The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
V. 1976. “God and Nation in Selected U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses, 1789–1945: Part Two.” Journal of Church and State 18 (Autumn): 503–21.
Mead, Walter Russell. 2008. “The New Israel and the Old: Why Gentile Americans Back the Jewish State.” Foreign Affairs 87 (July–August): 28–46.
Richard, Carl J. 2016. The Founders and the Bible. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Shalev, Eran. 2013. American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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American Bible Society
One of the organizations that has done the most to promote the distribution of the Bible throughout the United States and the world is the American Bible Society (ABS). Preceded by a number of state organizations, the Society was founded in New York in 1816 largely by Federalist evangelicals who thought that a wider effort was required. American statesmen who were involved in founding or serving in the Society in its early years included its first president, Elias Boudinot, as well as John Jay (the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court), Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787), John Quincy Adams, DeWitt Clinton (a New York governor), Rufus King (another delegate to the Constitutional Convention), Marquis de Lafayette, and Francis Scott Key, who authored “The Star-Spangled Banner” (Fea 2016, 21).
These men were not only committed to the spread of the gospel but were also firmly convinced that greater biblical literacy would lead to greater citizen virtue at home and to the spread of Western civilization abroad. Although they were willing to work with Roman Catholics, they originally published only King James Versions of the Bible, albeit without notes or comments. The later stipulation was based on the idea that “the Bible’s salvific message was self-evident in the words of the inspired text” and was designed to create unity among differing Protestant sects (Fea 2016, 63).
An address published by the Society along with its Constitution observed that “the times are pregnant with great events” and that hopes follow “a period of philosophy, falsely so called, and has gone in the track of those very schemes which, under the imposing names of reason and liberality, were attempting to seduce mankind from all which can bless the life that is, or shed a cheering radiance on the life that is to come” (1816, 13–14). In language that remains familiar in the twenty-first century, members expressed their desire to “fly to the aid of all that is holy, against all that is profane; of the purest interest of the community, the family, and the individual, against the conspiracy of darkness, disaster, and death” (14). The address said that “no spectacle can be so illustrious in itself, so touching to man, or so grateful to God, as a nation pouring forth its devotion, its talent, and its treasures, for that kingdom of the Saviour which is righteousness and peace” (15). This magnitude of the task was exacerbated by the immensity of the growing nation and its population “and the dreadful consequences which will ensue from a people’s outgrowing the knowledge of eternal life; and reverting to a species of heathenism, which shall have all the address and profligacy of civilized society, without any religious control” (17). The final paragraph firmly placed the Society within the vision that Puritans had brought to American shores and ended with a quotation from Habakkuk 2:14:
We shall set forward a system of happiness which will go on with accelerated motion and augmented vigour, after, we shall have finished our career; and confer upon our children, and our children’s children, the delight of seeing the wilderness turned into a fruitful field, by the blessing of God upon that seed which their fathers sowed, and themselves watered. In fine we shall do our part toward that expansion and intensity of light divine, which shall visit, in its progress, the 26palaces of the great, and the hamlets of the small, until the whole “earth be full of the knowledge of Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea.” (1816, 20)
Fea notes that supporters like Peter Jay saw the distribution of Bibles as a way of hastening the second coming of Jesus while individuals like Elias Boudinot believed that the imminence of this coming required special efforts to reach as many lost souls in the interim as possible (2016, 27). Supporters identified biblical themes with American principles of liberty. An 1830 circular entitled “The Bible: A Religious Constitution” thus described Scriptures as a “bill of rights dictated by the Holy Spirit—a charter granted by the Deity himself”; it described the Bible as a Christian “Magna Carta” (quoted in Fea 2016, 66).
In 1852, the Society apparently decided to issue a “standard” version of the King James Version, which included making a few changes to the text (Hogue 1991, 370). This stirred controversy among members of the Episcopal Church, which believed that its mother church in England had guardianship of this translation (370). In time, the ABS withdrew its standard edition and acceded to the standard of “authorized British presses” (quoted in Hogue 1991, 373).
The ABS typically sold its Bibles through state and local auxiliaries, making several major pushes to reach areas of the nation, like the South or the western frontier, which they believed had been underserved. In time, these efforts extended to immigrants, whom the Society thought were in special need of acculturating to American Protestant ideals. The Society also distributed Bibles abroad. Typically, the Society viewed its activities in distributing Bibles to be somewhat distinct from the job of missionaries, who were there specifically to make converts to their denominations.
Through the early part of the twentieth century, the ABS largely worked with mainline Protestant denominations, but beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, as the membership of these denominations declined, the ABS took a turn in a more evangelical direction. Not all evangelicals were pleased when the Society reversed its prior policy and published its own Today’s English Version of the Bible, the New Testament of which was distributed under the title of Good News for Modern Man, which was based on the idea of “dynamic equivalence” rather than on word-for-word translation. The Society produced a special Eisenhower Memorial Edition of this Bible as well as portions of Scripture to be distributed at Independence Hall during the American Bicentennial celebrations of 1976.
Although the Society had largely judged its prior successes by the number of Scriptures it distributed, it became increasingly concerned about biblical illiteracy and therefore dropped its earlier policy about printing Bibles with commentary or comment and instead expressed its purpose as that of making “the Bible available to every person in a language and format each can understand and afford so that all may experience its life-changing message” (Fea 2016, 302).
In the summer of 2015, the Society moved its national headquarters to Philadelphia, where it plans to open a Faith and Liberty Discovery Center beginning in 2020. It will feature a two-story sculpture that symbolically represents the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution. Roy Peterson, the CEO of the organization, introduced a statement of faith similar to the Nicene Creed affirming orthodox Christian doctrines, and also calling for all employees to be 27involved in a local church and to “refrain from sexual contact outside the marriage covenant,” which it defined as being exclusively between a man and a woman (cited in Shimron 2018). A number of employees left after this policy was enacted.
See also Boudinot, Elias
For Reference and Further Reading
Constitution of the American Bible Society, Formed by a Convention of Delegates, Held in the City of New York, May, 1816, Together with Their Address to the People of the United States; A Notice of Their Proceedings, and a List of Their Officers. 1816. New York: G.F. Hopkins.
Fea, John. 2016. The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible