Israel365’s “Open the Book” summit brought rabbis, pastors, and scholars together to confront a crisis that, they warned, threatens America’s future — and Israel’s standing in it.

Three weeks before America’s 250th birthday, a question hung over a webinar that drew registrants from Virginia to England to India to Idaho: not what America has been, but what it will become.

The answer, according to the rabbis, pastors, and scholars gathered for Israel365’s “Open the Book: A National Conversation on Biblical Literacy” on June 14, depends almost entirely on a single book — and on whether Americans still know what is inside it.

“That foundation is cracking,” said Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, who framed the stakes at the start of the event. “That foundation is under attack.” He pointed to research from the Barna Group: 66% of Americans call themselves Christian, but only 4% hold what researchers call a biblical worldview — down from 12% three decades ago. Among adults under 30, the figure is 1%. Forty-two percent say they read the Bible weekly, yet most cannot name the Ten Commandments.

“They’re holding a book that they no longer know,” Wolicki said.

The summit, the centerpiece of Israel365’s month-long “Bible Month” initiative, opened with a prayer led by Rabbi Tuly Weisz, founder of Israel365 and editor of The Israel Bible. Weisz recalled marking up his own Bible into three categories — history, law, and prophecy — during the five years he spent preparing that work. The Bible, he said, is “a window into our splendid past, a guide to our present responsibilities, and a map towards our glorious future.” His worry is that Jews and Christians alike have drifted from all three.

“It’s first and foremost a church failure”

The first panel asked the bluntest question of the day: how did we get here?

Troy Miller, president and CEO of the National Religious Broadcasters, did not hesitate to lay responsibility at the pulpit. He traced the decline to a shift roughly three decades ago, when American churches became “seeker sensitive” — reorienting Sunday mornings toward newcomers rather than toward discipling believers already in the pews. Wednesday-night classes and deep-dive teaching gave way to youth groups built around social programming. “We lost the balance,” Miller said. “Bible literacy or illiteracy is behind so many of the social ills we’re seeing today.”

Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schachter, senior scholar at Yeshiva University, offered a striking counterpoint from within the Jewish world. For centuries, he explained, even devoted Jews studied Talmud far more than the Hebrew Bible. The reason was exile. The Hebrew Bible is the record of a nation that lives in history, governed by kings, fighting wars, debating its own affairs. “When Jews are in exile, that doesn’t resonate with them,” Schachter said. A nation had become a religion, and the Bible’s stories of sovereignty became “distant, unreachable, maybe even painful reminders of days gone by when Jews did have power.”

What is reversing that, he argued, is the State of Israel. “Jews are back as a people. Jews are re-entering history… The new Jew looks like the Jew of the Bible.” Schachter cited polling from Israel’s Channel 12 finding that 53% of Israelis under 29 describe themselves as fully Sabbath observant and strengthened in faith after October 7 — more than double the rate of their parents’ generation. “From Zion shall go forth the Torah,” he said, “is also a return to biblical life.”

What it costs America — and Israel

If the diagnosis was sobering, the panel on consequences was sharper still.

Pastor Jim Garlow, founder of Well Versed, warned that when a people abandons a biblical framework, the vacuum does not stay empty. “It never goes in neutral. It goes to something else.” He cited Barna research showing that 90% of pastors believe the Bible speaks to the moral and cultural issues of the day — and that 90% decline to address those issues from the pulpit. “Therein lay the problem,” Garlow said. “There’s been silence in the pulpit. It’s catastrophic.”

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council drew the line directly to Israel. The erosion of American support for the Jewish state, he argued, is not a sudden phenomenon but “the fruition of seeds that were planted decades ago” — the gradual loss of biblical literacy, cultural memory, and national identity. He invoked Harvard’s Samuel Huntington on America’s identity crisis, then made the case concrete with Scripture.

There are four land transactions recorded in the Hebrew Bible, Perkins noted: Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron (Genesis 23), Jacob’s parcel near Shechem, David’s acquisition of the threshing floor that became the Temple Mount (2 Samuel 24), and Jeremiah’s purchase of land in Anathoth during the Babylonian siege — “a public declaration of faith that God would one day restore his people to the land.” Every one of these sites lies in Judea, Samaria, or Jerusalem — precisely the territory the international community now calls “disputed.” “If we understood our Bible as Christians,” Perkins said, “we could not go along with what is being advocated by the UN and others.”

The campus and the next generation

The fourth panel turned to where the crisis is most visible: the university.

Dr. Corné Bekker, Dean of the Regent University School of Divinity, described a “monumental change” over the past decade — declining biblical literacy even among students preparing for Christian ministry. More troubling, he said, is that in many seminaries “biblical literacy has been replaced by ideological instruction,” training activists rather than ministers. He stated his conviction plainly: there is “a strong correlation between biblical illiteracy and the erosion of support not only for the Jewish people but in particular for the land of Israel.”

Dr. Yael Leibowitz, a Jewish scholar and author who has taught on both sides of the Atlantic, reframed the entire conversation around a difference in mindset. The Bible, she insisted, is fundamentally “about nations. It’s about history. It’s about God’s grand plan for the world.” She contrasted a Western culture that reads Scripture for personal inspiration — “what does this verse say to me?” — with the Israeli experience of reading it as a collective story one is living inside. Israeli children, she observed, grow up knowing they will one day put their lives on the line for their nation. “Rather than asking what are my rights and what does the world owe me,” she said, “the nature of the questions being asked by Israeli children are much broader.”

Builders, not destroyers

Wolicki insisted the summit end “not with the problem but with the answer,” and turned to Pastor Stephen Martin, who has successfully addressed biblical literacy inside his own Texas congregation. Martin walked the audience through a chronological year-long journey through Scripture, a custom devotional that hundreds of congregants completed cover to cover, and — most strikingly — a classical Christian school he founded after a conversation in Israel.

He had asked a rabbi how the Jewish people maintained their cohesion across millennia of dispersion. The answer stayed with him: “Most nations build monuments. The Jewish people don’t do that. We build schools.” Martin’s school, now 240 students strong, teaches Hebrew and treats the Bible as the key text of every subject. “It’s the best thing we’ve ever done as a church,” he said.

The event also marked the work of the late Charlie Kirk, whom Wolicki described as a friend who “understood this crisis in a way that very few people did” and who saw the Jewish Shabbat — weekly, screen-free, anchored in family and Scripture — as a model for young Christians.

The closing word belonged to Wolicki, who suggested the day had not answered the question of America’s next 250 years so much as sharpened it. “Keep the book open,” he urged. “This is not the end of the conversation. It is the start of one.”

Bible Month continues throughout June on The Israel Bible YouTube channel, with videos covering all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible — Torah, Prophets, and Writings — taught by Jewish and Christian scholars together.