Wilfred McClay: The Civilizational Role of the Bible in the American Founding

As it happened, Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern's The Jewish Roots of American Liberty was released in late September of 2024, just as the American Right was increasingly grappling with some of its own calling into question the role of Judaism and the Jewish people in American history. The controversy reached a fever pitch just weeks later when Tucker Carlson decided to host Nick Fuentes on The Tucker Carlson Show, prompting a series of resignations from the Heritage Foundation's board of governors (after its CEO Kevin Roberts defended Carlson) and provoking anxiety that anti-Semitism was creeping into sections of the American conservative movement.

In their highly engaging book, which consists of twenty-one essays and speeches from various contemporary scholars and figures from American history, McClay and Halpern chronicle both the Hebrew Bible's influence on the United States, as well as the long-standing relationship between the Jewish people and the United States of America. On that latter point, though early colonial America was overwhelmingly Christian (and over ninety percent Protestant), The Jewish Roots of American Liberty contains a 1925 speech by none other than Republican President Calvin Coolidge narrating the participation of many colonial Jews in the non-importation resolution of 1765, as well as the service of Jews such as Major Benjamin Nones in the Continental forces during the American Revolution.

One theme present in both President Coolidge's remarks and throughout other included essays and speeches is the omnipresent idea at the time of the American Founding that the New World was to its settlers as the Promised Land was to the Jews in the Book of Exodus. And as President George Washington made clear in his famous 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, Jews would very much be included in this vision. Unlike in most of Europe, Washington assured this congregation that Jews would not just be tolerated in America but, rather, would be free to practice their faith thanks to their inherent natural rights. President Washington continued:

"May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Furthermore, The Jewish Roots of American Liberty makes clear again and again that while the Enlightenment and classical philosophy no doubt influenced the American Founding, the ideas of Christianity and the Old Testament loomed just as large, if not larger. To this point, Leon Kass is quoted: "You don’t get out of Plato and Aristotle an account that would sustain the view of the equal dignity of every human being." That comes from the Bible.

Another particularly interesting essay is from Dov Lerner, and it argues that John Milton's "poetry and prose lie at the root of the U.S. Constitution and beyond." And this comes chiefly from Milton's use of the Hebrew Bible to lend support for the idea of republicanism.

As the conservative movement–and the country more broadly–grapple with questions of identity and tolerance, McClay and Halpern invoke history to shed its much-needed light.

Below is a transcript of the conversation between McClay and editor-in-chief Erich J. Prince, lightly edited for clarity.

To get started, from what quarters today do you mostly see doubt being cast on the Jewish or Old Testament influence on American history? As you've said, this book happened to be released at such an important time when it comes to questions such as these.

The doubt has been around for a long time, among historians. I have a Ph.D. in history—don't hold it against me! There has been a tendency to discount the role of religion in American history and in the American founding, in particular, for a long time—nearly a century perhaps. I think certainly if you go back earlier, to the earliest American historical writing, writers like George Bancroft and even into the Progressive Era, they gave great credit to the Puritans for certain kinds of political ideas that are obviously traceable to the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament.

In recent years, historians are doing a better job of that, though they want to insist on the fact that no one religion was dominant and it was a sort of sea of diversity and so on. But, in fact, if you look at the Puritans, who come over in the early 17th century in several waves—beginning in 1620 with the Plymouth group and then the larger Great Migration in 1630 that settled Boston—these people were so steeped in the Old Testament that they saw themselves—not merely as a fancy or conceit—as reenacting in their trek across the ocean the tribulation of the Jewish people going from slavery in Egypt to the miraculous crossing to the Promised Land. So they called a lot of places in New England Zion, Canaan, et cetera.

New Canaan, Connecticut.

That's right. That's not just for lack of an idea of anything else to call it. This is a vestige of what was a very profound motivating force for these earliest settlers, who are culturally formative of the institutions we would go on to have, both in religious terms and in political terms. But they saw their movement across the ocean as an Exodus in the biblical sense. And the image of the Exodus, the idea of the Exodus, has had a very powerful effect in the whole founding generation.

One of my favorite examples is something that's depicted on the cover of the book. When the United States became a country, very early on, [early Americans] devised a seal, a national seal to certify official documents. We all know what the Great Seal of the United States is—the eagle and the olive branches and arrows and the strange pyramid thing on the back. Well, that wasn't what the initial committee—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams—wanted. At least two of the three, Jefferson and Franklin, both wanted an image of the Exodus.

