Summary: In this episode, I interview Daniel Dreisbach about the Hebraic ideas that helped shape American political thought. We discuss his contribution to Jewish Roots of American Liberty and the powerful influence of the Hebrew Bible on the founders — from covenant and political anthropology to the Exodus story that inspired generations of Americans, from the Revolution to the civil rights movement. Dreisbach explains why Deuteronomy was one of the most cited political texts of the founding era, how biblical narratives informed early understandings of liberty, justice, and human nature, and why recovering this literacy matters today. We also reflect on the challenges facing history education, the state of academic publishing, and the pressures of teaching in the age of AI. The result is a wide-ranging, accessible conversation about the ideas that defined the founding — and what they still offer a fractured society.
Note: The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and accuracy.
Garrett Brown: Welcome to Humane Pursuits. My name is Garrett Brown and I’m a research fellow in the humanities at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the host of this program.
Today I am releasing part two of my interview with Daniel Dreisbach, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC. In part one, we talked about the foundational concept of the separation of church and state and its relationship to freedom of speech and association. In this second half, we talk about a new collection that he contributed to as well as his 2017 book Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers, published by Oxford University Press.
Enjoy the show!
Now, I’d like to turn the conversation to a new book that you contributed to, and that is Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story by Wilfred McClay and Rabbi Stuart Halpern [and published by Encounter Books]. How did the book come about?
Daniel Dreisbach: Well, it’s my understanding there is a center at Yeshiva University in New York where Stuart Halpern works that got a grant to develop some curricular material for teachers to help them navigate this sort of tricky subject of religion in American public life. And they put together a number of conferences and colloquiums, and they brought teachers and various people together.
And they invited me to come up and give a series of lectures. And one of those lectures I developed into a chapter which appears in that book. It’s on the influence of the Bible, the Hebrew Bible on the American founding. And so, as part of a larger project, as I understand it, at Yeshiva, in helping teachers think through, how do you talk about, how do you teach the influence of religion in American public life.
Brown: With antisemitism manifesting in different ways in both political parties of late, the publication of the book seems timely. How would you say the book speaks into the emergence of antisemitism? Can it adequately respond to the challenge of the moment, simply by surfacing some of the ways in which the American founding is fully informed and enriched by these ideas?
Dreisbach: Well, I certainly hope it’s a book that can help address a kind of ignorance that attempts to marginalize or even deny the role of Jews in the American political experiment. And I think if you read this book you’re going to come away with a much richer understanding that Jews are not simply contributing at the margins. But Jewish ideas are framing some of the most basic and fundamental elements of the American political experiment.
So, just the very notion of liberty and liberation is an idea in the American experience that has been richly informed by the Hebrew scriptures. The story of Exodus, which is a recurring theme in American history, it’s a theme that someone like Martin Luther King appealed to over and over again and the story of liberation that it tells.
So, again, I don’t think you understand core concepts like separation of powers, due process of law, liberty, without having to engage at some level with the influence of Jewish ideas on American political thought, going back to the very earliest stages of the American experience in the New World and continuing well into the 20th, maybe even 21st century.
From Jewish American history to Jewish roots
Brown: Well, I think this new book seems to be a very good gateway into a lot of the scholarship that’s been done by many others before now. For instance, it builds on the work of Jonathan Sarna, who’s a professor of history at Brandeis, who’d written about Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and their relationship to the Jews.
More recently, I can think of two books: Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic [published by Harvard University Press] and Andrew Porwancher’s The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton [published by Princeton University Press] that have contributed to our understanding of the role of Jews within American history. And I just saw that Porwancher also has a newer book called American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews [also published by Princeton]. That should be interesting.
But it seems to me that this contribution isn’t just about the role of Jews in history and the way that they’ve contributed through immigration or through political participation. This is about Jewish thought, or specifically Hebraic thought, in the founders. And this ties to why you were invited to participate in an earlier book that you did called Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers.
So can you talk a little bit about what do we mean when we’re talking about these ideas? Not simply a kind of social situation or a social history. We’re not talking about that. We’re actually talking about a genealogy of ideas in many ways, to appreciate them in their fullness.
Dreisbach: Many years ago, a late professor at the University of Houston, Donald Lutz, published an article in the American Political Science Review, which is the flagship publication for political scientists, the American Political Science Association, in which he looked at the sources cited in the political literature of the American founding.
And he found that the Bible was by far the most cited political source in the political literature of the American founding. If I remember correctly, a full one third of all citations were to the Bible and within that, the most frequently cited book in the political literature of the American founding was the book of Deuteronomy alone.
