Back in 2019, the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School

hosted a conference dedicated to racial reconciliation and the National Covenant.

The organizers of the event were dismayed at the enduring racial

divisions in the United States. Rather than put their energy into legal or political remedies,

they wanted to see if there were theological and religious resources to help America heal.

So they brought together rabbis and pastors, church leaders and theologians,

and the proceedings of that conference have recently been published as a book, Race and Covenant,

recovering the religious roots for American reconciliation.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. Today I'm speaking with two

Christian leaders, Gerald McDermott,

who recently retired from the Beeson Divinity School, and Derek Green, a writer and analyst and member

of Project 21, a black leadership network. I was intrigued by the premise of the conference,

that the idea of covenant, the template of God's providential relationship with the children of Israel,

that that idea, that Jews renew and sustain three times each day in our worship,

that that idea holds some promise for American society. As I read the volume, I discovered what

McDermott had in mind. God, he notes, relates not only to individuals, but also to nations.

The claim here is not that America is a chosen nation, like the Jews. The claims that America

understood itself as a nation with no established church, yes, but nevertheless, in our constituting

documents, as well as in the public statements of national leaders who captured

and spoke to widely shared beliefs animating the American people, that in all of this, America

recognized itself as, in some sense, under God. And that self-understanding, to quote the Declaration

of Independence, with firm reliance on the protection of divine providence,

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