Franklin spelled it out in great detail: to have Moses with his hands over the water on the other side, and the Pharaoh and his armies being swamped by the waters returning. And then there was a motto that they wanted, both of them wanted, which was "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

Jefferson, who everybody thinks of as a deist, a non-believer, halfway to atheism, wanted this depiction of the Exodus but had slightly different desires than Franklin. But he liked the motto so much that he retained it for his personal seal: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

We always are taught to see the American Revolution, the American founding, as an event in the Enlightenment and as a secular event. But this was Jefferson's bow to the idea that, in fact, the Hebrew Bible—this brings us back to our theme here—had this powerful, almost primal image, in our civilizational makeup, of the Exodus. The passage from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land as an archetype—almost a symbolic expression—of the movement of the human race toward liberty. They all saw the American Revolution as being a gigantic step in that direction. In some way, the American Revolution was like Passover, the Exodus.

The reason I think it's so interesting that Jefferson liked the motto that he adopted for himself—he didn't propose this just as something for the great unwashed to throw them a religious bone. First of all, the average person doesn't see the seal of the United States very often. It clearly for him had intrinsic, almost civilizational, meaning. That's yet another example of all the ways that Founders and pre-founders, the colonial political thought, relied on the Bible. And when I say relied on the Bible, on the Hebrew Bible.

I'm glad you brought up this point about the Enlightenment because one of my favorite quotations from the book is from Shaina Trapedo's essay, "Psalms and the American Founding." And she writes, “While the American founding is full of complexity, with numerous theological and ideological crosscurrents as represented in the country’s early relationship with the Psalms, the Hebrew Bible’s "influence exists alongside Cato’s Letters, the philosophy of John Locke, and Plutarch’s exemplars of civic leadership and moral purpose."

Yes, I think that says it very well. I think anyone who read our book and came away with the idea that the only roots of American liberty are Judaic ideas would be somebody who read it with a very strange filter. [Laughs] No, it's a mixed legacy. And part of what's amazing about our revolution—and to some extent our country—has been the coexistence of secular and religious justifications for our conceptions of human liberty. They don't always start in the same place, but they eventuate in some degree of rough agreement.

Of course, there have been struggles. And I think of late, one of the reasons that some Jews and Christians are overcoming their time-immemorial sense of estrangement and antagonism is that they're discovering that what they have in common is so much greater—in cultural terms—than what they're struggling against in the culture. The idea that we have our liberties because we are made in the image of God, that it is an endowment from God that gives us those liberties, as the Declaration says. But what is it that makes all men created equal? In what respect am I the equal of a great basketball player even if I can't shoot a free throw? [Laughs] Or, in a number of other ways, I'm unequal to people of great achievement. You have to have a conception of it in some way. It is some property that goes beyond our physical attributes, our achievements. And it is this image-bearing that Jews and Christians both agree about.

And that God operates in some sense outside of nature. God speaks the world into being. I'm not going to push this too much that everybody believes literally every word of Genesis. That obviously is not the case. But in terms of it providing a paradigm for the way that we think about the human relationship to the natural world, it was radically different in its own time. The Jewish direction made a sharp departure from paganism. Things like sex and food were things to be regarded as consecrated for certain purposes and to be engaged in (or indulged in) in certain ways. God had spelled out what these appropriate and inappropriate ways were to conduct ourselves. That's a huge departure from any of the other ancient Near Eastern religions.

I noticed Leon Kass is someone whose work came up from time to time, and he's quoted in the essay what “Jews Mean to America,” writing “You don’t get out of Plato and Aristotle an account that would sustain the view of the equal dignity of every human being.”

Absolutely. I speak as a Christian, so I should own my point of view. But a lot of times you'll hear people say, "Well, it wasn't until the advent of Christianity that this notion of equal dignity appeared." Well, no. It was an inheritance from the Jews that Christians derived that insight. And so that's really one of the several things we want to bring out in this book is that the deep, deep, deep foundation of the things we think of as being most intrinsic to our distinctively American way of doing things—some of it is rooted in the more biblical culture that America has had, one more shaped by the Old Testament than you would find to be the case in Europe.

One point in the book that I found very interesting was the degree to which the Bible influenced so many presidents. I actually learned, for the first time, that James Garfield was the only minister to become president. I know that Gerald Ford leaned a lot on Proverbs. I was very moved to read that Lincoln's favorite Bible verse was "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Can you talk a bit more about how the Bible influenced so many presidents?

