The Bible’s Impact on Early America With Cole Feix

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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.

“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.

Cole Feix
Hi, I am Cole Feix. I’m the senior pastor of Carlton Landing Community Church and the President of So We Speak Media.

David Capes
Cole Feix, good to see you. Welcome to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”

Cole Feix
Thanks for having me, David.

David Capes
I met you at the Museum of the Bible in 2025 for a conference where you helped all of us understand some of the beautiful and wonderful things that are on the second floor of the Museum of the Bible. So, for those who don’t know Cole Feix, who is he?

Cole Feix
I’m a pastor in Oklahoma. I grew up in Oklahoma City. Now I live in rural southeast Oklahoma. I’m a pastor of a church in a great little town called Carlton Landing. And then I run a media company called So We Speak. We see ourselves as being an equipping branch of the ministry of the church, and we are trying to help people think Christianly around the world. Probably the most important things about me, though, is I’m a husband to Laura and a dad to two girls, Davy and Lila, and we love living here in this little paradise. We spend a lot of time outside, fishing, hiking, doing all kinds of things, like having people over to our house. It’s a wonderful life we get to live out here.

David Capes
I was fascinated by what you told me a little bit earlier about your work with So We Speak media. Give us a little bit more about that. First of all, how can people find it? And second, what are the things that you do?

Cole Feix
You can just find us at sowespeak.com or you can look for our podcast, just called “The So We Speak Podcast,” wherever you find your podcasts. And we’re really trying to equip people in their worldview. One of our lanes is Bible study. We try to provide a lot of resources for studying the Bible. For example, on our podcast we have an episode on every book of the Bible. For instance, if you’re in a Bible reading plan, you’re getting ready to read Leviticus or if you’re going chronologically come first week of March and you are staring down the Torah, we’ve got an episode there. What do you need to know before you read? What might help you if you’re plopped down in some random spot in the Bible? You can understand the background, the history, the big passages, the difficult passages. We’ve done series on tough passages in the Bible, ancient empires in the Bible, trying to equip people to read and understand their Bible better so we can love God and worship Him better.

David Capes
You and your dad host this podcast together.

Cole Feix
We used to work together at a church in Oklahoma City. We loved having those conversations, you know, amongst the two of us and staff and leaders. Then when I left Crossings, we thought, how are we going to continue having these conversations? Now we just do it and we tape it and we put it out.

David Capes
You’re finishing up a series on Tolkien, and you’ve done a series on C. S. Lewis already, two people that we very much love at the Lanier Theological Library.

Cole Feix
Yeah, those have been fun to do.

David Capes
So helping people understand the Bible, helping people understand the culture around them, and to have a worldview that is consistent with the Christian faith historically, and to be able to navigate these treacherous cultural waters that we’re in right now.

Cole Feix
That’s right. I write a newsletter every Monday morning trying to keep people informed about the world without being conformed to the world, which I think in this media age that we live in, has become very difficult. We’re constantly taking things in. But how good are our filters and how good is our formation.

David Capes
Yes and we’ve got to realize too that we live in a world of spiritual influence and spiritual powers, so there are things that are seen, things that are unseen, and we’ve got to take all of that into consideration. Tell me about your affiliation with Museum of the Bible.

Cole Feix
I work for a group called Inspire, and they are a partner, a separate organization, but a partner with the Museum of the Bible. We do faith building experiences, informative, educational experiences at the Museum of the Bible and at Inspire. We always say that the Museum of the Bible is the second greatest biblical classroom in the world, next to Israel, which I think is probably the best biblical classroom in the world. We can view the museum with its incredible collection of artifacts, documents, and books, as you’ve seen. It has everything you can think of that pertains to the Bible. We view that, though, as an opportunity to invite people into a life-changing encounter with the Bible, and obviously through the Bible with Jesus Christ, and so I’ve been working with them to do tours. We’ve done college classes. We do student groups, church groups that come to the museum. We do lectures, tours. We’re trying to enhance that experience at the Museum of the Bible with great biblical content.

David Capes
My meeting with you in January of 2025 was not happenstance. It was the fact that you were a part of what Inspire is doing and I’m working alongside of them as well. All right, onto the second floor of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. There’s an exhibit that describes the impact of the Bible, and you just seem to be able to float among those exhibits in such an elegant way and tell these amazing stories about how impactful and influential the Bible has been. It’s been in the history of the United States, in history of the world generally, but history of the United States in particular. Take us through some of the things people might see if they were there on that second floor.

