocrats intent on imposing a biblical order on the polity.” On the contrary, he says, “Believers and skeptics alike made use of the Bible.” The American University professor is admirably cautious, avoiding the Scylla of making every Founder a deist and the Charybdis of making every reference to the Bible a mark of true Christian piety.

Nevertheless, Dreisbach has an agenda. He exhorts students of the Founding “to be attentive to how the founders read the Bible and its place in the political culture of the founding era.” His advice is not just for fellow academics. The “biblical illiteracy” of our age “inevitably distorts the conception Americans have of themselves as a people, the nation, and their political experiment in self-government.”

The book has two main parts. In the first, Dreisbach shows the pervasive influence of the Bible on American public culture (chapter 1), the Founding Fathers (chapter 2), and political discourse at the time of the Founding (chapter 3). Part 2 explores specific Bible verses—Micah 6:8 (chapter 5), Proverbs 14:34 (chapter 7), Proverbs 29:2 (chapter 8), and Micah 4:4 (chapter 10)—as well as thematically arranged content on resistance (chapter 6) and liberty (chapter 9). After each chapter in part 2, Dreisbach also offers an example of the Bible in the context of American history; for example, George Washington taking his presidential oath with his hand on an open Bible.

Not everyone sees the Founding through Dreisbachian spectacles. The author quotes the late Wilson Carey McWilliams, for example, as saying that the Founding generation, far from using the Bible, “rejected or deemphasized the Bible and biblical rhetoric.” Also cited is John Fea’s claim that “one is hard-pressed to find any Christian or biblical language apart from a few passing references to God” in the arguments made by colonial leaders prior to 1776.

Dreisbach sets the stage for his rebuttal with Donald S. Lutz’s selective survey of American documents from 1760 to 1805. A single biblical book, Deuteronomy, occurs more often than the Baron de Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws—indeed, Deuteronomy is cited almost twice as often as John Locke’s entire corpus. “The American founders drew on a variety of sources and authorities,” Dreisbach notes, “but no source was better known or more authoritative and accessible in their culture than the Bible.” He makes clear that he takes the word “Founders” to include far more than Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. The term describes “a cast of thousands who played their patriotic part at the local, state, and/or national levels.”

The book is at its best—and shows how it is “the product of three decades of research”—when Dreisbach makes a point about the Bible and then uses a Founder to illustrate his observation or, even better, quotes a Founder making his point for him. Such is the case when Dreisbach claims that “the founding generation wove biblical language, often without quotation marks or explicit references” because “quotation marks and citations were unnecessary to identify the source of words so familiar to a biblically literate people.”

Dreisbach’s opponents may take issue with him here. Perhaps the Founders used biblical phrases without even knowing they were in the Bible. Dreisbach thinks the reverse is far more likely. The Founders knew the Bible, even if historians do not: “The failure to recognize Washington’s numerous biblical references perhaps indicates widespread biblical illiteracy among modern scholars.”

But whether quotation marks were unnecessary for the Founding generation isn’t a matter on which Dreisbach is speculating. He turns to historical testimony. When Benjamin Franklin—hardly the poster child for Christian America—agreed to translate and publish a Boston minister’s sermon for a European audience, he told the minister he would have to insert scriptural citations for the biblically illiterate non-Americans:

It was not necessary in New England where every body reads the Bible, and is acquainted with Scripture Phrases, that you should note the Texts from which you took them; but I have observed in England as well as in France, that Verses and Expressions taken from the sacred Writings, and not known to be such, appear very strange and awkward to some Readers; and I shall therefore in my Edition take the Liberty of marking the quoted Texts in the margin.

The translation that “every body” read in the Founding era was the King James Version, which has two advantages: It uses few words, and the words it uses are short. But, Dreisbach says, it also “enjoyed the favor of English authorities.” Why? He hides the answer in a footnote on page 250: “The marginal notes in the Geneva Bible,” its chief rival, “were an irritant to civil rulers, especially James I, because they were said to articulate a right to resist tyrannical rulers.” As Dreisbach makes clear, the Founders did not require margin notes to defend a revolution.