Of course, it's not unique in at least the English-speaking world that you find politicians making rhetorical use of the Bible. Sometimes they use it because it's just familiar to everybody. America is a very Bible-reading culture because it was populated initially primarily by Protestants who placed a high premium on reading the Bible. It's one reason we had such a high rate of literacy is because it's important to teach your children to read the Bible.

But you mentioned Lincoln. The thing that's brought out in the article about Lincoln and the Second Inaugural is that he had a very loose, non-denominational relationship to religion, and to Christianity. He was not a churchgoer, and this was actually used against him in one of his early campaigns. He had what has to have been the most stressful presidency of anybody in American history; the Union was falling apart even before he came into office. His First Inaugural Address is a wonderful way of saying to the South, "Please don't go." And, of course, they had already pretty much gone by the time he was inaugurated. So he's plunged into this and assassinated just slightly into his second term in office. He ran for re-election in the middle of the Civil War.

The point I want to make is that he becomes more and more reliant on the scriptures, turning to them. Because as is so often the case with these terrible wars, nobody expected it to last that long. It went on and on. And really in 1864 when he ran for re-election, up until Grant and Sherman's victories, he expected to lose. Can you imagine what it was like to carry that around, that conviction that you're probably going to lose after all this bloodshed? So he struggles with: What does this mean? What can this possibly mean? And he's drawn to the Bible, which he had always read and studied. It's said that the King James Bible and Shakespeare were the main two literary influences on him. He's very drawn into looking at how God’s providence operates in the world. How can you see the hand of God in these terrible events?

The Second Inaugural is full of that kind of reflection without any terribly definite conclusion, except to say that it could be that all of this was our justice for the crime of slavery. And it will go on, though by the point that he's giving the Second Inaugural, it's pretty clear that the Union is going to win—whatever that means. Reunion was something he, unlike a lot of his Republican allies, thought about all the time. He thought about it from the beginning: How am I going to conduct this war in a way that we can bring things back together? And so he's searching for meaning.

The Gettysburg Address is another effort to say this battlefield that we're consecrating. He's really speaking not just about the men that fell there at Gettysburg but the immense toll already in lives lost and men crippled and economic damage. And what's it all for? Well, he says at the end of the speech: for a new birth of freedom. So I think he really was looking to kind of divine how God operates in the world. And it's such a profound speech because he ends up saying that both sides pray to the same God and read the same Bible. There's a tremendous, majestic detachment from his own existential condition to try to see things as God sees them.

George Washington's famous 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island features prominently in the book. In closing, could you talk about the relationship between Jewish people and the United States?

Yes, this [letter] is something that every American should read and swell with pride to read. And we have in the book not just the famous letter to the Newport congregation, which is a response to a letter from Newport to him effectively saying, "We're really glad you were elected, how are things going to be for us in this new regime?" We also [have the letter] Washington wrote to Savannah and several other cities that had significant Jewish populations. (It's funny thinking of Newport as a major place at that time.)

He says essentially the same things, but it's most eloquent in the Newport letter. He says we no longer speak of tolerance towards Jews, as if it were our choice about whether men are allowed to exercise their natural rights. He's saying we don't have any business to say, "Well, we're going to hold our nose and put up with you Jews here." No—you are equals. And his position toward Jews at the time was very favorable because he went out of his way. He didn't have to do this. It's not a huge constituency. But he went out of his way to say—at the very outset—that all the natural rights are obtained for anyone who demeans himself [that is, conducts himself] as a good citizen.

Religious liberty, like anything, is not absolute—you can't sacrifice children or do something heinous. But as long as you demean yourself well as a citizen, then your natural rights are yours to practice. And that freedom of conscience, the liberty to raise your children as you please—all of this he is vouchsafing, is guaranteeing to the Jewish people. And it's quite unprecedented. This is still the 18th century. In Europe, Jews are still, at best, second-class non-citizens. So it is like the Exodus. It is not for nothing that America has been referred to as the second Promised Land.

My friend Eric Cohen, who wrote the last chapter in the book, had an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal the other day in which he said America is actually the most Hebraic nation in the world, and maybe in history. That may go a little too far, but I love the way it sorts of puts back on their heels people who think that somehow Jewish people have been this sort of alien element that has managed to persist. No, they've been here since the beginning. They've been affirmed by the man that we all regard as maybe the greatest of all Americans, at least in that generation. He went out of his way to affirm them. And that's big stuff as far as I'm concerned. And I think it should make every American proud.

I really appreciate your time, Professor McClay. It was wonderful to talk to you.

Wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much.