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Good morning. With millions of others I watched yesterday’s inauguration ceremony from Washington as Donald Trump swore to faithfully execute his office and preserve, protect and defend the American constitution. As well as Abraham Lincoln’s Bible he chose to swear on his mother’s Bible, a blue, much-used edition of the American Revised Standard Version.

As I watched it struck me that many of the world’s faiths depend on a sacred text. Putting a hand on a holy Book, the Bible, the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita reminds us that truth and justice are not things we humans know about intuitively, we have to be instructed, and by touching the text we commit ourselves to values beyond our own self-interest.

The Bible played a key part in the founding of America. We’ve all heard of the Pilgrim Fathers but perhaps even more significant in America’s history was the Puritan dissident John Winthrop, a country squire from Suffolk. From his teens he immersed himself in the Bible, reading it, praying, and eventually becoming convinced he was called by God to become one of the saints, as the Puritans described those who chose to follow a God-centred life. This eventually inspired him to give up the comforts he enjoyed as one of England’s landed gentry and to cross the Atlantic to become governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His departure removed him from growing religious conflict in England and gave him a chance to put his Puritan ideals into practice. He bult up the colony of Massachusetts, was twelve times elected its governor and lived peacefully with the local Indian population.

His vision for New England was that of a godly commonwealth, a ‘city upon a hill’ as he put it, echoing the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that a city built on a hill cannot be hidden. America has absorbed that ideal. The challenge to be a world example has been repeated again and again in American discourse and John Winthrop has often been regarded as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

When I saw Donald Trump take his oaths yesterday I had the curious sense that this controversial president, condemned so vociferously by his critics, has taken an oath which binds him, willingly or unwilling, to the text of the Bible, to continue to let scripture have its say. We have yet to see how that plays out. Sometimes, like John Winthrop, people do become who they promise to be.

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