The Bible’s Forgotten Influence on the American Constitutional Tradition

To many scholars of the subject, the American founding reflected the high-water mark of Enlightenment rationalism, producing a secular Constitution that makes no reference to God and mentions religion only insofar as it protects the free exercise thereof—and even that, not in the Constitution’s originally ratified text but in its first amendment. Not so, argues Daniel Dreisbach, noting that, in the political literature of the founding, the Bible was far and away the most-cited work: