When I was in middle school, I competed in a summer reading contest with a prize for those who read the most books, writing a paragraph about each as proof of readership.

Not wanting to spend the summer reading short works of fluff in order to get as many books as possible under my belt, I decided on a more creative approach and began reading the entire Bible, counting each of its 66 internal books as an individual one. (Hey, it’s reasonable! After all, most of the individual books are far longer and deeper than the books I would have grabbed from the Young Adult Fiction section at my local library!)

As you may guess, I wasn’t one of the contest winners. Yet I was a winner in the long run, for six months later, I completed the first of many marches from Genesis through Revelation.

Such a habit likely sounds odd to many ears, yet as I learned recently, I am not as alone in reading the Scriptures as people would assume. As the chart below from a recent Barna poll shows, Bible reading has soared in recent months, particularly among younger men and women.

Charlie Kirk’s death and the impact it had is the overarching explanation many give for this surge. However this trend came about, I sincerely hope these individuals reading the Bible will continue.

Why? Religious reasons are first and foremost, obviously. Those aside, there are many other non-religious benefits to reading the Bible cover-to-cover that many fail to realize, benefits which the American founders readily acknowledge in their writings.

Benjamin Franklin, for instance, is living proof that the Bible provides a solid foundation for thinking, writing, and speaking. Franklin “claimed he had read the whole Bible by the time he was 5,” Baylor professor Dr. Thomas Kidd explains, and it showed, for “Franklin was constantly referencing the Bible,” in his floor speeches during the Constitutional Convention as well as in his many essays. Had Franklin not read the Bible so extensively, one wonders whether the aphorisms of “Poor Richard’s Almanac” would still be quoted with such regularity today.

The Bible doesn’t just ground our thinking, however. It also grounds our morality. “By renouncing the Bible, philosophers swing from their moorings upon all moral Subjects,” John Adams wrote in an 1807 letter to Benjamin Rush. “It is the only correct map of the human heart that ever has been published. It contains a faithful representation of all its follies, Vices & Crimes.”

Noah Webster concurred with that last thought, noting in his 1832 “History of the United States,” “All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”

A third reason why we should regularly read the Bible is that it helps us to understand the history of our nation and the thought processes of its founders. Citing a study by political scientist Donald Lutz, Dr. Daniel Dresibach explains that “the Bible was cited more frequently [by the founders] than any European writer or even any European school of thought, such as Enlightenment liberalism.” He continues:

The book of Deuteronomy alone was the most frequently cited work, followed by Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. In fact, Deuteronomy was referenced nearly twice as often as John Locke’s writings, and the apostle Paul was mentioned about as frequently as Montesquieu and Blackstone, who would have been the two most-cited secular theorists.

Dresibach lends further credence to the idea that the Bible was central to founding our constitutional republic by noting that, among others, John Adams and John Dickenson both referred to the Bible as “the most republican book” in existence.

Perhaps that’s why American founder Benjamin Rush believed there was a great need for the Bible to be read in schools. Or maybe he just said that because he recognized that familiarizing children with the Bible at young ages offered them “the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and publick temporal happiness.” What more could one ask for in a constitutional republic than happy and prosperous citizens?

That same happiness and prosperity seem to be lacking today. In its stead, we find bickering, depression, a disdain for the past, and a lack of knowledge in general.

I wonder how much of that would change if more of us took this new trend of Bible reading to heart, not just for a few verses once a week, but for a few chapters day after day, month after month, year after year? Perhaps we would begin to see why the founders valued the Bible so highly – and how they so wisely founded one of the greatest nations to ever exist.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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