LET'S TALK ABOUT THOMAS JEFFERSON

I have asserted in previous posts my belief that the basic tenets of the founding fathers was that of Christianity.

Included in those posts was the inclusion of Thomas Jefferson as one of those Christians.

I came under some considerable scrutiny and not a little ridicule for my position, which I will endeavor to defend in this rather lengthy, but I believe significant, post.

Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States.

He, of course, was the principle writer of the Declaration of Independence, in which he used the phrase, "...that they are endowed by their Creator..."

What did he mean by that?

The reason that is an important question is that is defines where our rights as citizens come from and precludes that they come from government.

Much has been made about Jefferson's religious beliefs, some calling him a Deist, others a Unitarian, while some evangelicals have tried to make him into one of them.

In a practical sense, classifying Jefferson as a "Deist" with regards to religious affiliation is misleading and meaningless. Jefferson was never affiliated with any organized Deist movement.

He considered himself a Christian, but one of a particular sort.

While he loved the teachings of Jesus, from an ethical, and moral standpoint, Jefferson rejected the divinity of Christ. He believed that Christ was a deeply interesting and profoundly important moral or ethical teacher and it was in Christ's moral and ethical teachings that Jefferson was particularly interested, and to which he held.

And so that's what attracted him to the figure of Christ: the moral and ethical teachings as described in the New Testament. But he was not an evangelical and he was not a deeply pious individual.

In the minds of many, particularly evangelicals, this would exclude him from being regarded as "Christian."

But there are many today who claim Christianity whom I would in no wise call Christian, including some evangelicals.

Nevertheless, they are not atheists, agnostics, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhists, Confucians, etc., so the only designation they see as be left to be is Christian...and in that sense, I suppose, they are.

It is important to note, though that the principal Founding Fathers--Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin--were in fact deeply suspicious of a European pattern of governmental involvement in religion.

They were deeply concerned about an involvement in religion because they saw government as corrupting religion.

Ministers who were paid by the state and paid by the government didn't pay any attention to their parishes. They didn't care about their parishioners. They sold their parishes.

It was common for them to sell jobs and bring in a hireling to do it and they wandered off to live somewhere else where they didn't need to pay attention to their parishioners because the parishioners weren't paying them.

The state was paying them.

This is the thinking behind the rather famous letter to the Danbury Baptist Church (see below), to which we have become accustomed to assigning the doctrine of the Separation of Church and State (which doctrine is mentioned in neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution of the United States of America).

Some evangelicals, have tried to make Jefferson out as an evangelical. He was not.

Jefferson actually was deeply interested in the question of religion and morals and it's why particularly in his later years, he developed a notebook of Jesus' sayings that he found morally and ethically interesting.

It's now long since been published and is sometimes called, "The Jefferson Bible."

It is not a Bible, but an abridgement of the Gospels created by Jefferson in 1804 for the benefit of the Indians.

But Jefferson did have real trouble with the Divinity of Christ and he had real trouble with the description of various events mentioned in both the New and the Old Testament so that he was an enlightened skeptic who was profoundly interested in the figure of Christ as a human being and as an ethical teacher.

He wrote: "Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, of so much absurdity, so much untruth and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross, restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some and the roguery of others of his disciples"

This is a statement I, an evangelical, certainly agree with.

Lots of "preachers" take Scripture out of context, twist it around, use it to support their particular "Christian" philosophy, imbue it with superstition, try to force it to explain circumstances of natural cause or coincidence to the point that they do a major disservice to the Gospel.

Jefferson hated the priesthood and had very little regard for most non-Catholic preachers as well.

Here is Jefferson's estimate of priestcraft: "In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty; he is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."

Writing to John Adams, July 5, 1814 -- he refers to this subject: "The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticisms of Plato materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence"

Passages of Thomas Jefferson are often quoted that seem to be antagonistic against Christianity itself. In their context, however, the really railed against proponents of irrational Christian beliefs, never negating what he saw as true Christianity...which today I might call not Christianity at all.

Ninety-seven percent of what passes as Christianity today is exactly what Jefferson found so distressing. So do I. I hope you do, too.

