The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 30 – Thomas Kidd

Episode 30: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show, host Dr. Jeff interviews Dr. Thomas Kidd, a professor at Baylor University and widely published historian. Dr. Kidd discusses his journey from political science to history, sparked by his conversion to Christianity as a freshman at Clemson University. The conversation explores the nuanced reality of America’s founding fathers’ religious beliefs, with Kidd explaining that while figures like Thomas Jefferson were skeptical of traditional Christianity, the founding was still profoundly Christian at the level of ideas, particularly in concepts like human nature and the created order expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

They also discuss how the Great Awakening, led by figures like George Whitfield who drew massive crowds across colonial America, helped shape American culture and influenced the revolutionary rhetoric used by leaders like Patrick Henry. The episode concludes with Kidd’s observations about contemporary revival movements, noting growth primarily among immigrant populations in places like Boston, and his advice for aspiring historians to view their work as a calling while finding mentors in their field.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:00):
Thanks for tuning into the Dr. Jeff Show. This show is available on Apple, Google, Edifi, Spotify, Overdrive, Liftable and wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it’s Dr. Jeff. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence. You know how this works to show how worldview changes everything.

Today, I welcome a widely published author through Oxford, Yale. As a professor at Baylor University, he’s written books on Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, George Whitfield, America’s Founding, The Great Awakening, and so many other things. And this is so timely given where we are as a nation right now in the debate over the nature of America’s founding. He’s going to dive right into this. Please welcome to the show, Dr. Thomas Kidd. Dr. Thomas Kidd, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (00:57):
Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:58):
You are one of my favorite historians. I love your books and love the fact that you’re at Baylor University, which is one of the universities that I attended. And what you’re doing is having such a profound impact on helping Americans really understand the founding. And I can’t wait for us to have a chance to dig into that a little bit. But first of all, I’d love for our audience to get to know a little bit more about you. Growing up, did you ever imagine that you would become a historian?

Dr. Thomas Kidd (01:30):
No. I mean, I wasn’t like a lot of high school males. I was not sure what I was going to do, but both of my folks had gone to college, but I had never really thought about being a professor. And I was a political science major as an undergrad. But over time, partly because the big event was I became a Christian when I was a freshman in college at Clemson University. And that obviously set me on a very different path spiritually and intellectually and so forth.

And I, by the end of my college career, had really started to gravitate towards history instead of political science. And so I ended up doing a master’s degree in history at Clemson and then went to Notre Dame for my PhD. But really, no, definitely did not grow up dreaming of being a professor or anything like that. And so I was kind of a lightcomer to that development.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:39):
Tommy, when you were at Clemson, you said you became a Christian when you were a freshman. A lot of students go off to college who grew up in the church and kind of walk away from their faith, but you walked toward the faith. I’d love to hear a little of your story.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (02:55):
Yeah. Well, I grew up in the church. We were very consistent, but in a mainline context. And so I knew, I thought about Christianity as you try to be moral and you’re nice to people ideally. But if the gospel was being proclaimed, it was bouncing off of my ears. I mean, I didn’t understand anything about forgiveness of sin and why Jesus died on the cross and those sorts of things other than just maybe he was being nice or something. And so again, like a lot of high school males, I sort of sewed my wild oats for a couple years and just got kind of sick of life without God.

(03:47):
And I could just sort of see my life was kind of getting worse and worse and depressed and everything. And so the Lord gave me, my best friend in high school was a believer. And so when I went to Clemson, he was a year ahead of me in school and he had gotten involved with the navigators at Clemson and they told him about how you can lead friends through an evangelistic Bible study.

And the whole time I had been really, I was never anti-Christian or anything like that. I mean, I was always kind of interested and I wanted to know more about the Bible. And so he asked me if I would go through a study with him and I eagerly said yes. And at the end of it, he explained, “This is how you accept Christ for salvation.” And I knew that’s what I needed.

