Lori Borgman: Knowing the building blocks of our founding

Lori Borgman, Tribune News Service on Jun 23, 2026

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Stone tablets are so yesterday.

A professor from Princeton recently shared that his Ivy League students had to have the Ten Commandments explained to them. Yes, that is the same New England college where the famous Jonathan Edwards was once president.

For the record, I went to Princeton. Once. I walked the campus when one of our kids lived nearby in New Jersey. The Princeton campus is so drenched in history and beauty that you can gain IQ points by just wandering around the buildings.

Who knew that beneath that grand exterior lurks a pocket of cultural illiteracy.

They are not alone. Voices from other prestigious schools chimed in, noting they, too, had to explain allusions to the Bible not only in the founding documents, but in the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.

The good news is, I can help. I didn’t teach adult Sunday school as did President Jimmy Carter, but I did teach kids, including our own. We taught them to memorize the Ten Commandments with their 10 fingers. Hold up one finger and you have the First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.” God gets first place.

For the Third Commandment, place three fingers on your mouth in a “shush” position: “You shall not take the name of the Lord God in vain.”

Their favorite was the Tenth Commandment: “You shall not covet.” Stretch out both arms, make wild grabbing motions with all 10 fingers and shout, “Gimme, gimme, gimme!”

What’s so wrong about not knowing the Ten Commandments or biblical themes? They’re part of our DNA as Americans. The founders not only knew the Bible well, they lived out some of the themes. Early settlers weren’t fleeing Pharoah and Egypt like the Hebrews in the Old Testament book of Exodus; they were fleeing King George and Great Britain. They didn’t cross the Red Sea, but they did cross the treacherous Atlantic. Early arrivals came ashore and began wandering in the wilderness, just like the Hebrews.

The Founders’ beliefs were as varied as the Founders themselves, but they all knew the Bible—even if they didn’t believe in the Bible. It is like knowing Shakespeare even if you don’t like Shakespeare.

Jefferson famously made his own loose-leaf notebook version of the Bible, taking out the parts he didn’t like, a practice still in vogue today. Despite differences, those founders carved out the framework for one of the strongest, freest, most prosperous and powerful nations in the world, based on the principle that human beings have inherent rights and freedoms because they were created in the image of God.

As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

To be unaware of the history of the themes and thoughts that so heavily influenced our country’s founding is like mom without apple pie, or the red and white without the blue.