A Comforting Word in the Hotel Nightstand
Two billion Bibles later, the Gideons are still at it, spreading the Gospel room by room.
By BOB GREENE

Jan. 14, 2016 6:56 p.m. ET

If 2016, as various where-is-society-heading experts predict, turns out to be the year in which the sleek new digital world rudely shoves ink-on-paper products deeper than ever toward the dustbin of history, someone forgot to tell the Gideons.
You may not have thought about them in a while. Which is fine with them. The Gideons don’t seek publicity. They are content to do quietly what they have done for more than a century: endeavor to put a free Bible in the drawer of every nightstand in every hotel room in the United States and throughout the world.

The presence of those Bibles has been so constant for so long that many travelers barely notice they’re there. But the Gideons’ theory—the reason for the existence of Gideons International, based in Nashville, Tenn.—is that even if a person seldom picks up a Bible, there may come an unexpected dark night of the soul when a man or woman is on the road, alone and despairing, and by instinct will know that potential comfort is an arm’s reach away.

The organization began in 1898 when two salesmen who had never met— John H. Nicholson, of Janesville, Wis., and Samuel E. Hill, of Beloit, Wis.—were staying at the Central House Hotel in Boscobel, Wis., and took their evening devotions together. Their conversation led to a second meeting, and then a third; they wondered what might be done to help travelers who found themselves in solitude on the road and in need of spiritual sustenance.

Taking their name from a biblical figure emblematic of fidelity to God, the Gideons came up with what seemed like an outlandishly ambitious idea: put a Bible into every hotel room in the country, at no cost to the hotel owners. The project, in sheer numbers, has been nothing short of astonishing.

According to the Gideons, they have distributed, since the group’s inception, more than two billion Bibles around the world in more than 90 languages. The Bibles are given to hotels and are also offered to police and fire departments, military bases, hospitals, prisons and domestic-violence centers. The Gideons say their work is supported entirely by contributions, and if a hotel guest decides to take a Bible home—well, no one’s going to call the cops. The Gideons are always glad to print more.
There is a one-page guide at the beginning of each Gideon Bible, sort of an emergency index, with the headline “Help in Time of Need.” It directs the reader to specific Bible verses that address problems of the kind that people are sometimes reluctant to admit even to themselves, including “Comfort in Time of Loneliness”; “Relief in Time of Suffering”; “Protection in Time of Danger”; “Courage in Time of Fear”; “Strength in Time of Temptation”; and “Rest in Time of Weariness.”

When the Gideons began their mission, there were no radios or television sets in hotel rooms, and the four walls could make the space seem hauntingly empty and isolated. But in the modern age, even the most wealthy and celebrated travelers could from time to time understand that hollow feeling; the Beatles, at the height of their success, sang: “Rocky Raccoon, checked in to his room, only to find Gideon’s Bible. . . .”

Although the Bibles are there for anyone to use, the Gideons describe themselves as “the oldest association of Christian businessmen and professional men in the United States of America,” and there are occasions when hotel guests or outside groups, considering every aspect of that definition to be incontrovertibly exclusionary, complain to hotel managers and demand that the Bibles be removed from all the rooms.

Sometimes they succeed, as happened recently at the hotel on the campus of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill.; in our increasingly multicultural age, it will not be surprising if there are more such efforts. The Gideons, through their headquarters, routinely decline requests for interviews, preferring to let their work speak for itself.

But a case can be made: In 21st-century hotel rooms, on the high-definition television screens bolted to the walls or on the computers and tablets and smartphones that travelers never are without, every manner of violence and bloodshed and pornography is readily available 24 hours a day. So, with all that, perhaps there still is a place for the printed Bible tucked away in the drawer next to the bed. No one is forcing the guest to open it.

The Gideons define what they do rather simply: “Our mission is to reach the lost.” Which is a description that, in all of its nuances, will probably apply to just about everyone at some time or other in life. That book in the nightstand, if it’s allowed to remain, will likely never lack for readers.
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Mr. Greene’s books include “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen” (William Morrow, 2003).
 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/hobby-lobbys-steve-green-has-big-plans-for-his-bible-museum-in-washington/2014/09/11/52e20444-1410-11e4-8936-26932bcfd6ed_story.html

Saw this last weekend in Washington, D.C.'s National Portrait Gallery. To me it showed in a beautiful, moving way, the fundamental influence of religion in society. It begins at home.

Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week because of it....

This excerpt from Andrew Preston's Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy is moving, and speaks for itself:

"But even before Lend-Lease was finalized, Roosevelt felt it necessary to tell Churchill and the British cabinet that the United States was committed to their survival. In January, he sent Harry Hopkins to London to confer with Churchill and impress upon the British a sense of Anglo-American solidarity. 'The President is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it,' Hopkins told Churchill shortly after arriving in an England under siege. 'He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him--there is nothing that he will not do so far as he has human power.' Weeks later, at a dinner in Glasgow, Hopkins imparted the same message with a great deal more emotion. Rather than try to emulate Churchill's soaring rhetoric, Hopkins simply quoted from a passage in the Book of Ruth (1:16): 'Wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Even to the end.' Hopkins had meant to be reassuring, but the effect of his words was far greater than he had intended. According to Churchill's personal physician, who was at the dinner, the prime minister 'was in tears. He knew what it meant.' Hopkins' impromptu sermon 'seemed like a rope thrown to a drowning man.' Though comments were censored for fear of antagonizing isolationists in the United States, presidential speechwriter Robert Sherwood recalled that 'word of it spread all over Britain.' Lord Beaverbrook, in charge of Britain's wartime industrial production, told Sherwood that Hopkins's biblical pledge 'provided more tangible aid for Britain than had all the destroyers and guns and rifles and ammunition that had been sent previously.' (page 349)" 

Now listen to the YouTube video below.

By DAVID GELERNTER Presidential elections are America's season for serious chats around the national dinner table. The sick economy, health care and the scope of government are the main issues. But another is even more important. Who are we? What is the United States? Recently Gov. Mitt Romney urged us to return to "the principles that made America, America." But too many of us don't know what those are, or think they can't work.

Yes, Americanism evolves, and by all means let's change our minds when we ought to. We should always be marching toward the American ideals of freedom, equality and democracy, as we did when we ended slavery, granted women the right to vote, and finally buried Jim Crow. But if we forget our basic ideals or shrug them off, as we are doing today, we no longer deserve to be great. Without our history and culture, we have no identity.

Almost no one believes that our public schools are doing a passable job of teaching American and Western civilization. Modern humanities education starts from the bizarre premise that students must be cured of the Europe-centered, misogynist, bigoted ideas of the past. Many American children have never heard a good word for the United States, the West, Judaism or Christianity their whole lives.

Who are we? Dawdling time is over. We have failed a whole generation of children. As of fall 2012, let all public schools be charter schools, competing for each tax dollar and student with every other school in the country. Of course this is a local issue—but a president's or would-be president's job is to lead. There are wonderful teachers, principals and schools out there, and a new public-school system based on the American ideal of achievement will know how to value them.

No principle is more American than equality. Every generation has strained closer to the ideal. We have seen the near eradication of race prejudice in a mere two generations—an astounding achievement. We are a nation of equal citizens, not of races or privileged cliques. Affirmative action has always been a misfit in this country. A system that elevates individuals because of the color of their skin, their race or their sex has no place in America.

Yet a boy born yesterday is destined to atone (if he happens to be the wrong color) for prejudice against black women 50 years ago. Modern America is a world where a future Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor, can say publicly in 2001, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [on the bench] than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Once a justice has intuited, by dint of sheer racial brilliance, which party to a lawsuit is more simpatico and deserving, what then? Invite him to lunch? Friend him on Facebook? This is not justice as America knows it.

Next Independence Day let's celebrate the long-overdue end of affirmative action, and our triumphant return to the American ideal of equality.

Modern American culture is in the hands of intellectuals—unfortunates born with high IQ and low common sense. Witness ObamaCare, a health-care policy, now somehow deemed constitutional, that forces millions of Americans to buy something they don't want.

Bilingualism was the intellectuals' response to one of the best breaks America ever got, a common language to unite its uncommon people. Resolved: The federal government will henceforth conduct its business and publish its statements in English, period. There is plenty of room in this country for new immigrants of all races and religions who want to learn America's culture and be part of this people; none for those who dislike all things American except dollars. Resolved: The federal government will henceforth enforce its own immigration laws.

America's creed is blessedly simple. Freedom, equality, democracy and America as the promised land, the new Jerusalem. What Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he invoked "the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life."

