Leadership Quote by James McHenry

“Public utility” is the tell: McHenry isn’t making a purely devotional plea so much as a policy argument dressed in piety. He frames the Bible as infrastructure - not just a sacred text, but a civic instrument whose wide circulation produces measurable social benefits. The wording borrows the language of the early republic’s pragmatists: distribute Scripture because it works.

That choice of framing carries a quiet anxiety. Post-Revolution America was a young, shaky experiment that lacked the old glue of monarchy and established church. If you can’t rely on inherited hierarchy, you need some other mechanism to manufacture consent and self-restraint. “General distribution” signals mass moral training: a population disciplined from the inside, reducing the need for coercion from the state. It’s a subtle bet on internalized authority.

The quote also hints at a strategic merging of Enlightenment rationalism with Protestant moral certainty. “Public utility” appeals to the secular-minded citizen who might balk at religious mandate; “Holy Scriptures” reassures the devout that the nation’s backbone remains Christian. It’s coalition-building in a single sentence.

Context matters: McHenry lived through a period of fear about faction, disorder, and the fragility of republican virtue. Bible distribution, often driven by voluntary societies rather than government, offered a politically convenient solution: promote social cohesion without openly violating commitments to religious liberty. The subtext is less “read for salvation” than “read so the republic survives.”