There is a document signed by Thomas Jefferson on September 24, 1807, permission for a ship called the Herschel to proceed on its journey to the port of London.

The interesting characteristic of this document is Jefferson's unique use of the phrase "in the year of our Lord Christ."

Many official documents say "in the year of our Lord," but we have found very few that include the word "Christ."

However, this is the explicitly Christian language that President Thomas Jefferson chose to use in official public presidential documents, the afore mentioned and many others.

Were he alive today, he would most likely be included with the Unitarians, although he affiliated with no particular denomination.

Unitarianism was different then than it is now. Today, it classifies itself as a different "religion" than Christianity.

Unitarianism in Jefferson's time was regarded as one liberal Protestant denomination among many other Protestant denominations extant in America. Virtually nobody thought of Jefferson as a non-Christian (or even non-Protestant) president.

Jefferson was never one to exclude reference to God. In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

When two separate parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, began to form, Jefferson gradually assumed leadership of the Republicans, who sympathized with the revolutionary cause in France.

Attacking Federalist policies, he opposed a strong centralized Government and championed the rights of states.

I like that. Don't you?

Now some Jefferson quotations that show his disdain for conventional Christianity, but indicate his particular stance toward it:

"By our own act of Assembly of 1705, c. 30, if a person brought up in the Christian religion denies the being of God, or the Trinity, or asserts there are more gods than one, or denies the Christian religion to be true, or the Scriptures to be of divine authority, he is punishable on the first offense by incapacity to hold any office or employment, ecclesiastical, civil, or military; on the second, by disability to sue, to take any gift or legacy, to be guardian, executor, or administrator, and by three years' imprisonment without bail. A fathers right to the custody of his own children being founded in law on his right of guardianship, this being taken away, they may of course be severed from him, and put by the authority of the court, into more orthodox hands..." "Notes on Virginia," (pp. 234-237,)

"I doubt whether the people of this country would suffer an execution for heresy, or a three months' imprisonment for not comprehending the mysteries of the Trinity. But is the spirit of the people infallible -- a permanent reliance? Is it government? Is this the kind of protection we receive in return for the rights we give up? Besides, the spirit of the times may alter -- will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may become persecutor, and better men become his victims." (Notes on Virginia, p. 269.)

"Jesus, taking for his type the best qualities of the human head and heart, wisdom, justice, goodness, and adding to them power, ascribed all of these, but in infinite perfection, to the Supreme Being, and formed him really worthy of their adoration." Letter of Thomas Jefferson to William Short, August 4, 1820.

"Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the grip of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel." Letter of Thomas Jefferson to William Short, August 4, 1820.

"His [Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God, he did. The being described in his five points is ... a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin"
Source: Thomas Jefferson, Works, Vol. IV, p. 363.

"In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."
Source: Letter of Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 24, 1814.

"I never will by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance. I never had an opinion in politics or religion which I was afraid to own; a reserve on these subjects might have procured me more esteem from some people, but less from myself." Source: Thomas Jefferson the Freethinker.

A short time before his death, Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams, after commending the morals of Jesus, wrote as follows concerning his philosophical belief: "It is not to be understood that I am with him in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist."

"The serious enemies are the priests of the different religious sects to whose spells on the human mind its improvement is ominous" (Works, Vol. iv., p. 322).

"No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination." Source: Thomas Jefferson, Note to Elementary School Act, 1817

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State." Source: Letter of Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, Connecticut, January 1, 1802.

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors." Source: Letter of Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, April 11, 1823.

"Religion is well supported; of various kinds, indeed, but all good enough; all sufficient to preserve peace and order: or if a sect arises, whose tenets would subvert morals, good sense has fair play, and reasons and laughs it out of doors, without suffering the state to be troubled with it. They do not hang more malefactors than we do." Source: Thomas Jefferson, "Religion" in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), p. 287.

Author's Note: I am quite aware of many Jefersonian quotations regarding "religion" and "Christianity" that are not included in this post. I tried to select the ones that are most representative of the bulk of his writing on the subject...having read all of them, or at least more than most college professors. But having been accused of writing posts that most liberals, having been taught in government schools, cannot endure due to their length, I have attempted to keep this post as short as possible, while fairly inclusive.

How did I do?

Not so well, I think.