The democratization of Bible reading, a process begun by Martin Luther in Germany, became a potent force of liberation. Reformers soon wielded the Bible to confront oppressive political and religious regimes. The Protestant defenders of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1689, which deposed an autocratic monarch and established a constitutional government, were armed with a biblical text deeply rooted in Tyndale’s translation.

So, too, were colonial Americans. As the historian Daniel Dreisbach has observed, the King James Bible was “the most accessible, authoritative, and venerated text in early colonial society.” Thus in 1776, even Thomas Paine, a religious skeptic, drew from the Bible to make his famous case for American Independence. “That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true,” he wrote, “or the scripture is false.”