It’s cited more frequently than The Spirit of Laws [the principal work of the French political philosopher Montesquieu]. It’s cited much more frequently than John Locke. So, what’s going on here? Well, Deuteronomy is an interesting place to be turning if you’re an American in 1776 or 1786. Why are they turning to Deuteronomy?
Well, Deuteronomy is sort of an encapsulation of the preceding four books of the Books of Moses. But what does it tell us? It tells us a story of a people under oppression who’ve escaped that oppression and have to rebuild a political society. It gives us a sort of a guide on how to rebuild a political community.
And so I think Americans are drawn to Deuteronomy because it seems to speak to them in the moment that they find themselves at this time of independence or in the immediate aftermath of war. And it speaks to these basic fundamental principles, like putting limits on the power of government actors.
It seems to speak to a kind of republican form of government. There seems to be a reference to separation of powers. There were Americans who read Deuteronomy 16, 17, and 18 and saw there a separation of powers between prophet, priest, and king. And they said, there’s an idea here that’s worth studying, and perhaps emulating. They read Exodus chapter 23, the first nine verses, which they see as a model of due process of law. And they said, we want to embrace this. This is important to us.
So they’re seeing lots and lots of lessons in the Hebrew scriptures that speak, they think, to their moment, to their time, and they think is worthy of emulation in the new political order that they’re going to recreate after the War of Independence.
And so, yes, there are New Testament passages that are very concerned with the power of civil magistrates and the power of the state. Romans 13, right? The first seven verses: “be in submission to those in authority over you.” Americans are grappling with that. But the beauty of Deuteronomy, I think for Americans, is that it’s a handbook on how to rebuild a civil polity, and that’s the moment that they find themselves in.
And so they’re looking there for what they believe is a divine handbook. This isn’t just some nice political theorist laying out ideas. This has the divine imprimatur behind it in so far as it’s part of the canon of scripture. And so I think that’s why Deuteronomy speaks to them so forcefully.
It also tells a story of a chosen people. And many Americans saw themselves as part of the elect. They saw themselves as a chosen people. They saw themselves in the story of oppression that the Jews had experienced in Egypt, they had experienced under Stewart monarchs and later George III and Parliament. So they’re seeing all these analogies and comparisons between themselves and the story that’s recounted in especially the first five books of the [Hebrew] Scriptures, or the Pentateuch.
Reading the Bible Politically
Brown: Some people may feel uncomfortable with the level of religiosity, but it also doesn’t mean that they were only reading the Bible religiously. They were really reading it as a political text or they were reading it for history.
Dreisbach: I think they’re reading it for a lot of different reasons. I have a chapter in the book where I lay out four or five completely different ways in which the Bible is used in political rhetoric, and I think it’s really important to acknowledge that the Bible’s not being read in the American founding strictly for religious or spiritual reasons. It’s also got profoundly political and literary and rhetorical functions as well. But what drew me to write this book on the Bible and the American founding is this. And I think you’ve spoken to it, but I just want to be very clear about it.
When you read the literature of the ideas of the American founding, looming large in the historiography is the influence of Enlightenment liberalism. There’s the influence of republicanism, both ancient and modern. There’s the lessons to be learned from the Roman Republic, as well as more modern theorists like a Machiavelli [author of The Prince].
Yes, there’s profound influences from English common law and British constitutionalism. And the thesis of my book is, yes, those are all important influences, but if you want to have a richer understanding of the American founding, alongside these other important influences on the American people at the time of the founding is the Bible, and they are turning to the Bible. I’m not suggesting it’s the only source of influence. I’m not even making the claim it’s the most important, although we could have a debate about that. But I’m simply saying that among the range of ideas that is informing the political thought and practice of the American founding is the Bible and Christianity, as well as the Hebraic influences that we’ve just referenced is coming in through their reading of the Hebrew scriptures.
Brown: As you write in your book:
The fact that a founder was influenced by the Bible does not indicate whether he or she was a Christian or a skeptic. Both were influenced by the Bible. To say that Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine was influenced by the Bible, for example, is not to suggest that they abandoned their rationalist perspectives. It certainly does not mean that they believed the Bible was God’s revealed word. It simply acknowledges that they added biblical notions to their arsenal of ideas and arguments. Orthodox Christians, of course, had a special attraction to scriptural texts, and it stands to reason that they were more likely to take biblical ideas seriously than their rationalist counterparts. A claim of biblical influence does not suggest that the founders were theocrats intent on imposing a biblical order on the polity. It no more follows that the founding generation was entirely Christian, merely because it was influenced by the Bible than it follows that the founders were all rationalists because some prominent founding figures were influenced by enlightenment rationalism. Acknowledging and studying the Bible’s influence enriches an understanding of the political themes that informed the thought of the founders and their political projects.
