This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

And to search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the I-Heart Radio app or wherever

you get your podcasts.

Our founding fathers, both Christian and non-Christian, were heavily influenced by the Bible.

Here to share another story is Robert Morgan, who's the author of 100 Bible verses that made America.

Let's take a listen.

After the Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod in 1620,

large numbers of Puritans and separatists

begin arriving in New England, seeking freedom for religion.

The Puritans arrived in Massachusetts Bay by the boatloads during the great migration,

the Puritan migration of the 1630s, and many of them were very well educated. They were graduates of England's

leading universities, especially Emanuel College in Cambridge. Many were theologians, pastors,

and Bible scholars. One thing was paramount on the minds of those who settled into the new world.

They wanted to establish a school

in the colonies, especially for the training of ministerial students. As someone explained in the

1643 booklet called New England's first fruits, after God had carried us safe to New England,

and we had built our houses, provided necessities

for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and settled the civil government.

One of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it

to our posterity,

dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches

...