(04:46):
And so I was sort of a sitting duck and ready to get right with God and try to live for the Lord and everything. And so that’s what happened. But obviously that had a huge impact on me intellectually too, and explains many things about my life, including why I went on to study religious history.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:08):
Tell us what it’s like to study religious history as a Christian, because there are people who, I know this sounds odd to a lot of people who are watching or listening. There are a lot of people who study religious history who are not personally people of faith.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (05:23):
Yeah, you bet. I mean, and in fact, I think that that’s become more common over the past 30 years or so, especially since nine eleven. I think that a lot of people have realized, for better or worse, that religion is extremely important and it means a lot to a lot of different kinds of people. And it used to be back in the day, the old secularization theory was that religion is just vanishing. There’s very few academics who think that anymore, whether they like it or not.

And so, I mean, I’ve talked to people at public universities and so forth whose work I really admire on religious history. And I’ve occasionally asked people about their own faith or lack thereof. And I think one guy said, “Oh, I’m an atheist, of course.” That’s really amazing. So you do end up with some people who maybe are a little suspicious of you and your biases as a Christian.

(06:36):
It obviously is not that common in the elite academy to have outspoken Christians. So I definitely get some people who will at least imply, if not say outright, “Well, this kid here, he’s an evangelical.” So we can’t trust him on evangelical history, as if they would say that about a lesbian or a gay person studying LGBT history or something like that. So anyway, it does, I think, help me in the sense of understanding in a little more nuanced way sometimes about what’s motivating people of faith in the past. I think sometimes it probably makes me more critical because I get more frustrated about when people don’t live up to their faith.

(07:36):
And it definitely helps me, I think it’s so common for secular scholars, especially to, for instance, not know that some quote that they’re dealing with or something comes from the Bible. And so it’s one thing to study religion, but then it’s another thing to sort of know the text of scripture.

And so when I was doing my biography of Ben Franklin, for instance, I was doing a religious biography and, come to find out, Franklin knows the text of the King James Bible better than I do, I think, even though he said he was a deist. So he’s enigmatic that way, but I think there were probably times where I was able to catch the fact that he was citing scripture because it was like kind of an alternative language for him. I was able to catch it probably because I read the Bible most days personally. And so I think that really helps.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:39):
I really appreciate that. Having a worldview that is biblical ought to make a person a better historian about everything, but especially when you’re looking at evangelical history, that’s a great motivation for, I think, the young adults who may be watching right now and thinking, “Yeah, maybe I could do that. Maybe I could be a good historian.” Yeah. Tell me one thing, I was first introduced to your work because of some things you were working on talking about America’s founders.

And I recognize that you were in the middle of, I don’t know, maybe we could call it a debate that has raged in the last 30 years or so. Some people saying, “America’s a Christian nation, all of the founders were Christians.” And then other people saying, “That’s not true. All of the founders were deists.” And it kind of rages back and forth as if the soul of a nation is at stake and how this question is answered. And I’d love for you to explain to our audience how you approached this issue as a scholar.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (09:49):
Right. Well, one of the first principles of being a professional historian is trying to take the evidence as it comes. And I think that people on the left and right who are more polymical type of historians often will cherry pick, say, a quote about a founding father and say, “Well, this tells you all that you need to know about this person.” And so Thomas Jefferson says, “I am a real Christian.” And oh, well, see, he’s a real Christian. Even though he denied the resurrection, he denied the Trinity, he denied the divinity of Christ, he denied the authority of the Bible.

I mean, so we’ve got to dig deeper with these people and kind of hang in there with who they were in their time. And sometimes that means that you end up studying people who seem deeply unfamiliar in the current context. I mean, I just don’t think with Jefferson, I mean, he’s definitely a skeptic about Christianity.

