In this edition of the Reading Wheel Review, Dr. Jordan Ballor, executive director of First Liberty’s Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, interviews Dr. Daniel L. Dreisbach of American University in Washington, D.C. They discuss Dreisbach’s book, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers, which examines in detail the different ways
At least since the 1980s, Americans have included the Christian beliefs (or lack thereof) of their founding generation among the set pieces of rhetorical disputation in popular culture. Whenever the news got a little slow, we could count on some publication like Time or Newsweek to run a ready-made evergreen piece on the argument
In 2017 Daniel L. Dreisbach, the author of several groundbreaking articles concerning the American founders’ relationship with the Bible, wove this material together with new research to form a superb book called Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers. Dreisbach’s extensive research, judicious analysis, and lucid writing made this volume a
The mere fact that the founding generation frequently quoted from and alluded to the Bible reveals little about the American founding or the Bible’s influence on late eighteenth-century political thought, except that the Bible was a familiar and useful literary source. Furthermore, the mere fact that an individual founder referenced
