Every school that teaches American history must teach the Bible’s central role. Easily said; but experience suggests that many of today’s classes in English and U.S. history are stuck somewhere between useless and harmful. High school history and English curricula ought to be rebuilt from scratch right now, on an emergency basis. Those rebuilt curricula should (of course) teach students about the centrality of the Bible…
Anglican settlers founded Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; Pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower founded Plymouth in 1620. Boston and Salem, 1630. The goal of the early Puritan settlers, writes the historian Sidney Ahlstrom, was “a Holy Commonwealth standing in a national covenant with its Lord.” Ahlstrom mentions also that “an ’Anglicanism’ deeply colored by Puritan convictions would shape the early religious life of Virginia”; so it seems fair to describe the first stages of the invention of America as a basically Puritan affair. The early settlers founded a series of colleges to provide them with pastors and theologians, starting with Harvard in 1636. By 1700, a quarter of a million ex-Europeans and their descendants lived in the future United States.
America’s earliest settlers came in search of religious freedom, to escape religious persecution—vitally important facts that Americans tend increasingly to forget. A new arrival who joined the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1623 “blessed God for the opportunity of freedom and liberty to enjoy the ordinances of God in purity among His people.” America was a haven for devoutly religious dissidents. It is a perfect reflection of the nation’s origins that the very first freedom in the Bill of Rights—Article one, part one—should be religious freedom. “Separation of church and state” was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The idea that the Bill of Rights would one day be traduced into a broom to sweep religion out of the public square like so much dried mud off the boots of careless children would have left the Founders of this nation (my guess is) trembling in rage. We owe it to them in simple gratitude to see that the Bill of Rights is not—is never—used as a weapon against religion.
You cannot understand the literature and experience of 17th-century American Puritans unless you know the Bible. The Pilgrim father William Bradford reports in his famous journal, for example, that his people had no choice but to camp near their landing-place on the Massachusetts mainland. There was no reason to think they could do better elsewhere; after all they could not, “as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country.”
Bradford saw no need to explain that he was referring to Moses gazing at the Promised Land from atop Mount Pisgah before his death (Deuteronomy 34:1). To 17th-century readers, the reference would have been obvious—and so too the implied message: These Pilgrims are like biblical Israelites. They are a chosen people who made a dangerous crossing from the house of (British) bondage to a Promised Land of freedom. Other Puritan settlers expressed themselves in similar terms. There is a fascinating resemblance between these Puritan writings and the Hebrew literary form called “melitzah,” in which the author makes his point by stringing together Biblical and rabbinic passages. The Puritans’ world, like traditional Jewish society, was permeated and obsessed with the Bible.
Bradford’s comparison between Puritans and ancient Israel is central to the American revolution and the emergence of the new nation. Americans saw themselves as Israelites throwing off a tyrant’s yoke. Most historians look to the British and Continental philosophers of the Enlightenment, Locke especially, as the major intellectual influence on America’s Founding Fathers and revolutionary generation. To rely on Locke is to rely (indirectly) on the Bible. Yet the Bible itself, straight up, was the most important revolutionary text of all. Consider the seal of the United States designed by a committee of the Continental Congress consisting of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. (They don’t make congressional committees like they used to!) Their proposed seal shows Israel crossing the Red Sea, with the motto “Rebellion to kings is obedience to God.” The pastor Abiel Abbot proclaimed in 1799, “It has been often remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence Our American Israel is a term frequently used; and our common consent allows it apt and proper.”
That Britain and America should both have been inclined to see themselves as chosen peoples made a subterranean connection between them that has sometimes—one suspects—been plainer to their enemies than their friends. Down to the war in Iraq, enemies of America and Britain have suspected an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to rule the world. In part this is paranoia; but it might also have something to do with Britain’s and America’s Bible-centered cultural histories. The two nations speak of a “special relationship” with each other—besides which, each has a history of believing in its own “special relationship” with the Lord Himself.
The bible continued to shape american history. Some Americans saw the great push westward as fulfilling the Lord’s plan for the United States, modeled on Israel’s settlement of the holy land. Meanwhile, many have noticed that the history of modern Israel resembles earlier American experience. Harassed Europeans arrive in a sparsely settled land in search of freedom. They build the place up and make it bloom. They struggle with the indigenous inhabitants, some of whom are friendly and some not. At first they collaborate with the British colonial authorities; each group winds up in a push for independence and a deadly fight with Britain.
But long before Israel resembled America, America resembled Israel. It’s true that Manifest Destiny—the idea that America was predestined to push westwards towards the Pacific—was less a Bible-based than a “natural rights” approach to America’s place in God’s plans. You didn’t have to consult the Bible to learn about America’s Manifest Destiny; it was just obvious. But America was called back to her biblical faith by no less a man than Abraham Lincoln himself.
As the Civil War approached, both North and South saw their positions in biblical terms. Southern preachers sometimes accused abolitionists of being atheists in disguise. Lincoln rose above this kind of dispute. “In the present civil war it is quite possible,” he wrote in 1862, “that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.”
Lincoln was America’s most “biblical” president—”no president has ever had the detailed knowledge of the Bible that Lincoln had,” writes the historian William Wolf. Lincoln turned to the Bible more and more frequently and fervently as the war progressed. His heterodox but profound Christianity showed him how to understand the war as a fight to redeem America’s promise to mankind. Lincoln never joined a church, but said often that he would join one if “the Saviour’s summary of the Gospel” were its only creed. He meant the passage in Mark and Luke where Jesus restates God’s requirements in terms of two edicts from the Hebrew Bible: to love God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Lincoln’s religion was deeply biblical—and characteristically American.
In modern times the Bible was no less important as a shaper and molder of American destiny. Woodrow Wilson, another intensely biblical president, spoke in biblical terms when he took America into the First World War—on behalf of freedom and democracy for all mankind. Harry Truman’s Bible-centered Christianity was important to his decisions to lead America into the Cold War, and make America the first nation to recognize the newborn state of Israel—to the vast disgust of the perpetually benighted State Department. Reagan’s presidency revolved around Winthrop’s Gospel-inspired image of the sacred city on a hill. George W. Bush’s worldwide war on tyranny is the quintessence of a biblical project—one that sees America as an almost chosen people (as Lincoln called us), with the heavy responsibilities that go with the job.
There is no agreement whether God created the world, but the Bible’s awe-striking creative powers are undeniable. There is no agreement whether God “is not a man that He should lie” (Numbers 23:19), but the Hebrew Bible’s uncanny honesty respecting Israel and its many sins is plain. The faithful ask, in the words of the 139th psalm, “Whither shall I go from Thy spirit?” or “whither shall I flee from Thy presence?” And answer, “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.” Secularists don’t see it that way; but the Bible’s penetration into the farthest corners of the known world is simple fact. Most contemporary philosophers and culture critics are barely aware of these things, don’t see the pattern behind them, can’t tell us what the pattern means, and (for the most part) don’t care.
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