Kidd lectures on historic, current religious patterns in America

Scholar Tommy Kidd delivered a series of addresses for the Day-Higginbotham Lectures at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary on Sept. 24 and 25, sharing about the current state of religion in America and focusing on Thomas Jefferson and Charles Finney and their views of and influence on Christianity.

President David S. Dockery said the Day-Higginbotham lectures “bring an outstanding scholar to help us think Christianly, to think in ways that would honor the Lord.”

Madison Grace, provost and senior vice president for academic administration, said the lectures, which began in the 1960s, provide another level of scholarship for students and others to participate in at Southwestern.

“The main tasks that we’re often working towards in our classrooms are finding ways to train and equip for ministry; there’s a lot of practical work that goes into that,” Grace said. “… But we also are interested in academic work and the rigor of academic work. And part of higher education’s academic rigor is to engage in lectures like this one.”

During the Sept. 24 chapel service, Kidd spoke about the theme of a book he coauthored, The Death of Religion?: Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith, addressing the trend of individuals leaving mainline denominations in the United States over the past 60 years. But despite those statistics, which Kidd said do not show the whole picture, there is hope for Christianity.

“In that book, we argue that contrary to reports of its imminent demise, Christianity is alive and well in America and around the world,” Kidd said. “However, it is true that some Christian denominations have endured terrible decline over the past half century. And it may be that some journalists and scholars conflate the near death of those, especially liberal denominations, with the fate of Christianity and churches generally.”

Specifically, he pointed out that the Episcopal Church, one of the oldest and most influential denominations in America, has seen a decrease in its membership from more than 3 million in the 1960s to about 1.58 million in the early 2020s. At the same time, the American population saw a dramatic increase during that time, making the decrease even more troubling for that denomination.

Kidd said some of the causes for this decline are low birth rates, lack of recruitment, disconnect between liberal leadership and more moderate laity, and disagreement over issues such as ordaining women and homosexual marriage.

The members who disappeared from the Episcopal Church, Kidd explained, either no longer exist because the birth rate was not high enough to replace those members with new adherents; joined the growing group known as the nones, who claim they do not hold to any religion; or switched to another church and are no longer being counted in religious surveys, a group Kidd called the “others.”

He said some fear the growing number of those who call themselves nones, who are usually grouped with atheists and agnostics, is a sign that a significant number of confessing believers are deconstructing their faith and walking away. But Kidd said that many of them are in fact still theists and will even say that they pray and attend a church, they just do not associate with a religion. A generation ago, Kidd said they might have been people who said they were Christians but in fact only attended church on Christmas and Easter and their faith had no role in their lives.

“Today, there are just growing numbers of people who, when pressed, are able to be candid, I think, and just say, ‘The truth is, I’m nothing,’” Kidd said. “And honestly, I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad thing for the church, because, those of you who are going into ministry, I think you will find increasingly in coming years that when someone comes to visit your church for the first time, they are more likely to know that they are not a Christian, rather than thinking they are a Christian.”

Meanwhile, the “others” are a growing, religious population, Kidd explained, that are not often counted but are found in churches around the country that are not tallied when the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies do a survey of churches every 10 years. Kidd said the resulting number of that census is now thought to be 25-40 percent lower than the actual number of churches, in large part because of the rise of new denominational or non-denominational churches, such as schisms from the mainline denominations.

“I’m not saying that all of this is good news,” Kidd said. “But I am saying that there are many, many, many more churches and denominations and religious groups than the media ever recognizes. And almost all of those churches are at least culturally conservative. Sometimes they’re bad theologically, though.”

During an evening lecture, Kidd spoke about the beliefs held by Thomas Jefferson, who penned the words “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” in the Declaration of Independence, but seemed to hold an enigmatic view of Christianity.

Through letters to friends and colleagues, Jefferson’s progression in his theological stance is documented, Kidd said, even as he faced the pressure of helping lead a young nation through events such as the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812.

But while Kidd said Jefferson made the claim “‘I am a Christian,’” it was characterized by a series of rational examinations of the Scripture that led to his concluding Jesus’s moral teachings were the “most benevolent and sublime,” but that the Gospel writers were unlettered and the text “defective and underdeveloped.” He also refused to consider the divinity of Christ or accept anything metaphysical such as His miracles and resurrection.

Because he did not accept all Scripture as truth, Jefferson put together what became known as the Jefferson Bible, which included pieces of the Scriptures cut out and pasted onto new pages, only including what Jefferson thought was true. Kidd quoted Jefferson as saying he was “authorized to distinguish between what’s true in Jesus’s teachings and the impostures that the New Testament authors have fixed upon Him.

“In this confident sense of authority over the text, Jefferson illustrated, I think, a vast gulf between those who believe in the Bible’s entire God-breathed veracity, and those who see themselves as subjecting the Bible to the withering glare of contemporary academic and elite cultural discourse,” Kidd said. “The former seek to have an inerrant Word of God sit in judgement of the real; the latter seek to sit in judgment of an allegedly man-constructed, time-bound Bible by the standards of human rationality in contemporary ethical morals.”

In his third lecture, Kidd discussed Charles Finney, a lawyer who became a Christian and quickly gained celebrity status as an evangelist, and his impact during the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s.

His revival services were characterized by women praying in front of the mixed-gender gathering, praying out loud for unbelievers by name, and a sense of disorder that included weeping, groaning, and falling down. He also had “anxious benches” at the front for anyone seeking prayer or counsel on their path to conversion, with Kidd saying they often were discouraged from leaving until they had professed belief.  

But when other religious leaders of his time approached him about his methods, he did strive to make changes that would resolve the tension, leading to services still filled with passion and emotion, but less uncontrolled enthusiasm.

Kidd said today Finney is often thought of in a negative light because of his lack of theological training, even a sense of anti-intellectualism, and his disbelief of an inherent sin nature, instead believing salvation is possible by man’s decision to stop sinning without the need of the Spirit’s work or infusion of divine grace prior to conversion.

But despite being a divisive figure in current discussions, Kidd said Finney still had a major impact during the Second Great Awakening, sharing the Gospel with thousands, and on evangelists who would follow even a century later, such as Billy Graham, Dwight Moody, and Billy Sunday.

“I think Finney set a dominant pattern for American revivalism for the next century and a half,” Kidd said. “He crafted a model for many American successors. … Many of those preachers were more theologically precise than Finney was, but it would be hard to think of a more pervasively influential text on revival over the past two centuries than Finney’s lectures on revivals.”

After the Friday lecture, attendees participated in a Q&A session with Kidd, discussing misunderstandings of a Christian founding of America, differences between the First Great Awakening and Second Great Awakening, the impact of immigration on church attendance, and other topics.

Research Doctoral Studies students also had an opportunity to meet with Kidd in an informal, Q&A session. He answered questions concerning his own experience with teaching in higher education, his writing methods, the state of teaching positions in America as the number of college students declines and schools close or consolidate, and his advice for students who are trying to juggle reading and writing assignments.

Kidd taught at Baylor for 20 years and now teaches at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary as a research professor in church history and the John and Sharon Yeats Endowed Chair of Baptist Studies. He has authored numerous books on American figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and George Whitfield and specific eras of American history.