Mark Noll, Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, has written a fascinating essay entitled “The Bible in American Public Life, 1860-2005” in Christianity Today. It is an adaptation of the lecture he gave earlier this year as the Maguire Fellow in American History at the Library of Congress.
Here are the opening sentences:
“This country is, as everybody knows, a creation of the Bible, … and the Bible is still holding its own, exercising enormous influence as a real spiritual power, in spite of all the destructive tendencies …" These words, spoken 102 years ago, came from an unexpected source. Yet as part of an address delivered by Solomon Schechter at the dedication of the main building of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, they echoed what was then a common assertion about the biblical character of the United States.
Noll’s essay examines the manner in which the Bible informed both Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and Martin Luther King’s historic speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and includes an interesting look at the historical reaction of American Jews to the use of the Bible in American public life:
Jewish organizations do certainly continue to be understandably nervous about efforts to define the United States as a Christian nation, Jewish voters shy away in droves from appeals by the Republican Party featuring "biblical values," and influential Jewish spokespersons regularly protest against any trespassing of the divide between church and state. At the same time, it is noteworthy that from the founding of the nation, a prominent strand of Jewish opinion has embraced the proposition that the United States can be identified as an unusually biblical nation. Thus, David Gelernter recently wrote in Commentary to praise what he calls "Americanism" and to claim that "the Bible is not merely the fertile soil that brought Americanism forth. It is the energy source that makes it live and thrive."
More often, however, ambiguity has prevailed in Jewish assessments of the Bible and American life. Thus, in the 1850s, Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise of Cincinnati spoke out against the practice of requiring readings from the King James Bible in the public schools, but Wise also in 1854 published a book, History of the Israelitish Nation, in which he suggested that American principles of democratic republicanism had been adumbrated in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Rabbi Wise’s reference to America as an “Israelitish Nation” reminds me of the title of a valuable anthology of essays, by both Jewish and Christian writers, about Jews and Judaism in America: “The Chosen People in an Almost Chosen Nation.” The phrase “almost chosen nation” is Lincoln’s.
Professor Noll’s essay, which concludes with a set of wise and humble political implications for the use of the Bible in American political life, is worth reading in its entirety.
(Hat tip: CLAL).