(11:04):
And when he says, “I’m a real Christian,” he only means in an ethical sense. He thinks by the end of his life, he’s become convinced that Jesus is the greatest moral teacher of all time and not the son of God and not inspired by God. He just happens to be this great moral teacher. So Jefferson is a skeptic, but he’s deeply conversant with the Bible, including in Greek. He reads the Greek New Testament and he reads the Septuagint for pretty much his whole adult life.

And if you casually looked at somebody like that, you would say, “Well, he must be a Christian. He’s so committed to the Bible, but he doesn’t affirm the authority of the Bible.” I mean, so he’s deeply committed to studying it. Maybe there are some religion professors who are like this, I guess, today, but he doesn’t believe it as being inspired by God.

(12:08):
And really, when he does the Jefferson Bible, quote unquote, which is basically just extracts from the gospels, he says that when you’re extracting Jesus’ moral teachings, it’s like picking out diamonds from a dung hill and Jesus’ ethical teachings are the diamonds and everything else is a dunghill. Well, that’s not something a Christian would say.

(12:36):
And so you just have to let these people be who they are in their own context and then get to the question about how relatively Christian or not the American founding is. Now, I happen to think it is profoundly Christian in some important ways at the level of ideas. I mean, there’s assumptions about human nature. There’s assumptions about the created order. All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator. I mean, that’s a profound statement of theology, even though Jefferson is not coming from a place of personal Christian commitment. So that’s nuance, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:17):
Yes.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (13:17):
So you have to think about that a little bit rather than just fitting it into some contemporary political debate.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:25):
Yeah. So it’s not whether they signed the card, so to speak. I’m saying that because I know at a Baptist institution, that makes a lot of sense. You sign the card, you get the baptism, so forth, you’re in the club, but you’ve said something that’s hugely important is that the founding at the level of ideas had a profound Christian influence. And you specifically mentioned human nature. You mentioned the nature of the created order. Are there other things that you saw coming from scripture that were second nature to people at the time of America’s founding who were influential in it that we ought to be thinking about?

Dr. Thomas Kidd (14:10):
Sure. Well, I mean, I think that on the issue of the created order, I mean, some people, some of the scholars of Jefferson and the Declaration really disagree with me about this, but they see the theistic language in the Declaration is just kind of window dressing or throwaway language. But when Jefferson says, “All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator.” I mean, he had more generic ways to say that. I mean, the Virginia Declaration of Rights came out a month earlier and it said, “All men are by nature equal.”

I mean, that’s still talking about a created order, but it’s not as clear as what Jefferson chose to say, and it’s more inspiring what Jefferson said too, but that they’re endowed by the creator. I mean, that’s an active idea about God. And he chose to say it that way, along with the committee that he was working with, to frame the declaration, he chose to say it in such an explicit theological, theistic, I wouldn’t say it’s not specifically Christian in that case.

(15:21):
I mean, we don’t want to get too excited about this, but it’s profoundly theistic in terms of worldview. And it also speaks to this kind of pre-Darwinian world in which they’re living, in which Jefferson, he may not have believed literally in Genesis one or whatever, but where else do people come from other than God creating us? I mean, there’s no other option intellectually, and so that’s the world that Jefferson is living in.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:56):
And it led him to the understanding that we are not creating these rights, that we are securing them, which is at least a profoundly different understanding of government and of society and of the Constitution.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (16:12):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s not about individual expression of my preferences and so forth. And so when he says they’re endowed by their creator, I mean, it’s something that is very broadly assumed in 1776 in America and in Britain too, but it’s also something that Jefferson, I mean, of course he believes that, even though he’s deeply skeptical personally about the Bible and traditional Christian theology. Now, you would not expect somebody who’s skeptical about those things to then have this titanically profound theological statement of the basis for rights, but that’s who Jefferson was, and we don’t know anybody like that today.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:03):
Wow. Well, when people today are, of course, this is one of the big issues of our time, is America’s founding, was it 1776? Was it 1619? And I think a lot of people look at the declaration and say, “That’s cynical.” I guess the way I understand the 1619 Project, and as I’ve read through it, they were saying it wasn’t true. And other scholars have said, “Well, it was established as a promise. This is where we are headed. This is what we aspire to, not what we are saying currently exists.” Is there any insight that you can give to us because this is something, especially as people go back to school this fall, that they’re probably going to be facing in their classrooms?

