An interview with Peter Lillback on World Magazine:

World: Your scholarly field was the Protestant Reformation. What led you to start two decades of research on 18th-century America and George Washington? 

Lillback: President Reagan issued a proclamation declaring 1983 the Year of the Bible. The Gideons began to pass out children’s Bible stories at local schools, and the ACLU and others were offended. They threatened lawsuits if schools let the Gideons do this. I was appalled: We’re just telling children to read Bible stories, how scary can that be?

World: You wrote a letter to the editor. . . .

Lillback: I decided to do something I had never done before: a letter of protest to the weekly newspaper. I went through my arguments: the Founders were faith-friendly, our first educators in America took the Bible seriously, First Amendment protection. It got printed, but if you stick your head out of the foxhole you get shot at. The next week there’s a letter to the editor from the ACLU that says the minister who wrote last week knows nothing about American history, nothing about the constitutional understanding of the First Amendment…

… continue reading on World Magazine.

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