Revisiting the Aitken Bible

Before the American Revolution, English Bibles were only published the printers that were approved by British government to do so. Because of the severed ties with Britain, the colonies were running out of Bibles. Congress was asked to help with printing new Bibles. They refused to commit any funds to the project, but they allowed Robert Aitken to publish new copies.

Katherine Carté, who has recently written a book about religion in revolutionary times , writes about some of the process about how the Aitken Bible came to be and how it has been used by people of diiferent gorups to promote their ideas. She says:

The story of printing Bibles for the new nation was one of many such moments on the herky-jerky, experimental path towards teasing apart institutions of church and state. Those who participated in the process ran the gambit from devout to atheist, from pragmatic to doctrinaire. But in the crisis of Revolution, everyone had to make do in an utterly novel situation. It would take decades—into the nineteenth century—before US citizens settled into new (and already conflicting) narratives of the relationship between church and state.