Dr. Thomas Kidd (17:53):
Yeah. Well, I just don’t think that Jefferson and his group had all of this figured out. I mean, they’re talking primarily about the people involved in British and American politics when they talk about equality. I mean, that’s the primary concern that they’re dealing with at the moment.

And so they’re saying those people are equal, but when they use the language of creation, that puts it on the broadest possible foundation and it gives other people ideas. So my favorite example is the African American pastor, Leniel Haynes, who is an evangelical pastor in New England. And in 1776, he’s a former indentured servant, and so he knows what it’s like to be a bound laborer. And so he writes a pamphlet called Liberty Further Extended.

(18:59):
And the headnote of the pamphlet is the Declaration of Independence Statement about, all men are created equal. And he says, “Well, I totally appreciate the point that Jefferson and the Continental Congress are trying to make, but on the basis of that logic, we shouldn’t have slavery.”

(19:19):
And so Jefferson, I think probably in candid moments, probably would’ve conceded that. I mean, that the idea of all men are created equal makes slavery morally problematic. And Jefferson in notes on the state of Virginia even talks about being afraid of the judgment of God because of the immorality of slavery. And yet, he doesn’t do anything about his own slaves for the vast number of them get sold off when he dies, and he doesn’t really do very much legislatively about slavery either.

And I think that it’s a product of self-interested motives. I mean, it is. It’s a complicated business, but Gordon Wood, a great historian of the Revolution, says that the Declaration and the Revolution made slavery morally conspicuous in a way that it had never been before. And so they were taking a risk by talking about that language of equality by creation. And a lot of pro- slavery people from 1776 to 1861 wish that Jefferson hadn’t said what he said.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:46):
Yeah. Well, I like that idea, that thought about it making it morally conspicuous because I remember looking at William Wilberforce, for example, in Great Britain, and of course there were several people who were influential who were looking at slavery as a moral issue, but the case that they seemed to make to the parliament was an economic case. But in America, it was different. Here’s a principle, the realization of which would naturally result in the ending of slavery. Is that a correct way to think about that?

Dr. Thomas Kidd (21:23):
Well, I think that the people in Britain are being pragmatic and it works because the reason substantially why the white Southern founders are not willing to give up on slavery is economics. I mean, Patrick Henry, who I also did a biography of, I mean, he says it straight out. I mean, there are abolitionists, Quakers who are trying to get him to enlist on the side of abolition. And he says, “What can I tell you? I’m a hypocrite.” He says, “I can’t do without my slaves, so that’s why I’m not going to help you.”

(22:03):
So if you’re going to make a successful reform legislative argument against slavery, one of the best things that you can do in Britain is to say, “This institution is bad for the empire economically,” which I think was a plausible argument. And so the people who are not animated by Christian conviction alone might be able to hear, “Oh, this is bad economically. It destabilizes the empire. It’s leading to regular slave revolts, which it did.”

And so I think that they were very smart, I think, in Britain and Wilberforce and his crowd about how to make the argument. And it’s just a stunning difference about the way that Britain gets rid of slavery and its empire in 1833 through legislative reform. What a wonderful outcome. For us, it took the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in a terrible four-year war.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:11):
Thank you for helping with that. That’s really interesting. There’s something else I’ve been wanting to ask you about because I’ve recently had a chance to read your book on George Whitfield, The Great Awakening, stunning to think of this guy who was drawing Billy Graham size crowds when the nation was a tiny fraction of the size that it was during Billy Graham’s ministry. And he was a British guy who came over to America, regularly withdrawing 10,000, 20,000.

