Historian Tackles the Claim That 'God Made a Special Covenant Relationship With America.' Here's How He Responds.

A history professor is backing recent comments from Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who has claimed that America is not a Christian nation in the sense that many believe it to be.

"If what you mean by that is that a nation in which most of the people profess to be Christians, then, certainly, the United States of America was — and is — a Christian nation, based upon that sociological definition of a ‘Christian nation,'" Moore recently said.

He continued, drawing a distinction, "What they mean is the idea that God was in covenant with the United States of America in order to bless the United States of America as a special people, as a new Israel, as a group of people covenanted under Christianity. And the answer to that is, clearly, 'No.'"

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That's a perspective that was backed this week by Dr. Thomas S. Kidd, a history professor and the associate director of Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, who told the Christian Post that Moore "gets this exactly right."

"We need to ask, what do people mean by a 'Christian nation'? If you could have done a public survey in 1776, the vast majority of white Americans would have professed to be Christians," Kidd told the outlet. "Christian (or at least theistic) assumptions about creation, equality, and human nature undergirded the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution."

He continued, though, with an important caveat, "But the idea that God made a special covenant relationship with America, like he did with Israel in the Hebrew Bible, has no scriptural or historical basis."

Kidd also went on to say that the Founding Fathers intentionally separated church and state in an effort to protect the faithful as well as churches from persecution, according to the Christian Post.

As TheBlaze previously reported, Moore's comments about the U.S. and the Bible were shared in a May 3 video that was uploaded to the Gospel Coalition's YouTube page.

In it, he also argued that the Founding Fathers were "deeply inspired" by Christian ideas as well as ideas from the Enlightenment.

"They did not found the country as a Christian nation, which is why there is, for instance, no religious test for office holders and why there is a separation between the responsibilities of the state from the responsibilities of the church or of worshipping communities in the United States,” he said.

(H/T: Christian Post)

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