Cole Feix
That floor is amazing, and it’s a little bit surprising when you come into the Museum of the Bible, just how many angles and aspects. You think you’re going to see a bunch of Bibles, but when you get onto the second floor, what you realize is, I’m going to see the pervasive influence of the Bible on America in American history. Then on the second half of the floor, you go through all these different areas of impact. I like to introduce the floor as a lot of things that we take for granted in the West where the impact of the Bible and of Christianity. We may assume that everybody believes these things. But what you start to see on that floor is not everybody has not always believed these things.

These have arisen in a very specific cultural context because of, among other things, the leading influence of the Bible and of Christian civilization. When you walk into the floor, I always like to talk about the questions we’re going to be answering. I’ve listened back through several of your podcast episodes, and you guys cover a huge range of things, and they could be summarized by, is the Bible true. Which is a really important questions. And secondly, what I think is becoming maybe an even more important question for apologetics, is the Bible good? You know, on the one hand, can we be convinced that this is reliable, it’s accurate, it’s been transmitted faithfully. You see a lot of that at the Museum of the Bible. But on this floor, we’re going to answer the question, does it even matter? Does it even matter if it’s true? Is it desirable? Do you want the world where the Bible has influence in it? And so, we start that story asking is it good?

The first thing you’re going to see when you walk into the impact floor is a couple of open Bibles, and you’re going to stand in the middle of this tapestry that takes you back to the opening colonies in America. You’re going to be back at Plymouth colony. You’re going to hear the sound of waves like you’ve just arrived at the shore of the new world. And the story that begins the colonist life in America is one of a dream of religious freedom and all of life for God. You read the Mayflower Compact, which they signed when they were still sitting a little way off the shore in their boat. They’d been on this crazy journey of two months. They thought it would take a couple of weeks. They were crammed into this boat. They were hungry, they were tired, but before they did anything, they wanted to ensure that they bound themselves to these ideas, and that was for the glory of God. They were going to live all of life for him.

So, when you look at this opening case, you’ll see a King James Bible, and you’ll see a Geneva Bible. I always like to ask people what Bible they brought over with them in 1620. King James, Geneva? You would think it’d be King James. It is the most popular Bible. It’s supposed to be the Bible of the people, but these people were fleeing King James, and so they were big Geneva Bible fans. And the insight that you get is they thought they were doing something very similar to what had happened in Geneva. Which was Calvin and his followers, were building a society where the social and civic part of life and the religious part of life were used. And of course, there’s a lot of arguments over did that happen? Was that a good thing? But there’s certainly a lot of evidence that this is the kind of thing that these people wanted to do and thought they were doing.

The rest of the floor is going to walk you through the fact that this is a lot more difficult to do than it is to say. If it were easy, people would be doing it all over the place, but it’s very difficult. And the early colonies are a big attestation to the different approaches of trying to put God at the center of life in a civic society. In the first part of that floor, there’s all these great artifacts from the colonies. You’ve got law codes, you’ve got compacts, you’ve got educational materials showcased. It wasn’t just the people at the Plymouth Colony, it was all the colonies originally taking some different approaches to how they’re going to organize their life together.

One of the artifacts I love to point out in the first part of the floor is called the Elliot Bible. And the Elliot Bible is a diglot. It is two languages, one on the left, one on the right, and it is an early attempt at missionary work among the Native Americans. You have John Elliot, who had come over and was living in Boston. He becomes acquaintances with a man named John Sassamon, who is one of the Algonquin peoples and they start to translate the Bible into his native tongue. John Sassamon actually is a really interesting person. He’s the first Native American to attend Harvard. Just a fantastic, sharp, insightful person. And they end up printing this Bible. It’s the first Bible printed in North America that has the language of the Algonquin people, and the language of English, and was used as a missionary tool.

And one of the dichotomies I like to point to at the beginning of this floor in American history is you have this broad type of cultural, topdown approach to transformation. We’re going to make laws; we’re going to put people in power. We’re going to establish things as society, and that’s going to expand, build the kingdom of God at the same time. You have people who think, no, the best way to do this is through one on one evangelism. We’re going to evangelize. We’re going to see people come to follow Jesus. And if we just do that enough, then that’s going to expand the kingdom of God, build the kingdom of God, which, of course, are two of the major tracks of Christian public theology today. You see this even in our newspapers today asking what influence Christians should have. You have both of those and everything in the middle. And so that’s been there from the very beginning of American history, this top down and bottomup approach. Of course, depending on who you are and how you see it, you may favor one or another. But the thing I like to point out is that’s been there from the very beginning of America, and it’s been influential from the beginning of America.