Thomas Kidd
Research Professor of Church History, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
Dr. Thomas S. Kidd is research professor of church history at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri and a senior research scholar at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author of many books on religion in colonial and revolutionary American history, including Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale University Press, 2022). He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2001 and taught for twenty years at Baylor University before joining the Midwestern faculty in 2022.
Talks and Topics
‘An Appeal to Arms and to the God of Hosts’
“Divine Sanction and the American Case for Revolution”—This talk considers the appeals to God’s blessing contained in three of the most essential texts of the Revolution: the Declaration of Independence, Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. It shows that a wide range of Founders believed that Americans must seek God’s blessing, and that the rectitude of their cause would hopefully warrant such blessing.
God of Liberty: The Religious Principles that Undergirded the American Founding
The Founding Fathers were a diverse group with regard to their personal faiths, ranging from the self-professed Deism of Founders such as Benjamin Franklin to the orthodox Christian belief of others such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams. But key religious principles, such as freedom of religion, the flawed nature of humanity, and the providence of God united the Founders and helped ensure the success of the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson and His Bible
This lecture explores the reasons behind Thomas Jefferson’s so-called “Bible,” or his cut-and-paste edition of the Gospels. This Bible illustrates both Jefferson’s enduring fascination with the Scriptures and his skeptical views about basic Christian doctrines.