Dreisbach: I think it’s hard to overstate the influence of the Bible on the culture of the American founding. And we could play with this on a number levels, but let me just mention one level.
The King James translation of the Bible, which would’ve been the version of the Bible that would’ve been in most common use in America in the late 18th century, is an ideal tool for literacy education. And I think we can say without much exaggeration that most of the founding generation learned to read with a copy of the Bible open in front of them.
They used the Bible as a tool for literacy education. So, quite apart from the transcendent importance of the Bible, it played this role, fundamental role in the education of an entire generation of Americans. So of course, they were familiar with the stories in the Bible and the metaphors and figures of speech in the Bible.
They’re familiar with the larger doctrinal themes in the Bible. This is simply part of the culture in which they lived, and it’s going to influence and infect the arts, the letters you know, education. It’s going to influence the way they think about government and law, and the list goes on and on.
The Concept of Covenant
Brown: One of the things that you flesh out in your book is this notion of covenant which is anchored in the Hebrew Bible. Can you talk a little bit more about what that means and how it expresses itself in the American founding?
Dreisbach: Well, covenant is a reference to fundamental agreements, entering into an agreement, in this context, an agreement a people make with their God [or an agreement witnessed by God]. This is the story of the children of Israel. This is what we read about in Deuteronomy chapter 28: God’s covenant with the children of Israel.
And again, Americans seeing themselves in that tradition also believe that there is a kind of covenant here in the very foundation of the American polity. One could argue that something like covenant over time emerges in the very notion of constitutionalism. Now, I don’t necessarily want to push that point too far, but there is something covenantal in constitution writing. You’re entering into a fundamental agreement between ruler and ruled.
And so I think the commitment that Americans make not only to constitutionalism, but to written constitutions, which after all was somewhat of a departure from the English tradition, underscores this profound commitment to the notion of covenant as a firm foundation upon which to build a political society, a political order. And it’s going to be, I think, a recurring theme. It’s certainly a recurring theme in the language and rhetoric of the Puritans, but it’s going to continue right through the American founding period and beyond, that we have not only this covenant, but we have to preserve the covenant.
Of course, much of the Hebrew scriptures are a story of a people who depart from the covenant, who fail to live up to the covenant. So we end up with what are sometimes called covenant lawsuit texts in the Hebrew scriptures where God challenges his people for abandoning him. Think, for example, of Micah chapter 6, which is sometimes called a covenant lawsuit text. God is distraught. He’s saddened by the failure of his people to honor that covenant and the commitments made. And it’s a warning because there’s terrible things that happen to a people who depart from the covenant, right? And so he comes to them and he laments the fact that they are not honoring the covenant.
And Micah 6 is a story of that complaint that God has with his children as spoken through his prophet Micah, and in probably the most famous language in all of the work of the prophet Micah, the children of Israel concede that God’s right, they have abandoned him, and they say to God, what must we do to make things right? What must we do as a nation to bring ourselves back in alignment with you? And God, speaking through the prophet Micah, says, you have to do three things: You’ve got to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” [Micah 6:8]
Now, this was a text that appealed to Americans. It’s a Hebrew text. It’s from the Hebrew scripture, but again, it’s a warning to them. They’ve entered into this covenant, they believe, with God, and if they abandon it, they are lost. And so they want to remind themselves what is required of a people if they’re going to retain that alliance, that covenant with God: “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.”
And one of the most interesting places where you find that language in American political rhetoric is in the final paragraph of George Washington’s circular letter to the states, which was essentially his resignation letter as commander in chief. And he’s retiring to go back to Mount Vernon after an eight year’s absence. And he’s giving his parting advice to the American people. This is in June of 1783.
I like to call this his first farewell address because he’s leaving public life. He doesn’t think he’s ever coming back. And this is his parting advice. And what does he end that letter with? A paraphrase of Micah 6:8, which again is premised on this understanding of covenant. This is Washington. He [asks] what must we do if we want to remain a happy people? He says, and now he goes to Micah 6:8, we’ve got to do justice, love mercy, and we have to imitate the holy author of our religion.
So again, it’s speaking to covenant and this important role covenant makes in the way Americans see themselves, their relationship with God, and how you build a solid, stable political order.
Brown: — that religion and education go hand in hand with the experiment of self-governance.