I remember you mentioned that Ben Franklin had actually tried to calculate because somebody said, “There’s no way one person could speak to a crowd that large without amplification.” And he actually did some experiments to demonstrate how it could happen. That was all leading up to the American War for Independence. Tie together Whitfield’s teaching and people’s move toward independence and freedom. Did it sort of set things in motion for this country?

Dr. Thomas Kidd (24:18):
Well, I think that there’s no doubt that the Great Awakening forms American culture into what it was on the eve of the revolution. I mean, that’s one way to think about it because the Great Awakening is not just the most profound religious event of the late colonial era, but it’s also the biggest social and cultural upheaval of that time. And it happens 30 years before the revolution. And we think that something like three quarters of the entire population of the English colonies in America heard Whitfield preach at least once.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:00):
Wow.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (25:03):
He had the kind of celebrity cache and impact that is bigger than any celebrity in America today. It’s a lot bigger because we’re scattered all over the place. Lady Gaga is a really big celebrity. I don’t pay much attention to Lady Gaga.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:28):
And she’s never spoken to two thirds of the Americans for 45 minutes or an hour or two hours.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (25:35):
That’s correct. That’s correct. So I mean, he’s such an unparalleled figure in terms of his prominence and celebrity. Graham is a good comparison, but in his time, I think Whitfield was a bigger deal than Billy Graham was in his time. So anyway, it has to influence what America is on the eve of the revolution. And there’s no doubt that there are direct political consequences of the Great Awakening.

A lot of it relates to religious liberty because there was a lot of persecution of the evangelists of the Great Awakening by the state churches in the colonies and also in Britain, but especially in the colonies. I mean, you had just terrible persecution against the evangelical preachers being put in jail, beat up, fined, all kinds of things. So the call for religious liberty that is central to the reform movements coming out of the Revolution has everything to do with Great Awakening.

(26:41):
As far as the relationship of the Great Awakening to the Revolution itself, it’s a little harder to know what to say because the Great Awakening is happening in Britain too. And obviously Britain is opposed to the American Revolution. So why didn’t the Great Awakening have this kind of revolutionary effect in Britain?

I’m not sure that Whitfield would’ve supported the American Revolution. Like he said, he was English. He spent most of his life in England. He’s an Anglican minister, which is a political institution in Britain backed by the state. So it’s hard to say what the direct impact is, but a lot of the language, rhetoric and all that of the revolution, I mean, it’s come straight out of the Great Awakening playbook. And so just get to give one example, Patrick Henry’s liberty or death speech. Henry had gone to the revivals as a boy.

(27:51):
He’s not exactly an evangelical Christian in the sense that he doesn’t talk about being born again, but he’s definitely a devout Anglican Christian and he had gone to the revivals. And so that speech, the Liberty Death speech, it sounds for all the world like an evangelical sermon. And it’s not a very long speech, but it’s full of quotes from the Bible. And Henry’s critics even said, he must think he’s a preacher or something the way he talks.

(28:20):
And he said that the greatest orator he ever heard speak was Samuel Davies, the revival preacher in Virginia that he went to and listened to as a boy. So that mode of persuasion and rhetoric, it was moral. It was often biblicist. It was going straight to the people with this kind of moral appeal. People like Henry got a lot of that from the Great Awakening.

Dr. Jeff Myers (28:44):
Do you think it prepared people to have a different kind of revolution than the revolution that took place later in France, which seemed to be based more on the writings of Rossau and Voltaire?

Dr. Thomas Kidd (29:00):
Yeah. There’s definitely a very clear distinction about what kind of revolution the French Revolution is versus the American Revolution. And it’s the evangelicals in America, but it’s also just people like Washington, I mean, who is not an evangelical, but so deeply values the public role of religion, especially in a republic.