The author forthrightly allows that “the founders had a mixed record when it comes to their fidelity to biblical contexts and historical interpretations of biblical texts.” But he makes clear how the Founders knew the Bible, even those who criticized it or rejected certain Old Testament passages—even those who found the book altogether abhorrent.

Some Founders turned to the Bible for political purposes. For example, Thomas Paine called monarchy an invention of “the Heathens” and appealed to the Hebrew Scriptures with its “kind of republic administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes.”

But some Founders were Bible students, teachers, or even commentators. John Witherspoon was a clergyman as well as president of the College of New Jersey; his student, James Madison, could read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew. Roger Sherman published a sermon on the Lord’s Supper; John Dickinson left behind a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, and Samuel Osgood wrote “a 500-page commentary entitled Remarks on the Book of Daniel, and on the Revelations (1794).” Something tells me I’d rather read Dreisbach on Osgood than Osgood on Daniel.

The Founders made a serious push to get the Bible into people’s hands. Elias Boudinot served as the first president of the American Bible Society; John Jay served as the second. John Quincy Adams, Francis Scott Key, and John Marshall served as vice-presidents.

Dreisbach exhibits impressive craftsmanship in his chapters on single verses. His chapter on Proverbs 14:34 (“Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people”) shows his method at its best. He first sets the stage with some appropriate quote from a Founder, places the verse in its biblical context, and proceeds to show the extent to which the writer or speaker used, adapted, or modified the verse.

George Mason’s concern for national righteousness is as striking as it is prophetic:

In a speech in the Constitutional Convention on the corrupting effects of slavery, Mason argued that slavery produces “the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves,” he declared, “is born a petty tyrant.” The scourge of slavery, he continued, will “bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.”

When considering Proverbs 29:2 (“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn”), Dreisbach goes so far as to consider whether the King James Version correctly translates the Hebrew text. He also nicely catalogs the different ways the same Founder could use a verse. For example, George Washington uses Micah 4:4 both as an expression of hospitality (“I should be very happy in seeing you under my vine and fig tree”) and as a picture of religious liberty (in his1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island).

To conclude, let me offer three small criticisms. First, though insightful and enjoyable, chapter 6—on resistance literature in the 16th and 17th centuries—fits inelegantly with the overall theme of reading the Bible with the Founders. Second, Dreisbach occasionally repeats the same stories or offers the same lengthy quotations. (The story of the Great Seal of the United States is told on page 90, again on pages 106–107, and yet again on page 133.) Finally, I have one question about the Founders’ views on liberty. In chapter 9, Dreisbach speaks of an “autonomous individual liberty” familiar to us but less familiar to the Founders. But in chapter 10, he speaks of “an atomistic idea of freedom” that “resonated with many Americans for whom the ‘rugged individual’ was an archetypal persona.” Which is it? It isn’t clear.

Nevertheless, the book is exquisite, rich in insights and encyclopedic in scope. Late in life, Dreisbach tells us, John Adams called the Bible “the best book in the World.” His son John Quincy agreed: “The first and almost the only Book deserving of universal attention is the Bible.” Reading the Bible with the Founding Founders shows how they gave this “best book in the World” near “universal attention”—with near universal results, too, from belief to unbelief, from politics to piety.

James Bruce

Dr. James E. Bruce is an associate professor of philosophy at John Brown University. His first book, Rights in the Law: The Importance of God’s Free Choices in the Thought of Francis Turretin, was published by Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht in 2013.

In 1776, Americans were church-going Protestants who had a certain view of God and country.

In 2017, Americans are mostly non-church going, in a country that has no majority religion. Catholics make up the 22% plurality (and they have a decidedly different view of government's duty than Protestants do), followed by people with no religious affiliation at all, who make up about 20%. "Spiritual, but not religious" is 37% of the populace.

Only 39% of the population is some sort of Protestant, and only 46% of those - about 18% of the population - actually regularly attend church.

America is not at all the same country that it was in 1776. It has different values and different fundamental beliefs. Everything has changed.

In 1776 Maryland was a majority Catholic colony which had the Catholic Church as their official religion for decades.

