NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Tennessee residents overseeing an effort to donate Aitken Bibles to the state’s elementary, middle, and high schools held their inaugural luncheon at a Nashville restaurant on Saturday.
American Bible Project founder Stephen Skelton said the date of the event, September 12, held significance.
“This date, September 12 is not chosen by accident. Here we stand at the 238th year of the anniversary of Congress approving the [Aitken] Bible. And, by the way, it shouldn’t escape our attention that when Congress approved the Aitken Bible they not only approved it they then turned around and recommended it. That tells us two things at a minimum. Our founders were men of faith, because, after all, they just approved the printing of the first American Bible. And they knew something about the people of this country that many of us have forgotten today. At our foundation we were a people of faith. After all, it was recommended that all the inhabitants of America read that Bible,” Skelton said.
“That is vitally important for this reason. A lot of times in life if you remember where you came from you can remember where you should be going. As you get on in life you think of the way your father and mother raised you and hope that they raised you in the right way. You make the right decisions based on that. I think the same is true of our country.”
And that, Skelton said, “Is what the battle for the future of America is all about.”
“It’s whether we are going to continue to raise generations of our country with little to no knowledge of the Bible’s vital role in the founding of our country,” Skelton said.
“Just the history of it. We are going to put the Bible back into school, where it never should have left.”
As The Tennessee Star reported this week, Nashville physician Ming Wang is also involved in the project.
“We are not putting this Bible in schools as a piece of religious teaching,” Wang said this week.
“This is a piece of a historical document to show the students what our Founding Fathers were thinking at the time [of the American Revolution] and in the context of telling the story of the American Revolution.”
Right now, organizers only plan to hand out these Aitkin Bibles to schools in Tennessee. They also plan to put only one or two hardcopies in each school library. They do not plan to pass out a copy to every student — Wang said that’s too expensive.
According to BiblesinSchools.com, the Aitken Bible Historical Foundation is a nonprofit that manages the American Bible Project.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Does this also include the abolitionists, civil rights activists, pacifists, etc., who also used the Bible to show their faith in their agenda? And what about WOMEN of faith?
This is wonderful.
Yes, men of faith, but not religion as you know it. Most of those signing the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution were almost to a man, members of secret societies.
They were living proof that understanding that Church and State needed to be at opposite ends of our societal spectrum and thus the state had no business bothering religions. Men, our founders understood, would self righteously hype the bigotries listed in the bible, thus fallible men would try and run our country as do the Imams of Islam in the middle east.
While our founders called themselves “Christian” publicly, they did not buy into the religious fervor being spewed by the likes of religious reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries
They are confirming the truth, there is no such thing as separation of Church and state it was a lie invented by a bigoted supreme court justice who was a Roosevelt appointee, Also they held the LORD’s name in high reverence that is why you only see the phrase “Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven and of the independence of the United States of America” they held Jesus’s name in extremely high regard and did not take it lightly.