The Two Pillars of Republican Self-Government
Dreisbach: That’s right. I would say republican self-government. Because this is republican theory. Republican theory relies on two pillars, two essential pillars. And one is education. People must be sufficiently well informed, well educated, to make good decisions about how to govern themselves. But even more important, the other pillar is virtue and morality informed by religion. Because people have to be sufficiently virtuous that they can govern themselves without reliance on external control of the authoritarian rulers’ whip and rod.
And so over and over again in the republican theory of the American founding is the two essential pillars for successful republican government: religion and education. You see a bit of this, you see especially the religion part in George Washington’s farewell address in 1796. But he also makes a reference, it’s a little bit less precise, to the education pillar. But what was the most famous line? The most famous line from the farewell address of 1796 — schoolchildren for generations had to memorize this — he says, of all the habits and dispositions, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. He says, if we’re going to survive as a free, self-governing people, religion and morality are indispensable.
You can’t get more vital, more essential than that. And as if to underscore [the point], he continues in the very next sentence, he says, in vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these firm props of human happiness. So, if you, Thomas Jefferson, are laboring to undermine religion’s role in public life, you can’t call yourself a patriot. Because why? That pillar of religion is vital. It’s indispensable to the survival of republican self-government.
The Exodus in the American Imagination
Brown: Another concept that comes up is the idea extending from Exodus of being a new Israel. Is this where our ideas of American exceptionalism come from? I know that the Exodus story itself would become very important during the Civil War for emancipated Blacks but also in the civil rights movement as a touchstone again and again of being literally drawn out of slavery and into freedom. But how does it get seeded in the earlier generations, at the founding?
Dreisbach: Yes. I do think I would say, first of all, this idea of being a peculiar people, a chosen people of God, to use the language of Puritan New England, the elect, really predates the American founding. It’s part of the Puritan narrative. It’s part of the pilgrim narrative. They are a chosen people of God who flee the oppression of England to come for relative safety in the New World. So, this is just woven into the American narrative almost from the very beginning of Western settlements in the New World.
American exceptionalism is one of those terms that you’ve got to really nail down exactly what you mean by it. But I think there is a vein of American exceptionalism that taps into this idea that Americans are, like the children of Israel, a chosen people, who have entered into a covenant relationship with God, who have been favored by God. But there are perils that come with that. Because if you abandon God, there are horrible curses that we read about in, let’s say, Deuteronomy chapter 28. So, yes, I think it is part of this version of American exceptionalism.
We all remember, of course, what we associate with July 4, 1776. But a part of that day that we oftentimes don’t pay attention to is later in the day the Congress met at which time they appointed a committee of three men to design a great seal for the United States. It was a committee composed of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. And they took this commission and they designed a seal and returned with a proposal to the Congress. And the proposal was an image of Moses standing on the banks of the Red Sea with arm outstretched and the waters parting and allowing for the escape of the children of Israel and the eventual destruction of Pharaoh’s armies when the waters came crashing back in.
Now, what’s remarkable is that at this moment of independence, these Founders — and we don’t associate Franklin or Jefferson or Adams with being pious evangelical founders; in fact, we think of them oftentimes as being more on the enlightenment liberal side of things — and yet they’re drawn to this image of the Exodus as a fitting portrayal for what would become the great seal of the United States. Now, as it turns out, the exigencies of the moment overtook [the Congress] and this seal was never approved by Congress.
But nonetheless, it tells us something about the frame of mind and the attraction to this biblical story. And after all, it is a profound story of liberty and liberation. George III becomes that Pharaoh. George Washington becomes Moses. The Atlantic Ocean becomes what was the Red Sea. And so they’re playing off these themes, these images now.
This is going to continue into the next century. The abolitionists in the 19th century, both African American abolitionists, as well as white abolitionists, are going to pick up this theme of the Exodus as appropriate in pushing forward their cause. It’s also, of course, going to be part of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. returns time and time again to the Exodus narrative. And so its place in the founding is significant, but it’s part of a larger sweep of American history in drawing on the themes of liberty and liberation as revealed in the Exodus story.
A Political Anthropology
Note: Owing to a problem with the audio recording, the following section was written as a replacement.
I would mention one other area where I think the Bible — and this is both the Old and New Testaments — has profoundly influenced American political thought and practice. And that is what the Bible teaches us about who we are as human beings. What does the Bible teach us about political anthropology? The American founders, over and over again, looked to the Bible to get an understanding of who human beings are. John Dickinson wrote in one of his famous letters from a Pennsylvania farmer that this is the starting point of political theory.
