Dennis Prager Comments on America’s Judeo-Christian Roots

In 2019, I (Jerry Newcombe) got to interview Dennis Prager for my Providence Forum films, The Foundation of American Liberty series, on America’s Judeo-Christian roots. This was in his study in his home in the greater Los Angeles area.

Prager told our viewers: “Christians rooted in the Jewish Scriptures founded the United States. You cannot say that about any other country. One very good example is the Liberty Bell….It has only one verse on it, one statement, one anything, except for who made the Bell, the company that made the Bell, and that is from the Torah from the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. And [America’s founders] knew their Hebrew Scriptures real well.”

The Liberty Bell has Leviticus 25:10 (in the King James Version) embossed on it: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof.”

Another point Prager told our viewers is that secularizing the founders presents a very inaccurate picture: “There are two dishonest ways of depicting the founders. One, that they were deists, and the other is that they wanted a secular society. They wanted a government that was not a theocracy, that is clear. Ultimately, they wanted people to be free to practice their religion and relate to God in their way, and, for that matter, for an atheist to be a free citizen…..But they knew, all of them, except for Tom Paine, all of them knew that without God, this experiment would not work. God is the source of liberty, God is the source of rights, and that is central.”

Interestingly, in 1776 when Thomas Paine wrote the influential Common Sense, he used the Bible positively to bolster his arguments. But later he became a skeptic.

Prager lamented that way history is often presented today, including in our schools: “The American past is erased, except for the isolated awful moments. Kids today are learning how bad America was, but they’re not learning that every country had slavery, every country killed indigenous people, because everybody who made a country often killed the people who were living there.  I’m not excusing it, I’m just noting a fact. Where America differed is in its goodness. Badness is universal, goodness is relatively unique….And there isn’t a kid in American school who knows that.”

When I asked him if the Bible played an important role in the founding of America, he retorted: “Do bats and gloves play an important part in the founding of baseball?  Bats are to baseball what God is to the founding of America, instrumental. There is no baseball game without a baseball and without a bat.  There’s no America without God….We are completely losing our heritage. We were founded to be one nation under God.”