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the Civil War continue, said Lincoln in the second inaugural, "until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said: The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." (Psalms 19:9) Woodrow Wilson turned Lincoln's worldview outward. Today in Iraq the nation is struggling to digest the new dangers, opportunities and chivalrous duties of the post-Cold War world.

So it's not *secularism* that inheres in the idea of America. It's chivalry, with an American twist. Chivalry as a profoundly serious, *religious* ideal—a Judeo-Christian idea—a *biblical* idea. And a nation that adds chivalry to its worldview must agree with the psalmist: religion is a *public* not only a private matter.

"Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

I hope this all helps explain why I call America a *biblical republic*. A "biblical republic" is no theocracy; nor is it ruled by *Biblical* law. The only definition I have is informal. *A biblical republic has the Bible on its mind*, the way you might be obsessed with a melody you can't get out of your head. A *biblical republic* is full of citizens who agree with Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he said that "In the Bible, there is more that *finds* me than in all other books put together."

The words and stories of the Bible are in America's ear, on its mind, in its heart; they are the wallpaper and elevator music of American life. And sometimes—especially in hard times—the background becomes the foreground, and the Bible gets woven right into the stuff of American history.

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Of course the assertion that America has the Bible on its mind is hard to prove. I won't even try. But I want to describe a small handful of episodes that hint at the truth. There are a lot more where these come from.

I have already spoken of the Puritans, who consistently projected themselves into Biblical stories and cited Biblical passages with new words dubbed in to make the point that America was a new promised land and they themselves were new Israelites. This is well known. So let me skip several centuries forward, to Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln's knowledge of the Old *and* New Testament was profound, and the Bible was deeply important to him—"the best gift God has given to man," he called the Bible; "But for it we could not know right from wrong."

Lincoln said "I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go"--although he had difficulties even calling himself a Christian. He refused throughout his life to join a church. Yet he often went to church. And he explained his refusal to join this way: "When any church will inscribe over its altar as its sole qualification of membership the Saviour's condensed statement of the substance of both the law and Gospel, Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,--that Church will I join with all my heart and soul." Of course he is referring, as Jesus himself did, to two verses in the Hebrew Bible, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. George Washington personally added the Bible to the presidential inauguration ceremony; he reached impulsively, intuitively for the Bible as an expression of

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unity, of America's unofficial yet *chosen* religion—Judeo-Christianity, *biblical* religion. Lincoln did him one better: he put Jesus right at the center of his spiritual life, yet derived its substance wholly from the Hebrew Bible. And the Hebrew Bible is the text Lincoln cited in his climactic statement to America in the second inaugural. Lincoln knew America profoundly, and had the uncanny gift of elevating the democratic consensus like a chalice to the level of sanctity.

Lincoln is our last founding father (he completed what the others started) and the most important religious figure in American history. And he would certainly have agreed that, "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain." Biblical religion is a private *and* public affair.

Now let me skip a few decades again, to a different kind of story.

In October 1897, Columbia University dedicated its Morningside Heights campus, not *too* many blocks from here. Its eminent former president Seth Low spoke in the rotunda of the new library that had been named for him. "The founders of this university," he said, "looked upon God as the source of all wisdom, and they placed upon the college seal as its motto for all time 'In thy light we shall see light.'" From Psalms 36. [36:10] "A century and a half of years almost have rolled around since then," he continued, "and the authorities of Columbia still believe that this is the spirit in which all study should be carried on. The seal of the college is set in the pavement of the corridor just outside the entrance to this room. I can hardly imagine a better motto for a library or for a university."

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Nowadays an Ivy League University is the last place you'd look for a celebration of the Bible. But it wasn't always so, and at Low Library, the campus itself says what the faculty would mostly rather forget.

Another step ahead: In his January 1942 State of the Union message, weeks after Pearl Harbor and the Nazi declaration of war, FDR said, "We are inspired by a faith which goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: "God created man in His own image." We on our side are striving to be true to that divine heritage...."

Certainly America as a nation had the Bible on its mind during the Second World War. Sometimes the Bible was woven into life on the frontlines too. The best movie ever made about World War II—though not the best known, by a long shot—dates from 1949, it’s about a small unit trapped in the Battle of the Bulge. It’s no documentary or newsreel. But sometimes art can be truer than life.

The film shows us the front lines as America pictured them, or remembered them, or chose to remember them, only a few years later. Life in the mud, bedded down in a frozen hole, where each night offered a fresh chance of being blown to bits by a shell or a bomb; winners picked strictly at random. Guaranteed.

The movie is called *Battleground*—directed by William Wellman at MGM. The story is about the famous battle for Bastogne, where the Americans are surrounded by Nazis and smothered under snow and fog; but the sub-text is about a young soldier seeing combat for the first time, and his changing attitude to a verse from Isaiah. At first he clutches it like a child with a security blanket.