You’ve got to understand who we are as humans before you begin to flesh out a system of government. And the picture of mankind that emerges from Scripture, and it starts in Genesis chapter three, is that man is a fallen, sinful creature. John Adams, for example, made the connection between the fall in the Garden of Eden and humankind’s infirmed nature, writing, “what a mass of corruption human nature has been in general, since the fall of Adam.” Numerous founding figures said the Bible portrays human nature as infirmed, even desperately wicked.
The founding generation’s political anthropology, informed by a biblical anthropology, explains the founders’ obsession with checks and restraints on the exercise of government power. Because of humankind’s sinful, selfish, and depraved character, political actors vested with government power are inclined to aggrandize and abuse that power, and, in so doing, threaten the liberties and interests of those they govern. Thus, as John Adams bluntly put it, “power must never be trusted without a check.” Again, this view of human nature nurtured the founders’ obsession with limiting government powers and crafting manifold checks on the exercise of those powers, even to the point of framing a constitution with checks within checks.
In his farewell address to the nation in 1796, President George Washington connected this political anthropology with the necessity for constitutional checks and the separation of powers. He wrote that there is a “love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart.” This necessitates, he continued, multiple checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, and guarding one exercise of power from invasions by the others.
Cultural Literacy Redux
Brown: Well, connecting back to the Jewish roots book, I’m concerned that we moderns are at a disadvantage with declines not just in religious participation, but also of religious literacy. If Duke University professor Brent Strawn [author of The Old Testament Is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment, 2017] is to be believed, even among Christians, there have been steep declines in the frequency of preaching from the Hebrew Bible, from the pulpit.
And there have even been calls from certain Christian religious leaders to unhitch the New Testament from the Old. But, last time I checked, that’s a heresy called Marcionism. So how do we get to a place where we can fully appreciate the context in which a lot of these religious and political leaders have been coming from?
Dreisbach: This is why history is important. This is why reading literacy is important. If we want to understand where we’re going, it’s very useful to know where we’ve come from. And so, you know, reading the Bible is important. I tend to think there’s some value in studying the Bible as a work of literature, even in public schools. This is not about evangelization or proselytizing. It’s simply about understanding the place and the role of this book in Western civilization and, more specifically, in American history and how it has shaped and framed so much a part of our culture, including our laws and government.
But again, it’s not limited to law and government. It includes our literature, our arts, our music is infused with biblical references and illusions. If we want to understand who we are, we have to be familiar with this book. And so, I think that’s why 35 years ago, a professor at the University of Virginia, E. D. Hirsch Jr., wrote a series of books on cultural literacy. He says our democracy, in a way, is threatened if we can’t talk to each other, if we’ve lost certain points of reference, certain common themes, certain common understandings. It could be figures of speech, it could be historical events, historical moments that enable us to engage in conversations one with another. But if we become so culturally illiterate that we fail to share those reference points, our democracy is going to be undermined. We can’t even talk to each other.
And I think if you looked at Hirsch, he developed dictionaries about different cultural items that we should be aware of if we’re able to engage in healthy conversation. And an overwhelming number of those references that he identified come from the Bible. From figures of speech to stories: understanding the “fall,” or the story of the prodigal son, or the Damascus road experience of the apostle Paul. We can go through story after story that shapes our conversations and how we communicate with each other. And if we lose those, how can we even speak to each other?
And so I think in some respects, the growing biblical illiteracy of our own time is reflected in the remarkable polarization that we see in our society, where we just can’t talk across certain divides. And maybe the Bible isn’t the only thing we need to read to be able to develop that literacy, but it’s certainly a part of that. And so I lament a country that loses that ability. But it makes it difficult for us to even talk about what is the purpose of our government. What are we trying to accomplish with government and certain institutions of governance? And so this just goes to the very core of who we are, how we hope to govern ourselves, how we hope to move forward in the future.
Idealism and Violence
Brown: Well, in closing out this section, I feel that I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about the relationship of all these high ideals to violence. Just this morning I heard an interview with Ken Burns on NPR talking about his new documentary on the American Revolution, and he talked about the shocking personal violence of the fighting. You know, that often it was the bayonet, you know, as the instrument of fighting. Did people at the time ever read the Bible in ways that led them to doubt their own course of action, to question their use of violence? I’m not just thinking about loyalists or Anglicans who may have professed in a fidelity or allegiance to the Crown, but of others who were actively engaged in this kind of fighting.
Dreisbach: Well, certainly, war is a terrible thing. War is a violent thing. I would be curious to know, and maybe Ken Burns can enlighten us on this, whether there were depths of violence in the American Revolution that we had not seen before. I’m a little bit skeptical that’s what we’ll discover. But, yes, war’s a terrible thing.
