At least two renowned Christian leaders appears to be in disagreement on whether God's covenant includes America or on whether America was founded as a Christian nation.
Dr. Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention says the answer depends on how someone defines a "Christian nation."
If a person believes the definition is "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... the answer to that is clearly, 'no,'" Moore says in a video posted on his website.
However, Dr. Corne Bekker, the dean of the School of Divinity at Regent University, seems to disagree.
"The Bible is very clear about this fact that God invites people to enter into covenant with him," Bekker told CBN News.
Bekker cited Psalms 85, where God says, "If you fear me, my glory will dwell in your land."
He said it's "very clear" to him that America's founders feared God. "They came here specifically so that they could be free in the worship of the Lord," Bekker said.
Moore also believes that Christian ideas deeply influenced America's founders. But "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 says.
"I think that the confusion often comes in when people assign to the United States of America a Providential place in history that the Bible never assigns it," Moore added.
Dr. Thomas S. Kidd, a history professor and the associate director of Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, supports Moore's position.
"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 Christian Post, adding that "Christian (or at least theistic) assumptions about creation, equality, and human nature undergirded the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution."
"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 said.