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Then he pushes it away bitterly: as the danger grows the verse seems to mock him--and he mocks it. "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." From Isaiah 40. (40:31) But in the end it sees him through. The fog lifts and the air force can mount up once again with wings as eagles, and the infantry can at last renew its strength, and run and not be weary, and walk and not faint.

In the end the soldier sees that it's okay to lean on the Bible, even to draw comfort where the facts don't seem to justify any. Because if you advance the Bible some trust and some faith--it will pay you back in the end. It will make the debt good.

> And once again we find Americans with the Bible on their minds, who likely believed that, "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

One final leap forward takes us to a modern transitional president, John F Kennedy. Kennedy was the bridge between Eisenhower, hero of the Second World War, and LBJ, during whose administration America began to come apart at the seams.

Secularist intellectuals run American culture today because of two simultaneous events between the late 1940s and the late '60s: the coup of the intellectuals; the breakout of the universities. In the coup, America's left-leaning secularist intelligentsia took over American universities; henceforth intellectual (not social) bigshots would be faculty stars, and top colleges would recruit

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students with good intellectual and not social bloodlines. During the breakout of
the universities, American colleges and graduate schools and (especially)
professional schools came to dominate much of U.S. culture.

At all events, JFK and his staff wrote a speech for him to deliver at lunch on Nov 22, 1963. Of course he didn't live until lunch, and this speech was in a sense his last. Its *very* last line was a quotation from the Psalms: Psalm 127, verse 1. "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

Kennedy never made the speech; he never quoted the verse; the secularists took over American culture instead. And ever since, Kennedy's (so to speak) unspoken last words and that withhold verse have overhung the American landscape like a heavy cloud in a dry, drier, finally drought-stricken land. Today in our biblical drought, the cloud still hangs there.

Kennedy kept a personal Bible in the bedside table on Air Force 1; LBJ was sworn in using that Bible. But right after the swearing-in, that Bible disappeared. An unknown stranger asked for it at the Dallas airport, the judge who'd administered the oath turned it over--and as of 1967, when William Manchester published his semi-official book on the assassination, it had never been seen again.

Which makes a perfect, ominous picture of the end of an age: the Biblical warning that is never delivered; the Bible that vanishes into the hands of a somebody no one seems to know, who was wandering around the field at Dallas. One can't help thinking of verses from Job: "The Lord said unto Satan whence

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comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it."

Years after the assassination the Bible turned up somehow, and today it's in the LBJ museum at the University of Texas. So this isn't really the story of a missing Bible, it's the story of a missing story. When the Bible was lost it was a big deal; when it was found, no one cared very much any more.

Yet the Bible is still waiting for someone to pick it up and read out that missing verse from Psalms--the silence at the center of our noisy national life. The withheld verse. The verse Kennedy meant to read, before the culture war closed in.

Today the public is uncertain and foundering. Polls show it. On the one hand, America remains strongly Christian; but knowledge of the Bible is collapsing, among young people especially. A majority of Americans opposes the marriage-mocking plans of the homosexual rights contingent—brutal plans to kidnap a sacred ceremony, and violate it; but the majority that insists on the sanctity and sacred resonance of marriage seems to grow steadily smaller. A case like Terri Schiavo's seems to pose the simplest kind of moral question: when a person is too sick or weak to speak for herself, and has made no serious plans for this contingency--is it all right to kill her? When her parents plead for her life? If it is all right, might it at least be okay to slip the dying woman an ice-chip while she starves to death, at a time when she's suffering agonizing thirst—or might be? America's duly constituted legal authorities approved the killing; forbade the ice-chip. And the public wasn't sure whether it agreed or not. A

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terrifying low-point in this nation's moral pulse, which almost disappeared. At that moment our heart nearly stopped.

Why is the public confused? Why is it foundering? The Bible has
temporarily been dismissed from American public life. We no longer have the
Bible on our minds. That might be part of the reason.

Ultimately morality can't get any purchase without religion; without
divinity to hold onto, morality is a first-time roller-skater trying but failing to
keep its rear end off the floor. But today's secularists have left morality far
behind and foresee a society where human rights have replaced human duties;
where only the state has obligations and the passive, bovine citizenry can relax
and let the government take care of everything.

But the secularists won't succeed. Someday soon someone will remind us
that tolerance is American but secularism is not. That absolute religious freedom
is American but contempt for religion is not. That religious doubt is American
but religious indifference is not. That heated religious debate is American but
cold academic disdain is not. That chivalry is American but complacency is not.
And someone will take up that Bible that was lost and found, and read out the
missing verse, or shout it out—and sounds of Bible will return full-flood to the
sullen, cracked, dry earth of American public life—and we'll say with the Song of
Songs “The winter is past.... The flowers appear in the land.” We'll remember
that “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain”; and we'll
be proud once again of who we are.

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