But if I can just shift your question ever so slightly, Americans thought a great deal about the issue of resistance and rebellion. Is it ever right, is it ever appropriate for a righteous people to resist their rulers? And they gave a lot of thought to this. One scholar has given some attention to biblical citations in the political literature of the American founding, and he found that Romans 13 is the most cited biblical text in the literature of this age. Now, Romans 13 speaks of the obligation of the believer to be in submission to those in authority over them.
It goes on to speak of authority, rulers being ordained of God. They are God’s ministers on earth. And when we disobey, when we rebel against earthly rulers, we are in that sense rebelling against God who ordained their very existence. And so Americans are grappling with this question, in the light of Romans 13, is it appropriate to rebel against George III and Parliament.
Now, many patriotic Americans eventually came around to a rather subtle and nuanced reading of Romans 13. It wasn’t original to them. It had been discussed a century earlier in England, during the English civil wars and had been discussed much earlier in the history of Christendom and Western civilization. But Americans nonetheless embraced a view or reading of Romans 13 that said, yes, God ordains civil authorities. Yes, God calls us to be in submission to those in authority, but our rulers are ordained to serve the public good.
And if a ruler ceases or fails to serve the public good, that ruler in essence, deposes himself, abdicates the office. And if they abdicate the office, they’re no longer entitled to the submission and obedience of those underneath them. And so Americans thought it vitally important to persuade themselves that George III was, in fact, a tyrant who had failed to serve the public good. And in so doing, he had in essence deposed himself, which justified the American rebellion against him.
There is a line in the Declaration of Independence. I often skipped over it until a few years ago, and now it almost just slaps me in the face every time I read it. First of all, the authors of the Declaration go to great length to depict George III as a tyrant. That’s important because that suggests that he has abandoned his divinely ordained role as a ruler. But the line that I’m referencing here, it speaks that George III has abdicated, that’s the very word, abdicated his office. Now that’s startling, but I think it fits into this kind of theological justification for resistance that Americans are pulling out of Romans chapter 13. But resistance, rebellion, sometimes leading to war, leading to the violence of war, Americans are thinking about this very deeply. They’re very sober in how they approach this resistance.
I think, in general, they do not believe that individuals have the right to rise up and resist their ruler. They think that a citizen who believes that they have been oppressed or abused by their rulers must follow a biblical sequence of responses. First, it begins with a petition of your government, petition the very ruler that perhaps you believe has suppressed you and try to persuade them to honor your rights and liberties as a citizen. And in failing to do that, you then take the next step of perhaps fleeing, a flight, leaving the jurisdiction.
This, in essence, is what the pilgrims did when they were oppressed in England. What did they do? They left and they went to Holland, and later they left Holland to come to America. They’re avoiding the violence, immediate violence of a resistance right there in England of perhaps taking up arms against the king. But it’s not always possible for a large nation or a large group within a nation to flee. And Americans understood this, and so they understood that fleeing as oppressed citizens of George III on this side of the Atlantic was perhaps not a viable option. Which then leads them to a third and last resort, which is taking up arms in defense of your rights, the rights that God has given you.
And so Americans are working, I think, through a very deliberate process. Americans spend 10 years from 1765 to 1775 trying to petition king and Parliament to honor and respect their rights as they perceive them. Failing that they’re left with few options and it’s only having reached the last option that they take up arms in defense of their rights and liberties.
But let me mention one last element in the equation that Americans are working with here, and that is this is not a right necessarily of the individual to resist your ruler. Americans generally thought that if you found yourself in a position where you had a right to resist, you should resist by working through lower magistrates, inferior magistrates, lesser magistrates than the king that’s oppressing you.
And that’s why I think the actions of a body like the Second Continental Congress [are] so important. Again, it’s not Americans rushing into the streets with their guns and bayonets without any sort of order to it. They’re working through their lesser representatives there in Congress. The same is true of representative bodies at the state and local level. And this is a check on every man doing what they want to do in their own eyes. That leads to mob uprising, mob violence. But Americans are trying to approach this in what they believe to be a biblical process of rightly resisting an oppressive ruler in the light of Romans 13.
Brown: Excellent. Well, we may have to look to Burns’ new documentary for greater understanding of how the high idealism sits uncomfortably next to the brutality of war. But I certainly appreciate how it plays out in the context of the American Revolution.