Catholics hardly have a monolithic view of government, they range from near anarchist libertarians like Tom Woods and other Mises Institute contributors, to liberation theologists on the left.

Your stats need sourcing and definition. Is "Protestant" a label for any who are not members of the Catholic Church?

So broad a statement that it is a combination of Captain Obvious and easy target practice, as not "everything" has changed.

No, yours do. Catholics were a minority in Maryland from the late 1600s onward, and after 1689, until the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Church of England was Maryland's official established church, and Catholics were prohibited from voting, holding office, or public worship.

Maryland was FOUNDED as a Catholic refuge, but the Protestants flooded in and became the majority, and ultimately outlawed the public display of Catholicism and any Catholic participation in public life. It was the American Revolution that reversed that - and is a key reason why Maryland's Catholics went over to the revolutionary cause.

I did not alter, distort or rewrite history at all. You did, in order to make a false point. You should retract it.

I'll be happy to source my stats - I didn't make them up - but only once you source your bit about Maryland being a Catholic majority colony in 1776 with Catholicism as the established church. Good luck with that, because you did make that up.

(It's an easy mistake, by the way. I know why you did it. You remember that Maryland was founded as a refuge for Catholics. That's true. The part that you forgot, or never were taught, is that Protestant immigration soon overwhelmed that, and that Protestant intolerance soon force the Catholics into subjection in Maryland just the same as everywhere else in America at the time, except for Pennsylvania (to the Quakers' undying credit. If I were ever to convert to a Protestant religion, it would be Old Style Quakerism. The Quakers are the only Christians who have consistently practiced what they preached over centuries, particularly with regards to money and violence. All of the rest of Christianity are utter hypocrites compared to the Quakers of old. In more recent years they've lost their Christianity, unfortunately.)

Catholics are pretty useless politically in America, because the Catholic Church is really just about tradition and family. Economically, Catholics skew poor, and therefore politically they skew Democrat, a majority of them don't think that abortion policy is a dealkiller for being a Democrat (in largest part because they think that poverty relief is more of a commandment of Jesus than "no abortion", in smaller part because many don't really care about the abortion law itself).

This means, net-net, that politically Catholics' biggest voting issue is social welfare and poverty relief, which cuts a lot of ways that all skew Democratic.

The problem the Republicans have is that they are not at all Catholic Christian in their economics.

The block of determined Catholic Republican voters are there either because of abortion, or are militaristic against Islam. This is the smaller portion of Catholicism.

Also, very large numbers of Catholics are Hispanic, and skew towards immigration.

Finally, religious Catholics - the ones who go to church and care - do not generally find themselves in Churches whose priests preach politics. There are hard-core Protestant political ministers, with national followings, for whom Republican politics IS religion personified. Catholics don't have any comparable counterparts in the pulpit.

Protestant means Christians who are not Catholics or Orthodox. Baptists, Pentecostals, Episcopalians, Mormons and everybody in between are "Protestants" for the purposes of that survey.

I think you have a considerable sense of the electorate which stimulates my thinking. Howver, you are doing impressionism with a house painter's brush.

You are leaving out a cohort of conservative-libertarian (read: economic) Catholics.

The rest we will get to when I take the time to school you in economics. I will show you how your ideas are self-defeating.

Relax, I know things have changed. Please take the time to write a short letter.

My late friend, Will Grigg, left the Mormon church. He and I agreed that it is psuedo- Christian at best, with little regard for what Jesus taught.

I see. That is where we are headed. Let's get their straightaway, starting with a battle of credentials. What are yours?

They are more Republicans than Catholics. Catholicism is a family-culture- and-God religion, not a political movement. Catholics who try to make it a political movement fail in this country for two big reasons:

(1) Catholics are still only 22% of the population. Catholic economic theology - the real thing, which includes vast structures of social welfare as a primary duty of sovereigns - is not shared by economic Catholics. They are Republicans. The Protestant population mostly rejects any notion of that. Only seculars and black Protestants embrace it, and do so on the Democrat side.

