A divine tipping point
Religion & Liberty Online

A divine tipping point

“America has never been a Christian nation. America was founded on an attempt to integrate Judeo-Christian values with Enlightenment ideas of self-government. What I’m envisioning is a divine tipping point or critical mass.”

So says Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was discussing his new book, Imagine! A God-Blessed America: How It Could Happen and What It Would Look Like, and was responding negatively when asked whether his book’s thesis is “dependent on America being a Christian nation” (presumably meaning the embodiment of an explicitly Christian political order).

When referring to a “divine tipping point or critical mass,” I can only hope and presume that Land is talking about the largescale conversion of Americans to a dedicated and authentic form of biblical Christianity. This is likely what he means when he says, “We may look back and say that America entered what is either a revival or an awakening sometime in the late 20th or early 21st century.”

Jordan J. Ballor

Jordan J. Ballor (Dr. theol., University of Zurich; Ph.D., Calvin Theological Seminary) is director of research at the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy, an initiative of the First Liberty Institute. He has previously held research positions at the Acton Institute and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and has authored multiple books, including a forthcoming introduction to the public theology of Abraham Kuyper. Working with Lexham Press, he served as a general editor for the 12 volume Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology series, and his research can be found in publications including Journal of Markets & Morality, Journal of Religion, Scottish Journal of Theology, Reformation & Renaissance Review, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Faith & Economics, and Calvin Theological Journal. He is also associate director of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research at Calvin Theological Seminary and the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity & Politics at Calvin University.