I mean, because all the founders assumed that if you’re going to have a kingless republic, then the survival of the republic depends on the people’s virtue. And if people lose their sense of public spirited virtue, then that will lead to the collapse of the republic. Well, so where do you get virtue? I mean, maybe some from education, but for average people, the founders believe that virtue is going to come from Christian belief and practice.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:00):
Yeah.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (30:01):
And so Washington talks about religion and virtue as the great pillars of human happiness. Happiness, right? I mean, the pursuit of happiness comes out of religion and living a virtuous life for someone like Washington. So it is profoundly friendly to religion where the French Revolution, especially in its radical phases, is rapidly anti-Christian and anti-Catholic in particular. Since that was the established state church in France. And so they’re killing priests, they’re converting Catholic cathedrals to temples of reason and doing all this barbarous stuff in France. In that sense, they couldn’t be more dissimilar.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:55):
As I’m thinking about how all of this applies to our own time, Tommy, there have been, I interviewed a guy who was involved in the Jesus movement and how music was central to that and how so many people came to faith in Christ through that movement. And I know there are revival movements that take place all over the world.

When I look at North America though, I don’t see that. And it’s hard to even see how it could happen here. Is there anything that you think is, I know you have what you write and then you have, probably what you think, “Oh, this might apply here or there, but it’s not really part of the work.” Is there anything that you can share with us that might help us get some hope?

Dr. Thomas Kidd (31:51):
The Lord’s own is thrown. That’s my hope. Yeah, there are definitely revival movements happening around the world. Some of them, well known, some of them not well known. China, obviously, significant numbers of conversions happening. In Iran, a lot of that’s kind of under the radar because of legal problems for people leaving Islam for Christianity. But in America, it’s complicated because so much of what ends up in the news about evangelical Christianity is about politics. And I understand why that is, but the media conveys an impression of evangelicalism that’s only political or if there’s scandal, they’ll cover that too.

But they’re not interested in, say, people becoming Christians per se. And so there are definitely pockets in America of what you certainly would call church growth and maybe revival too. I mean, one of the things I talked about in my book, Who Is an Evangelical, that came out a couple years ago is that in Boston, over the past half century, there are twice as many Protestant churches in Boston today as there were 50 years ago.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:24):
Wow.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (33:25):
And you would have no idea. I mean, the media doesn’t care about this. Pop Christian sources, don’t talk about these sorts of things. But one of the reasons for it is partly because the secular media doesn’t care about religion as religion. They only care about it as connected to politics. But it’s also because those churches, virtually all the doubling of the churches, Protestant churches in Boston are immigrant churches.

And so that is probably the place where you see signs of the most growth and sometimes revival is in the immigrant populations in places like Boston. There’s tons of Haitian Baptist churches, for instance, being founded in places like Boston and Miami. And so the growth areas in American evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are usually connected to immigrants. And so whatever we think about immigration policy as evangelicalism, that should be something that we note.

(34:38):
If you’re looking for revival in America today, it’s usually among immigrant populations. But I mean, going back to the Great Awakening, I will say that Jonathan Edwards led what we usually consider the first revival of the First Great Awakening in Northampton, Massachusetts in the 1730s. And when he wrote his account of that revival, he said a faithful narrative of the surprising work of God at Northampton.

And part of the point he was making there is that he didn’t, I mean, he was praying for revival to happen, but he basically said, “I had been doing pretty much the same thing as a pastor for eight years, preaching the word of God and praying and those sorts of things.” And then one day God sent revival. So sometimes I think we may be right on the edge of revival, but we’re putting our faith in the wrong things.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:34):
Expand on that a little bit more. So if we hoped that there would be a revival coming, what did Edwards do that we should be doing?

Dr. Thomas Kidd (35:49):
Well, he thought it was basically a sovereign act of God. And so he would say, “I didn’t do anything. I just received.” And I mean, he had been faithful as a minister for all these years, but God and his sovereignty decided to send revival in 1734 and 35. And that can be frustrating, I think, especially the evangelicals who really like technique and really like new measures, as Charles Fenney put it in the 1800s, that if we can just figure out the right method, especially to reach the young people, I mean, that’s just the perennial concern. He goes back to the first greater way. How are we going to reach the young people?

