Northrup Frye reminded us in The Great Code (Academic Press Canada, 1982) that one cannot understand English literature without first obtaining a substantial working knowledge of the English (Christian) Bible. Without such knowledge, “a student of English literature… does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continuously misconstruing the implications, even the meaning” (xii). Carl Richard proposes an echo of Frye's thesis, arguing that “a thorough study” of relationships the founders of the American republic had “with the Bible reveals that the more extreme claims of some modern Christians and secularists are equally invalid” (1). It is neither the case that “all of the founders were Christians” nor that they were “twenty-first century secularists” (2).

In ten chapters, Professor Richard demonstrates through extensive quotations and explication the thesis that the American founders—to bend Jon Butler's metaphor—were awash in a sea of scripturality. The ubiquity of the Bible in the “homes, schools, churches, and society” (11) of their childhoods thoroughly infused the founders with biblical metaphors, characters, and general vocabulary, leading most to a lively, lifelong engagement with the Bible. The pervasiveness of biblical references in everyday American life, whether in low or high culture, provided the founders and their compatriots a common stock of heroes, villains, “stories, knowledge, and ideas, [set in] a literature select enough to provide common ground yet rich enough to address a wide range of human problems from a variety of perspectives” (63).

Such biblical saturation begat common doctrines and beliefs. Contrary to a “popular misconception” that “the founders” were deists (i.e., believers in “divine noninterference”), Richard finds them to have “embraced the biblical concept of an omniscient, omnipotent, caring God who not only created the universe but also intervened in it” (99). This belief upheld them in adversity in their private lives and in their political aspirations, and it also supported the theo-political belief that the United States was a “new Israel,” “destined by God” to serve as “a model of liberty” and “a safe haven for the world's oppressed” (139). Richard thus finds American exceptionalism rooted in the “strongly held” biblical belief of the founders and their contemporaries that the “United States was a unique nation with a divine mission” (166). Contra any “Beardian analysis centered on financial gain,” many of the founders suffered substantial personal losses for this belief during the Revolutionary period, confirming the genuine character of the biblically rooted beliefs that animated their activity (167). The founders also shared an assessment of the “superiority of Christian morality” and a belief that “the survival and success of any republic” required this religion and its morality (169). Apart from its doctrinal truths, therefore, the Bible usefully supported a system of government that could nowhere be found described within its pages, but whose “spirit” validated such a regime in principle (195). Hence an irony: the founders supported their concept of American exceptionalism by “fidelity to their chief inheritance from the Old World—the Bible” (194).

Other “shared crucial beliefs,” including “spiritual equality, free will, … an afterlife characterized by divine rewards and punishments” (197), and a conception of human nature rooted in biblical doctrines of original sin and human depravity, were likewise motivating factors in the republican and revolutionary ideals of most of the founders. The latter doctrine, argues Richard, makes best sense of those aspects of American republicanism, such as deliberately separated political competencies and powers, that reveal a deeply rooted suspicion of political power and political ambition.

While providing a trove of quotations and other source-based materials, Richard does not identify the interpreters with whom he disagrees. He never, for example, clearly identifies the sources of polar assertions concerning the founders’ secularity or religiosity. Where such writers might be cited, they appear as sources for quotations from the founders, not as discussion partners. These absences make it difficult to discern what he believes his arguments ultimately imply for understanding the American founding specifically or American political and theo-political thought more generally. His overall treatment is, in consequence, not directed at key questions that might be of most interest to many historians or political scientists, especially political theorists.

In similar fashion, Richard pays slight attention to the nuances of the interrelationship between “biblical” and “secular” or “classical” thought. For example, while Christianity contains a deep and long tradition confirming the depravity of humankind, a similar tradition is also found in classical pagan antiquity. The reference points in John Adams's discussion of the human lust for power seem to be more pagan than Christian (266), an appearance further confirmed by his reading of Thucydides (274–75). We know (as Richard has affirmed elsewhere) that most founders were deeply formed by their reading of the Roman and Greek classics. Just as Machiavelli professed to have developed his dim view of human motivations not from Augustine, but from his observations confirmed by pagan authors, might the same have been (partially) true for the founders? Might such a genealogy differently nuance some of the founders’ political prescriptions? Conversely, and without offering compelling evidence, Richard attributes Adams's political optimism entirely to his “Enlightenment” beliefs, yet some Christian traditions, including the later development of social gospel theology, show that optimism regarding earthly human potential can be “biblical.”

Richard does not give the reader a direct, precise meaning of terms such as “biblical,” “orthodox,” “Christian,” or “morality,” but he leaves clues. These include his anachronistic use of the theologically fraught “Judeo-Christian” and his observation that roughly three-quarters of American colonists at the time of the founding were “Center (or Reformed) Protestants in the tradition of Martin Luther or John Calvin” (12). His terminological usage is consistent with this tradition: to speak of the founders’ “thoroughly biblical” understanding of the relationship between church and state, for example, is to speak purely out of this Protestant heritage in its eighteenth-century formation (289ff.). Richard devotes a substantial chapter to the nontrivial ways in which various founders departed from this Center orthodoxy, concluding that they nevertheless remained essentially within its orbit.

The biblical texts were inarguably a compass point in the thought of most of the founders, who lived in a world permeated with biblically derived tropes and language. The Bible can be so used while yet being read as literature, as a moral guide, as history, or as a text belonging to any number of other genres without ever moving the reader to one or another variety of orthodox Christian belief. Scholars who argue for a stronger or more widespread “secularist” or “deist” vision among the founders may find this extended collection of biographical vignettes and explications useful, but will wonder why it leaves aside a direct critical engagement with specific arguments and evidence supporting their perspective.

Richard concludes his book with brief comments on the Second Great Awakening, an episode that implies that some chronologically proximate Christian believers may have found the scripturality of the founders and their contemporaries to be not entirely satisfactory.