Richsrd D Land is not a Biblical Scholar
Per se but he is Biblical Dude who explains to born again Christians that America was never a Christian Nation and why born again Christians should never argue that it is.
WORLD: So what's wrong with "claiming that America once was, and ought to return to being, a Christian nation"?
LAND: As an evangelical Christian I believe the phrase "Christian nation" has connotations of a redeemed nation. A Christian is someone who has a personal relationship with Jesus and has entered into a redeemed state. As an evangelical Christian, I would never want to claim that for any nation. There is no nation in history that has been made up completely of born-again believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Secondly, this nation was founded by many people who were operating largely out of what Francis Schaeffer would call a "Christian memory." They still accepted a Judeo-Christian value system, although some were Deists and some were committed Christians. Many of them were people like Thomas Jefferson, who issued his own edition of the Gospels in which he kept the teachings of Jesus, but eliminated all claims to Messiahship and all miraculous elements.
Many others were operating from a Judeo-Christian worldview and accepted Jesus as the Savior, while not necessarily accepting Him as their Savior in the sense I as an evangelical would understand that personal commitment and personal conversion experience. Even after the First Great Awakening, it would be erroneous to assume that anywhere close to a majority of people who lived in the American colonies prior to the Revolutionary War were born-again Christians as evangelicals understand it.
A "Christian nation" would have to be a nation where virtually the entire population were born-again believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, and their societal institutions, including their government, would reflect a value system that would be put together by an overwhelming consensus of born-again Christians. That was not the case in the Colonial, the Revolutionary, the post-Revolutionary, the early Federal period, or any period since.
WORLD: So how would you define the nature of the United States?
LAND: As our Declaration and our Constitution indicate, America as a nation was an attempt to combine Judeo-Christian values, in a very traditional sense, with Enlightenment ideas of self-government. The genius was that it worked only because you had both.
God & country
We're not a Christian nation, says Southern Baptist leader Richard Land, but America has certainly been blessed
by
Marvin Olasky
Post Date: April 21, 2007 - Issue Date: April 20, 2007
View attachment 924454
Richard Land's The Divided States of America? (W Publishing Group, 2007) has as its subtitle What Liberals AND Conservatives are missing in the God-and-country shouting match