by Nathan Winters,
Wyoming Family Alliance President & CEO
I recently had the honor of being one of nearly 500 readers from across the country who participated in the public reading of the entire Bible in recognition of America’s 250th anniversary.
Standing there and reading Scripture aloud at the world-class Museum of the Bible in our nation’s capital was more than a moving experience.
It was a reminder of something modern America must never forget: this nation did not begin by treating the Bible as a private relic or a cultural embarrassment. The Bible stood at the center of the moral imagination of the founding era.
That is not romantic mythology. It is a historical fact.
In 1988, political scientist Donald Lutz’s landmark study of founding-era political literature from 1760 to 1805 found that the Bible was the most frequently cited source in the era’s political writings, surpassing Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone. The same article also cites scholar Daniel Dreisbach, who argued that the Bible functioned as the founding generation’s “most authoritative, accessible, and familiar literary text.”
In other words, it was the common language of moral and political discourse in early America, which explains why the Bible held such an honored place in the minds of so many early American leaders.
George Washington warned in his Farewell Address that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” of political prosperity. That was not empty rhetoric. It was a sober recognition that liberty depends on virtue, and virtue cannot survive long when a nation cuts itself loose from transcendent truth.
John Adams made the same point even more directly when he wrote that our Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious People” and is “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Adams understood something many modern elites refuse to admit: self-government requires self-restraint, and self-restraint requires moral formation. A people unwilling to govern their own passions will eventually be governed by force.
And where did earlier generations believe that moral formation was most powerfully rooted? In the Bible.
Adams also described Scripture in striking terms, calling the Bible “the best Book in the world.” Patrick Henry likewise declared, “The Bible is worth all the other books which have ever been printed.” John Quincy Adams urged his son to read the Bible daily and testified to its unmatched power to make men “good, wise, and happy.”
These were not marginal statements. They reveal that many American statesmen saw the Bible not merely as a private devotional aid, but as a wellspring of virtue, wisdom, and public order.
Today, that vision has been largely reversed.
We are told that public life must be morally “neutral.” We are told that biblical conviction is dangerous when applied to questions of family, life, education, sexuality, and law. We are told that freedom means liberation from moral restraint rather than the liberty to pursue what is good, true, and just.
But a nation cannot long survive on procedural rules alone. Law detached from moral truth becomes either chaos or coercion.
When a culture rejects the authority of God, they do not become neutral. They simply hand authority to someone else, usually the courts, the bureaucracy, the media, or the loudest activists in the room.
That is why this public reading of Scripture mattered.
It was not a quaint exercise in nostalgia. It was a public testimony that the Word of God still stands above every age, every political movement, and every human claim to power. The Bible reminds us that rights come from God, not government; that human beings bear His image; that justice must protect the innocent; and that liberty is meaningful only when ordered toward truth.
For those of us at Wyoming Family Alliance, that is not a ceremonial conviction. It is the foundation of our work. We contend in the public square because truth matters, because families matter, and because the health of a republic depends on the moral character of its people.
Scripture says, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 33:12).
That is not merely a comforting slogan. It is a warning, a promise, and a standard.
If America is to remain strong, just, and truly free, we must not merely display the Bible. We must read it, believe it, and obey it.
