It may be putting it a bit strongly, but biblical references and allusions permeate the Western canon and Western culture pretty thoroughly. For the last 500 years it was the only book that nearly everyone had read. Before that it was for over a thousand years the only book everyone knew at least some of.

Few books have ever had such penetration of a culture. The Koran, the Analects, the Pali Canon are perhaps the only meaningful comparisons.

The 500 years figure I chose was not a coincidence. The printing press and the Reformation are connected. If a person in Europe or the New World could read, they would have read some or all of it.

Before that familiarity came from weekly readings at Mass, which is why I talked about partial familiarity for the thousand years prior.

I'm an atheist, but there's a difference between dismissing the book's contents and dismissing the impact and influence of the book's contents.

Actually learned persons in the west have considered democracy a terrible form of government that inevitably gives rise to tyranny for millenia. It's hardly foundational, rather it's a known anti-pattern. Republics were an attempt to harness the benefits of democracy without the drawbacks.