President Obama rejects this creed. He doesn't buy the city-on-a-hill stuff. He sees particular nations as a blur; only the global community is big enough for him. He is at home on the exalted level of whole races and peoples and the vast, paternal power of central governments.

The president has revealed no sense of America's mission to move constantly forward "with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." Lincoln's sublime biblical English uses the parallel stanzas of ancient Hebrew poetry. That is who we are: a biblical republic, striving to live up to its creed. The dominion of ignorance will pass away like smoke and we will know and be ourselves again the moment we choose to be. Why not now?

Mr. Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, is the author of "America-Lite," out on July 4 by Encounter Books.

A version of this article appeared July 2, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: What Is the American Creed?.

This excerpt from a 2008 interview with Father Kelly, the St. Francis de Sales parish priest, is about his teachings regarding reading scripture. He died several months later after stopping to assist a motorist in a wind storm; while helping the person, a gust of wind felled a tree, which landed on top of him and killed him instantly.

Moses, the Patron Saint of Washington
By Bruce Feiler
Sunday, October 18, 2009




When the Supreme Court began its new term this month, the justices went to work in a building overflowing with Moses. The biblical prophet sits at the center of the structure's east pediment; he appears in the gallery of statues leading into the court and in the south frieze of the chamber; the Ten Commandments are displayed on the courtroom's gates and doors.

Similarly, when the House of Representatives gathers, the members meet in a chamber ringed by 23 marble faces, including those of Hammurabi and Napoleon. Eleven look left; 11 look right. They all look toward Moses, who hangs in the middle, the only one facing forward.

Elsewhere in the nation's capital, the prophet is ubiquitous. He stands in the Library of Congress. He appears in front of the Ronald Reagan Building. Images of his tablets are embedded in the floor of the National Archives. And nearly every occupant of the White House, from George Washington to Barack Obama, has invoked the Israelite leader to guide Americans in difficult times.

Moses is the patron saint of Washington -- and a potent spiritual force in nearly every great transformation in American history, from the nation's founding to the Civil War to the civil rights movement.

Why did a 3,000-year-old prophet, played down by Jews and Christians for centuries and portrayed in the Bible as a reluctant leader, become such a presence in American public life?

Because, more than any other figure in the ancient world, Moses embodies the American story. He is the champion of oppressed people; he transforms disparate tribes in a forbidding wilderness into a nation of laws; he is the original proponent of freedom and justice for all.

His part in the American story begins with the Pilgrims. A band of Protestant outcasts who felt oppressed by the Church of England, they saw themselves as fulfilling the biblical story of the Israelites, the descendants of Abraham who were enslaved in Egypt and freed by Moses, then journeyed toward the Promised Land. When the Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower in 1620, they carried Bibles emblazoned with Moses leading his people to freedom.

By the time of the Revolution, Moses had become a staple of proponents of American independence. In 1751, the Pennsylvania Assembly chose a quote from the five books of Moses for its statehouse bell: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants Thereof -- Levit. XXV 10."

After the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 -- under that future Liberty Bell -- a committee made up of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams set about designing a seal for the new United States. Their recommendation: the Israelites crossing through the parted Red Sea, with, as their proposal described it, a ray of fire "beaming on Moses who stands on the shore and, extending his hand over the Sea, causes it to overwhelm Pharaoh."

To beleaguered colonists seeking freedom from the superpower of the day, the story of another oppressed people achieving freedom was a powerful precedent, especially since it was taken from the ultimate source, the Bible.

When the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, though, they quickly descended into lawlessness, with the 12 tribes bickering and complaining about their leader. The solution was to bind them under a new law, a new covenant: the Ten Commandments. (The Bible says the Israelites "re-enslaved" themselves.) Similarly, "God's new Israel," as America was called, entered a period of disarray after the Revolution, and the result was also a commitment to stricter law: the Constitution.

The critical figures in each instance, Moses and George Washington, were warriors as well as lawmakers. Reluctant leaders, both resisted the temptation to turn their nations into monarchies. The analogy was not lost on the new nation. Two-thirds of the eulogies on Washington's death compared him to the biblical prophet. One orator even likened Washington's death before the completion of the District of Columbia to Moses's failure to reach the Promised Land.

The American promised land, however, featured an element of Egypt: slavery. Here again, Moses proved influential. Forced to adopt Christianity, African slaves across the South found kinship in the story of an enslaved people who escaped their masters. Harriet Tubman sang slave spirituals about Moses as coded messages when she led people to freedom on the Underground Railroad. As her fame grew, she adopted the alias Moses, triggering a wave of posters: "Wanted Moses: Dead or Alive."