(2) Americans other than evangelical Protestants hate the idea of organizing on religious grounds. Evangelicals, such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, et al, love it. It makes them rich and powerful. It goes nowhere, though, because the rest of the population thinks they're idiots. The leaders are not idiots, they're Republicans. Their followers are idiots, and people don't want to associate with them any more than they want to associate with Mormons.

So there's no Christian democracy movement in America. It's been divided between Black Protestant Democrats, and white compromised Robertson Republicans. Catholics are not welcome at the Republican table, because their theology is one of heavy state social welfare (the Levitical model). They already vote Democrat more than Republican, and the Democrats will never, ever compromise on abortion...unless the country Hispanicizes so rapidly that Latin-American-born Catholic Hispanicism outruns the individualistic loss-of-faith-identity and atomization that happens to Latin Catholics just like any other immigrant group. If the Latins come en masse, you could get a pro-life movement among Catholic Hispanic Democrats.

If immigration and population replacement is slowed, the gradual loss of Christianity in Latin America will send forth ever-less-Christian immigrants, who will join an already-acculturating and de-Christianizing Latin population here.

In time, if immigration is managed and measured as opposed to a tidal wave (which seems likely) the Hispanic Catholics will be like Italians and Irish - Catholic - but able to be Pelosis and Kennedys and Leahys with complete sang froid and untroubled consciences.

The Republicans really do have the power to break this wheel, but they would have to be different men than they are.

Catholicism changed everything when it began to inject itself into America with the Irish Potato Famine and then the German waves of immigration. For while half of that immigration from Germany was not Catholic, it was also not the Anabaptist and Pietist kind of German. It was Lutheran. There are no Protestants who are more Catholic than German Lutherans. Lutherans are as statist as Catholics. Minnesota and Wisconsin are German Lutheran places. Essentially, Lutherans are rural Catholics, while the Catholics who emigrated to America from the rest of Europe are urban.

As their numbers increased, two things happened. First, the Protestants who really hated the Catholics tried to stop it, and failed because the capitalist desire for cheap exploitable labor always triumphs over religious scruples in English-speaking countries. Anglophones worship money and the power it brings more than anything else. They are very pragmatic about it. After fighting the Reformation and having all sorts of anti-Catholic laws, the English were more than ready to give the French Canadians the Quebec Act, and thereby gain the quiet allegiance of a massive land full of otherwise untameable Indians, and a vast fur trade. And did that piss off their "fellow Englishmen" in the American colonies? Who gave a fuck! The colonials were firmly in hand, and the Crown would act in the Crown's best interests (which always skew financial).

This practical aspect of the English-speaking mind certainly has carried over into America, and been learned by all of the successful races who joined the American race. Cultural and religious preservation? Pfffft. Keep the borders open and the visas flowing, we need that cheap labor because that means better profits and better standard of living. People who stand against that on religious or cultural grounds are just bigoted fanatics, Luddites and buggy-whip manufacturers. The Know-Nothings of old had the same protests as the modern anti-immigration types. The Know- Nothings lost, and so have the moderns, both for the same reason. American greed for profit and desire for a higher standard of living trumps any notion of cultural patriotism, and God is available for appeals by all sides.

Second, the Catholics and Lutherans brought with them their own convictions of how a society should be organized, and they all came from Roman-Law structured republics structured by Napoleon and his modernized legal and adminstrative system - which was really an update of the fundamental Catholic city-state monarchy structure. Republicanism gave an anti-clerical overlay, but Catholic countries have always assigned poverty relief and education as a fundamental structure of the state, giving enormous power to bishops as part of the state apparatus. Two thousand years of social welfare theology has never been contested within the Catholic Church.

OF COURSE providing for the poor is a duty of every individual. And when the individual is the King or a high official, then he has the duty to mobilize his power to do it. Of course the Bishop educates and feeds the poor. The messy, imperfect, social welfare model has been the model Catholic State at least since Charlemagne, and every Catholic immigrant brought that notion with him, and still has it.

