One of the more enduring areas of inquiry for scholars, jurists, and popular writers concerns the religious influences on the founding of the United States. Were America's founders, many of them schooled in the works of classical and Enlightenment authors, inspired chiefly by Whig and Enlightenment ideas when crafting the nation's republican governments? Or did the founders draw inspiration for many of their ideas about republican governance from a competing religious source derived from Calvinist ideals? Or did the founders undertake a more syncretic approach, one that integrated seemingly disparate themes into a single whole? Many of the nation's leading intellectual, religious, and legal historians—Perry Miller, Alan Heimert, Bernard Bailyn, Martin Marty, Catherine Albanese, Frank Lambert, and Jon Butler, among others—have contributed to this discussion, and our understanding of this question has been enriched by their insights.

The plethora of works on this topic leads one to wonder if any fresh approaches to this subject remain. (This is not to discount recent significant contributions from scholars such as Thomas Kidd, John Fea, David Sehat, and Chris Beneke.) Most contemporary scholarship tends to underscore the influence of one tradition or the other on the founding generation, though most scholars who emphasize the dominance of rationalism acknowledge the prevalence of religious ideas and rhetoric in revolutionary discourse. At times, charges are exchanged that one camp understates the strong religious milieu of the time while the other camp tends to over rely on a religious discourse that was simply common for the period.

Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers seeks to escape from this binary pattern that entraps so much writing about the founding period, and it is mostly successful. Daniel Dreisbach, who is a leading scholar in the “religionist” camp, pursues a different track with his new book. He uses as his starting point Donald Lutz's now classic study, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Louisiana State University Press, 1988), where Lutz claimed that the Bible was the most frequently cited source in the political literature of the period, outstripping any Enlightenment or Whig author, including Locke, Montesquieu, or Blackstone. Though agreeing with Lutz that the Bible “was a vital source for language, themes, and ideas in the political discourse of the American founding” (6), Dreisbach asserts that 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 that period (7). Any study “of the founders’ use of the Bible must be attentive to why and how this text was used and not merely to the fact that the Bible was read and referenced” (71).

Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers thus digs deeper into that use, focusing on the popularity of particular scriptural passages that apparently resonated with a large number of the founders. Providing a fresh approach, Dreisbach explores how various founders interpreted and applied these select biblical passages to the challenges they faced in constituting a republican society. As he demonstrates, several of these passages—such as Micah 6:8 (“What does God require of us”) and Proverbs 29:2 (“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice”)—were employed by founders from across the religious perspectives, Calvinists and rationalists alike. Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers provides readers insight into how the founders understood certain biblical themes to apply to their own situation.

Despite Dreisbach's careful and insightful analysis—the book's source material is comprehensive, demonstrating Dreisbach's command of the literature—the book cannot escape several pitfalls. Dreisbach is unsure how far to push the implications of its thesis. In places, he urges caution in overstating the significance of the founders’ use of the Bible: “Indeed, Scripture was frequently employed for literary, rhetorical, and political purposes, in addition to spiritual uses” (71). In other places, Dreisbach verges on making more robust claims about the Bible's prominence during the founding period: “The breadth and depth of [the Bible's] influence on the culture are difficult to overstate” (25); “The Constitution included specific provisions that were almost certainly derived from the Bible and Christian doctrine” (46), this last claim being highly contestable. And though Dreisbach acknowledges that many rationalist-leaning founders (e.g., Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine) employed biblical rhetoric for non-religious reasons, he relies heavily upon statements by more religiously orthodox founders, such as Samuel Adams, Elias Boudinot, Roger Sherman, and John Witherspoon, to demonstrate a strong reliance on scripture. It should be noted that as the editor of two compilations about religiously orthodox members of the founding generation, Dreisbach is a leading advocate for elevating their significance in the nation's founding. And finally, the overall thesis of the book almost proves too much. The more that the Bible is seen as having an “expansive influence on the culture” (93) and the more that its rhetoric was integrated into the political discourse and the “language, letters, arts, education, and law” of the period (17), the less significance may be attributed to its frequent uses.

Overall, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers is an important book in offering a nuanced approach to understanding the founders’ uses of the Bible. It counsels against merely counting the number of biblical references in the historical record and in taking religious statements by members of the founding generation at face value. It joins James P. Byrd's recent Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013) in urging a more in-depth exploration into the religious influences during the founding period. This approach is an important development in the literature surrounding this topic.