History and Higher Ed
As we wind down our time together, I’d like to pivot to some general questions about history as a discipline and the academy. It strikes me that in many ways we live in a golden age of publishing where academic and commercial history thrive. At times they even seem to nourish each other.
Mary Beard, Dan Jones, Tom Holland, Niall Ferguson, Simon Schama, Jill Lepore, and David McCullough are just to name a few that have a wide, if aging, readership. Where do you look for good work being done in history or the academy more broadly? And do you see any encouraging trends or important work being done?
Dreisbach: Well, yes and no, if I can answer in that way. I think there’s a thriving world of historical literature emerging. There are forces and pressures in academic publishing to make works shorter and shorter. So we don’t see some of the grand sweeping histories of certain events, certain nations, certain peoples that we might have seen in an earlier age. Think about all of the multivolume histories of the American people or histories of the American republic that we saw in the 19th and early 20th century. I don’t think we have the attention span as readers. Publishers are less inclined to publish such grand and sweeping works. So we’re seeing less and less of that. There, of course, is an unfortunate tendency oftentimes in academia to more narrowly and narrowly focus on a particular topic to slice the topic in very fine ways. And so we lose those sweeping narratives, sweeping histories that we might have once seen in the marketplace.
You mentioned a number of people who I think cut against that grain, who are writing on some of the big grand themes of American history. And so I’m drawn to some of those authors just as you are. So I think this is a good time but it also is a time where there are some warning signs that maybe we’re losing interest and losing focus on some thematic works, large narrative works in history.
It’s a good time to be a scholar working in history in that we have access to documents through digital databases that are just the thrill for a scholar. There was a time when I started out when I would spend my summers driving from archive to archive looking for documents hidden away. I rarely do that today because I can pull most of those documents up on my home computer screen with a push of a button because so many of these archives have digitized their collections and made them accessible.
And so, that allows for new kinds of research and the ability to see pictures in the literature that was very hard to see when you had to go from this archive to that archive and dig through file boxes to find documents. So in that respect, this is a wonderful time in which to be researching, especially if you’re researching in areas where primary source documents are key to the work that you’re doing. So good times, bad times in the field of history.
Brown: It seems as if your book, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers, came at a very specific time before the advent of AI, in the sense that it relied heavily on your own familiarity with the King James Bible, which is not, I assume, the dominant translation of the Bible that people read these days.
Do you also have a sense that this book came at a particular moment in time when you could make some of those connections without relying on machine learning or some other technology to make those connections?
Dreisbach: I think I was very well placed to write this book on the Bible and the American founding in part, large part because I was raised reading the King James Bible. And if you’re familiar with the King James translation from 1611, you know that it has a very distinct cadence to it. There are certain ways of phrasing terms that are just very distinctive to this late Elizabethan and early Jacobian English language. And so I was very familiar, it’s very much set in my mind.
And so when I’m reading the literature of the American founding, I would often encounter a phrase, a document where it sounded to me like the language of a King James Bible, even though there were no quotation marks, no citation saying this comes from the Bible. I recognized the rhythms of the language, and so that tipped me off to dig a little bit deeper and, in fact, find that it was a reference to the Bible.
Now, someone who was not raised on the King James Bible, I think would’ve had a much harder time picking up on that. In fact, I have a rather lengthy footnote in the book in which I complain about a number of leading biographers of George Washington today. And I named them by name and give you page citations. These are the leading biographers of George Washington today who say George Washington gives no evidence that he knew the Bible.
Well, if you know the papers of George Washington, that’s jaw dropping. I’ve read a lot of George Washington’s papers and I know that there are hundreds, if not thousands of references and allusions to the Bible. Now, how can a learned scholar of George Washington make that kind of a statement? Well, it may say as much about the biographer that perhaps they aren’t themselves biblically literate. But it may also say something about the way George Washington quoted the Bible.
He almost never used quotation marks or gave a citation to a particular chapter or verse when quoting the Bible. He would simply weave a biblical phrase or even a biblical verse into a letter or a document that he was writing, and he could count on a biblically literate audience recognizing that was a biblical illusion. As far as I can tell, by the way, the only time Washington ever tips you off that he’s going to be quoting the Bible is when he quotes the “wise man,” a reference to King Solomon, who we were taught was the wisest man that ever lived. And so Washington will often say, quote, “as the wise man said,” end quote. And then he would quote from Solomon. But generally, Washington never used quotation marks or citations when referencing the Bible. And that’s why I think these modern biographers can make this absurdly false statement that he didn’t seem to know the Bible because clearly he knew it very well.