Come the early 20th Century, when the largely unsupervised capitalist system failed in the Great Depression (or at any rate was politically perceived to have failed by large bodies of suffering voters), there was a natural alliance for New Deal economics with the Catholics. The Lutherans were more reticent theologically, as it cut against some of their concepts of Church and state, but their voting patters put them in the allied camp, however reluctant. The change having been made, Lutheran Minnesota and Wisconsin are among the states that more stubbornly go blue every election cycle, precsisely because the social solidarity model is ingrained in the mindset.

Catholics and Jews vote the same way, and Lutherans are socially conscious rural voters in a way that balances the much more independentist (and racially segregationalist) Southern Baptist rural whites.

As Catholic immigration has continued apace to our day, first from Europe, now from Latin America, the inexorable political drift to the social welfare state has followed as night follows day.

Vatican 2, by throwing aside CATHOLIC reticence to working with any other Christians who will listen (but especially liking to work with Lutherans and traditional Anglicans and the Orthodox and the Methodists - the people who are least likely to preach hell and damnation "Whore of Bablyon" schlock against Catholics), caused Catholics to meld more easily and broadly into American political and social life than they ever had before.

America loosens the ties of ethnicity and culture, and people mute their religions. But the religions nevertheless affect the culture.

And what has changed from the Bible-based thinking of the 1770s to now is that increasing numbers of Catholics in particular, and Jews and Orthodox, and on a different but somewhat parallel track, German and Scandinavian Lutherans, and now Latins, have systematically moved America towards the Napoleonic Catholic law-and-welfare state model, and away from what the founders envisioned.

Catholics don't generally appeal to the Bible, but that doesn't mean they are incapable of it. Catholics turn to the Church, but the Church theologians very heavily base THEIR writings on the Catholic interpretation of Scriptures and the traditions of the early fathers and the Church itself - which is, after all, a massive charitable government.

When Fundamentalist Protestants read the Bible, they hear Paul and faith versus works. When Catholics read the Bible, they hear the commandment to feed the poor, house the homeless, the widow's mite, the cold cup of water.

When Protestants read the Old Testament, they see the blood sacrifices. When Catholics read it, they see the tithe and the Jubilee.

Protestants and Catholics can get into some very mean-spirited mocking of each other's blindness, but that's beside the point. America WAS an English Protestant Bible-focused country in 1776. It is today a mixed European, Hispanic, Black and Asian state, with no single majority either in ethnicity or religion, but with the single largest ethnic group being German (Lutherans and Catholics), and the single largest religion being Catholicism.

The big difference between 1776 and 2017 theologically has come from wave after wave of Catholic or Catholicky-Lutheran immigration out of Northern, Central and Southern Europe, with Eastern European immigration bringing Orthodox who are Catholic for these purposes. And then came the shift in the 1960s, with immigration pouring out of Latin America that continues unabated. The Catholic quotient gets higher and higher, and as it does, the notion of an underlying belief set about the Bible being the root of our government has simply evaporated and is gone with the wind.

Sure, there are Evangelical Protestants, and particular Southern Baptists, who are the most English and the most Bible-based of all Americans, and also the second largest religious sect, and they fiercely resist and oppose all of this.

But just because they oppose it and, indeed, hate it, does not mean that it is not absolutely real, and does not mean that it is not absolutely what has happened.

On this board, the bulk of the posters are of that Southern Baptisty Old- Style Protestant Bible-and-Constitution basis. There are several drug- lovers and libertarians who just seem to hate authority (and therefore really hate the Catholic Church), and then there's me over on the other side, a very pragmatic Catholic whose political beliefs are every bit as RELIGIOUSLY motivated as my Protestant counterparts. Indeed, unusual for a Catholic, I look past the Church teaching back to the nitty gritty Bible passages from which the Church scholars GET the religious theses, so my Catholicism is the most Bible-based Protestanty you've ever seen. Also, I'm a FRENCH Catholic, which means that I have little time for claims of absolute authority. The abuses of all Churches in the past have rendered them necessarily subject to state oversight, because God certainly has not prevented all of the Churches from behaving like absolute bloody barbarians.

Part of what makes religion tolerable in our age is the fact that the people, through republics, have pulled the fangs out of Christianity and taken the sword out of the Church's hands. Fanatics can wail and rail about stoning offenses and abominations all they like, but the law of the land supersedes Exodus when it comes to criminal justice REGARDLESS what the fanatics think.