(36:39):
Well, the way we’re really going to reach the young people is through an outpouring of the Holy Spirit for revival. And so if nothing else, I mean, I think what we need to do, quote unquote, is to be faithful, to pray for our church in particular, for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit for revival. And it’s not like putting a coin into the machine and getting out the result that we want, but I think that’s the number one thing I would put on the list.

And also just to know that, I mean, there are signs of revival all over the world, amazing things of God. But the spirit moves in different ways at different places at different times, and he won’t be put in a box. So that’s what I would say is my source of encouragement, but also just for a lot of Christians and a lot of times it does involve faithful prayer and waiting.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:47):
And while waiting, we are occupying in a sense, we’re getting involved as historians or in the media or in medicine and the military and all of these different areas. If there are young adults who are watching or listening to the show right now and thinking, “I like this guy, I want to read his books, but I think I might want to be a historian.” Can you just give us some tips from a guy? And now maybe they’ll want to come to study with you at Baylor, but what are some tips?

Dr. Thomas Kidd (38:22):
Yeah. I mean, I definitely see being a professor of any kind as a calling. I see every vocation is a calling, but being a professor is definitely a calling in the sense that it’s a tough road in some ways. I mean, I was in college for 11 straight years, which not that many people want to do. And I spend an enormous amount of time by myself reading books and researching things and writing things. It’s a very solitary enterprise and it’s often, elite academia is often not very friendly to Christians, especially Christians who want to talk about their faith publicly, but it is a wonderful career if you can put up with all the other stuff that comes with it.

So I would recommend that students who are thinking about being a professor in whatever field, that they think in terms of the reading that they’re doing, is this the sort of thing that I’m really resonating with? What offers do I really resonate with? Who are they? I mean, I think a lot of times students just totally miss the fact that the people that they’re reading often are alive and they work somewhere.

(39:50):
And some of them work with graduate students. Not all of them do, especially at Christian liberal arts colleges. A lot of times your history professors are only teaching undergraduates, which is great, and that’s a huge impact too. But if you’re getting good grades in those areas and you want to think about doing graduate work, I would talk with one of your professors and see what they think about it.

And maybe some, so just the other day, I got an email from a student actually at a public school who said that he had read one of my books in his class and that he was interested in possibly working with me if he could get in and that sort of thing. And when you’re transitioning into that mode of, I want to be possibly a professor in this field, you’ve got to identify some possible mentors and advisors and places to go.

(40:52):
And one of the things that’s so important about what Baylor is doing in particular, if I can toot Baylor’s horn for just a second, is that most Christian schools only have graduate programs in Bible and theology, and we do too, but Baylor is trying to have PhD programs in all the traditional fields, and the programs are both highly professional and doing the sorts of things that you need to do to train to be in academia, but they’re also friendly to Christians. And so there’s just not many places that are doing that sort of thing, especially on the Protestant side.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:34):
Tommy, thank you for your work and thanks for taking time to come on the show today. I love conversations like this, and I’m really grateful.

Dr. Thomas Kidd (41:43):
Yeah, you’re welcome.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:44):
I’m so thankful to have had an opportunity to have Thomas Kidd on the show today. You can find his many books wherever you buy books. Check out the ones on George Whitfield, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, America’s founding. You can also follow him on Twitter @thomaskidd, K-I-D-D, for up-to-date commentary on the struggles that Christians face to this day through the lens of somebody who is a highly regarded historian.

Thank you for joining us. But before I go, I want you to know that this podcast is now on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place for you as the listener. You can download it at edifi.app. We’ll see you next time.

(42:34):
Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen, and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more. If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/thedrjeffshow for more information.