Now let me just say [as] a broader point here. Of course, he knew the Bible because almost certainly he, like almost everyone else of his generation, learned to read with a copy of the Bible open in front of him. The King James Bible is an ideal tool for literacy education, so we’re speaking about a whole generation of Americans, really. It’s a number of generations who learned to read by reading the King James Bible. So even if they were not drawn to the Bible for its spiritual, transcendent claims, they knew the stories, the narratives, they knew the symbolism, they knew the figures of speech of the Bible, and they knew them very well, and they could weave those aspects, those allusions to the Bible into their own discourse and political rhetoric. And they did. And that’s why we find so many references to the Bible in the political discourse of the American founding.
Brown: Well, there’s a lot of concern right now about students in the decline of long form reading, in part because of changing expectations, I think, and in part owing to AI and social media. I don’t want to blame them entirely. A lot of these decisions are those of teachers and administrators, not the students themselves. But how have you had to change the way you approach the material in recent years based on what you’re seeing in your students at American?
Dreisbach: Well, I think we’ve just come out of a period where we’ve seen a kind of a coming together of a number of things that have not worked to the benefit of our students and their general literacy and the like.
You mentioned generative AI. I think we’re just beginning to grapple with the implications of AI, a tool that has many promises to it, but also I think some perils attached to it. I would add that I think the COVID [pandemic] was not good for our students, generally speaking, pulling them out of the classroom. Their “learning” in isolation has not been entirely healthy. Academics from elementary school up through colleges have been patting themselves on the back about how nimble they were when COVID came along and they moved online and taught their courses on Zoom, as if this was some great achievement.
My own view is education in the age of COVID was an absolute disaster. I think our students probably learned next to nothing. And not only was it a failure of learning content, but it was a time in which students learned and developed a lot of bad habits, lesser attention span. We were very lax on putting demands on them in terms of assignments and deadlines and things like that. And we’re still dealing with that, and we’ll be dealing with that until the kids that were in kindergarten in the first COVID years — now I’m thinking about this every day, almost every day, all day. How do you respond to it?
I’ve got students who I think will probably go through college having never read an entire book. That’s the new reality. They may have been assigned a book to read. They’ll just get a synopsis off of their computer by way of generative AI. And that will satisfy them. It may not be satisfying to their instructor, but that will satisfy them. We have students here who I think quite likely will graduate having never put pen to paper and write their own paper, because again, they can just call one up from generative AI.
The reality is our students need to know how to use AI for the future. I understand that, but I don’t think it’s a replacement for learning how to read and learning how to write a sentence. And I worry about what will a generation look like that has never had to literally write a paragraph. I think that’s a problem.
I’m trying to tackle it in my classroom. I don’t have any illusions that I’m ahead of the curve, that I’m winning the war here. I’m well aware of the inadequacy, but what I’m doing is I’m requiring more literal face-to-face time with my students, face-to-face conversations. I want to hear the words come out of their own mouths as they formulate them in their head. I don’t want them to go home and get some AI response to my question. I want to hear it out of their mouths right now in my classroom.
And so a lot of the learning that might have taken place outside the classroom, I now am forced to bring it into the classroom and forcing students to engage in the conversation. When I give exams or other kinds of assessments, it is in the classroom with pencil and paper in hand. Back in the day, we used to call those blue books. They’re using blue books again. They’re writing on paper. And so, these are ways that I am [trying] to counteract the temptation to let the computer do the work for you, to let the computer read the book on your behalf and you never, ever opened the book yourself.
Brown: Well, let’s hear it for the blue book. Well, this has been a tremendously illuminating conversation. As we wrap up our time together, I understand that your current focus is on developing a class on the culture of law. What topics do you cover in that class?
What’s Next
Dreisbach: So I currently teach a course called “American Legal Culture,” which is very much focused on the way law operates within our culture and the culture within the legal community.
I’m also scheduled to teach in the spring a new course called “Rule of Law and Due Process,” and I’m looking forward to that, in part because these are two terms that we throw around all the time. But, sadly, I’m not sure we pause very often to think what exactly do we mean by rule of law? What exactly is required when due process is invoked. Even in law schools, I’m afraid we don’t spend much time on trying to understand what those terms mean in application. So that’s going to be the focus of that course: rule of law, due process. What is the process due and when is someone entitled to due process? So those are going to be some of the questions I try to address in this latter course.
Brown: Excellent. Well, we’ll just have to have you on a future episode to talk through those important concepts in their own right.
Daniel Dreisbach, thank you very much for joining me on this episode of Humane Pursuits.
Dreisbach: Well, thanks for having me, Garrett. It’s been my pleasure.