Now, obviously it give me JOY to say that, because I recognize how far the Catholic Church fell in the middle ages, and how much in recent times the need for dialogue BECAUSE it was stripped of temporal power has rendered the Church something I can support, as opposed to needing to kill like a good French revolutionary. But I recognize that my JOY about the practical limitations on the Church are a HORROR to hard-core Protestants on the other side, who hate the state and essentially think that the Bible should be the law book.

That was so for many practical purposes (not all) in 1776, and it is BECAUSE so many Catholics, and Lutherans, and Orthodox, and "others" have migrated and continue to migrate, that that aspect of original American culture has been lost. Really, it has been POLITICALLY DEFEATED by people like me.

And unlike the Southern Baptists and religious right authors who lament tha as a terrible defeat, I view it both politically AND THEOLOGICALLY as a massive victory for righteousness, truth and God.

My view of American history would be the diametric opposite of the Christian conservative fundamentalists. He would see American progressively moving away from God and the Bible. While I see America progressively moving away from barbarism TOWARDS God and the Bible. He sees social welfare as "theft". I see it as the republican version of the tithe and the duty of the king and the people to provide for the poor. Diametrically opposed theology that leads to diametrically opposed politics.

And it shows. What also shows is my general joy and lighthearted demeanor. My side is winning. We have been winning since the Civil War. We're going to keep on winning. And I know it.

So the very laments that I hear coming from the other side are music to my ears. It means that they KNOW they have been defeated, and continue to be defeated.

Now, note well, I too want immigration controlled, but for very different reasons. I too want a strong defense, but for different reasons. I too want a different tax structure, but for a different reason. I want peace with Russia like Trump does. And that's really the ALPHA issue. Why? Because social welfare is EXPENSIVE, and if we're going to do it right, we cannot afford a military empire alongside of it. It's one or the other. I vote for taking care of our own people, not spending a fortune to make a hash of the Middle East.

And that means that we need peace with Russia. Which is why I support it, and Trump, who is the only one who offered it.

So, when you decide to SCHOOL me on economics, understand that I am going to answer Von Mises with YHWH, and I am going to answer Hayek with Jesus. You may not feel schooled when you're done, but I will tell you that regardless of who "wins" some sort of artificial debate on a chatsite, that the overall political drift of this country and the world will continue to be in my direction, I know it, and I'm happy about that.

The Catholic Church is, of course, universal - people all over the world are part of what God intended to be one world religion, providing salvation for all.

ANd there is nothing that would be more efficient than one world federal government, providing social welfare to people who need it across the world, and health care and education, and a stable system of justice and law, without the need for the waste of military forces, all under a legal regime that protects the rights of the individual to life, especially, and to the degree of personal liberty and the pursuit of happiness that is commensurate with what can exist in those realms while everybody else still has enough for basic dignity. That means that the liberty for one man to amass half of the world's wealth must be curtailed and substantially redistributed away from him. He is too greedy, and our cousins will continue to starve if the few wrongly hoard that much.

This is not a call for Communism or socialism. It's a call for Catholicism. Failing that, it's a call for a worldwide consensus on peace and protecting the individual.

All of the bogeymen of the political religious right - I embody them. I'm Catholic. AND I'm French. The very nightmare antithesis of everything, all wrapped up in one charming and voluble package.

Now, "school" away. And don't be surprised if I take the mickey out of you as you try to do it. I already know, from God, that my overarching economics are holy and true. I already know that you're wrong, if you're going to be opposing that. It's only a question of whether or not I am going to be able to force you, against your learning and your will, to see it.

And the answer is: of course not. You're a right wing Protestant! I may as well try to order back the tide as try to turn you. So, there will be no resolution. The Southgoing Zax and the Northgoing Zax will end up unbudged in our tracks, but the world will go on evolving around us, and I'll like what I see out of my peripheral vision a whole lot better than you will.

If you're stupid enough to believe one brand of mythology on faith, you're stupid enough to believe in another brand when it comes along.