On Thanksgiving in 1862, as the Civil War raged, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who used the Exodus as a major theme in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," visited the Washington barracks of fugitive slaves who had joined the Union army. After the blessing, the room sang the most famed spiritual of all, "Go Down, Moses," which Stowe's sister dubbed the "negro Marseillaise."

And when Abraham Lincoln died on the threshold of the promised land of victory, he, too, was compared to Moses in many eulogies. "What was the work which Moses was called to do?" asked a Connecticut preacher. "It was nothing less than to deliver his race from slavery. The work before our late beloved president was the same. God called him to free the nation."

Political figures weren't the only ones likened to Moses -- so were national icons. Uncle Sam was compared to the prophet for leading immigrants across the Atlantic; Old Glory for going into the wilderness during the Civil War. And the country's greatest symbol, the Statue of Liberty, was designed to mimic Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai with shafts of light around his head and tablets of law in his hands. On the statue's opening day, Cuban patriot Jose Martí described her as walking "as if to enter the Promised Land."

The presence of Moses in American iconography grew in the 20th century, even as the Bible declined in influence. Woodrow Wilson was compared to Moses for creating the League of Nations, and Franklin Roosevelt for defeating Hitler. Lincoln Steffens's 1926 book, "Moses in Red," called the prophet the founder of communism, while Bruce Barton published a book calling him the greatest capitalist who ever lived. And the builders of the Supreme Court in the 1930s used Moses as the ultimate exemplar of the rule of law.

But it was Cecil B. DeMille who truly elevated Moses to his status as a hero of the American century. His film "The Ten Commandments," released this month in 1956, turned Moses into a Cold Warrior. The Israelites were mostly played by Americans; the Egyptians by Europeans. DeMille himself appeared at the opening of the film to denounce Soviet-style tyranny. And he persuaded Paramount to place 4,000 stone Ten Commandments monuments on courthouse lawns around the country. The publicity stunt became the basis for a 2005 Supreme Court case that approved such displays as long as they had secular purposes.

Today, the Hebrew prophet is as resonant as ever. Early in his presidency, Bill Clinton explained his support of "don't ask, don't tell" by informing a group of senators that Moses went up Mount Sinai and came back with "God's top 10 list." "I've read those commandments," he said. "And nowhere in those Ten Commandments will you find anything about homosexuality."

George W. Bush said in an Oval Office interview that he was inspired to run for the presidency by a sermon in Texas in which his preacher said Moses was not a man of words but still led his people to freedom.

And Barack Obama said in 2007 that while the civil rights pioneers were the "Moses generation," he was part of the "Joshua generation" that would "find our way across the river."

Most striking about Moses's enduring appeal is that a figure introduced into America by white Protestants proved equally appealing for blacks as well as whites, immigrants as well as the native-born. Moses fits the American story because he embodies the courage to escape hardship and seek a better world. He keeps alive the ministry of hope.

He also encapsulates the American juggling act between freedom and law. Moses represents independence, but as the deliverer of the Ten Commandments, he also represents the discipline of being a people of laws. From the Mayflower's "covenantal people" to Bill Clinton's campaign promise to build a "new covenant," American leaders have invoked the Mosaic covenant to project a sense of cohesion and common purpose.

Finally, Moses is a reminder that a moral society is one that embraces the outsider and uplifts the downtrodden. "You shall not oppress a stranger," God says in Exodus 23, "for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt." In that sense, the prophet represents the ideals of American justice.

Yet while leaders often invoke Moses, they, like him, may not see their hopes come to pass. When the Pilgrims' dream of creating God's kingdom failed, for example, their leader, William Bradford, retired and wrote mournful poems comparing himself to Moses. And the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on the night before his assassination, invoked Moses's heartbreaking death in the wilderness. "I've been to the mountaintop. . . . And I've looked over. I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

King's message reminds all the justices, lawmakers and presidents who come to work amidst the Moses images in Washington today: The ultimate goal for a leader is not to reach the land of milk and honey yourself, but to make it possible for others to get there.

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Bruce Feiler is the author of "Abraham" and "Walking the Bible," which was made into a PBS miniseries. This essay is adapted from his new book "America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story."