More than 3 million people reportedly tuned into a livestream on Pure Flix, April 18-25, as nearly 500 leaders from across the nation read the Bible from cover to cover in celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday. Organizers of this Bible-reading marathon, called “America Reads the Bible,” described the event as “a sacred opportunity to call our nation back to its spiritual foundations.”
But what of these spiritual foundations? Did the Bible play any significant role for the United States of America’s founding generation? According to Daniel Dreisbach, a constitutional historian and professor at American University in Washington, D.C., the answer is “Yes.” He goes to some lengths to demonstrate this reality in his book, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers (Oxford, 2017). But he also discussed the issue more briefly in a broadcast talk with the C.S. Lewis Institute in 2018.
“The founding fathers read the Bible,” he said. “Their many quotations from and allusions to both familiar and obscure scriptural passages tell us that they knew the Bible well; they knew the Bible from cover to cover. Biblical language and themes liberally seasoned their rhetoric; the phrases and the cadences of the King James Bible, especially, informed their written and spoken words. The ideas of the Bible shaped their habits of mind and informed their political pursuits. The Bible was the most accessible and authoritative text for eighteenth-century Americans.”
Moreover, the Bible played a key role—alongside other significant sources—in fostering the Founders’ republican ideals and political vision. And, according to Dreisbach, it is important for Americans to remember this, especially today.
“An awareness of the Bible’s contributions to the founding provides insights into the identity of the American people on their experiment in self-government,” he said. “Indeed, the widespread biblical illiteracy of our own age inevitably distorts the conception Americans have of themselves as a people, their history, and their political experiment.
“I think this is why it matters,” he emphasized. “This danger alone—that in our biblical illiteracy we’ll lose sense of who we are, where we’ve come from—this danger alone should inspire us to study the Bible in its role in the life of our nation.”
Dreisbach is right that we should revive our understanding of “the Bible in its role in the life of our nation,” and organizers of “America Reads the Bible” should be commended for calling the nation back to its scriptural roots. We should pray with them that “God can spark revival in individual hearts and inspire Americans to carry the Word forward in their lives and communities into the next 250 years of our national story.”
Now, we shouldn’t pray merely that God restores our culture’s biblical roots. Scriptural knowledge, after all, doesn’t automatically or necessarily confer spiritual blessing. During the Lord’s own lifetime on this earth, for example, the Jewish leaders knew the Hebrew Scriptures in great detail. But Christ reprimanded them, since they missed what was most important in the Scriptures: “You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them,” Christ told these religious leaders, “and yet they testify about Me. But you are not willing to come to Me so that you may have life” (John 5:39-40, CSB).
As such, we should pray that, within our churches and communities, people would read God’s Word and meditate on it day and night (Josh 1:8; Ps 1:2-3)—not merely for information or cultural impact, but to find a life-transforming relationship with Jesus Christ.
Knowledge of God’s divinely inspired Word without faith in the living Christ can be hollow and hypocritical. Nevertheless, we can rest assured that, by the power of the Spirit working through the Word, God can stir up faith in a person’s heart and draw them to His Son. For “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Rom 10:17). Moreover, when we read God’s Word with faith-filled and Christ-focused hearts, we will indeed find hope, peace and life in them.
As such, I hope that we, as Missouri Baptists, would renew our passion for God’s Word and seek Christ in His Word. Let’s also call others, young and old, in our families and churches and communities, to take up the Word and read it in faith.
I write these words on Mother’s Day, and I can’t help remembering the moment in my pre-teen years when my mother encouraged me seriously, yet in only a few simple words, to take up God’s Word and read it. Almost immediately, I began reading the Bible—and my life has never been the same.
