The day will come, when the mystic 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. — Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, April 11, 1823
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I recently completed the second biography of Thomas Jefferson that deals specifically with his religion (I have read three Jefferson biographies in total). It is called “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson” by Charles Sanford and presents a rather exhaustive review of the third president’s personal letters to friends and family and other statements about Jesus, the nature of man, the afterlife and other theological issues.
Even today, Christian apologists, politicians, cable news talking heads, modern deists, agnostics and atheists have tried to adopt Jefferson and other American founders as their own, claiming, or not depending on the worldview, the Founders essentially wanted to establish a nation with God or Jesus as its centerpiece, or at the least, create a nation based upon Christian or Judeo-Christian principles. The simple fact is that, at least publicly, most of the Founders were either Congregationalists, Presbyterians or Episcopalians with varying degrees of religious devotion. Here is a list that details each of their specific affiliations. Except for those, like Jefferson, who wrote a great deal about religion in private correspondence, we can say little about what they really believed in their private lives and in their hearts, just as we can little about what Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and Georgia W. Bush really believe. Their outward expressions of faith or participation in church services or public prayers speaks little to what they actually believe behind closed doors or what they write about to friends and family.
That said, Jefferson passed along, and in abundant detail, clues as to his true feelings on religion. We can be grateful that these letters and other statements on religion survived, since knowing the true religiosity of arguably the greatest historical American figure is of utmost importance if we are to make any broader claims as to the true wishes of the Founders on the topic of religion and the separation of church and state.
Perhaps the most important place to begin is at Jefferson’s death, dated July 4, 1826, or on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He requested that the following words be placed on his tombstone:
HERE WAS BURIED
THOMAS JEFFERSON
AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
He singled out these three life accomplishments — conspicuously absent are his service as president, his service in the Continental Congress or his work as a diplomat in Paris — “because by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered.”
On the Declaration, Sanford in his book said,
Jefferson expressed his deepest convictions about life and the nature of man based upon what he believed to be ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God.’ The (crucial) sentence states: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and [changed by debate in Congress to certain] inalienable rights; that among them these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.’ Familiar as these words are to most people, it is often overlooked that Jefferson based his argument for human rights upon religious beliefs about the nature of God and man.
Jefferson, then, was certainly a deist in that he believed in one God who created the world and man. This god also gave man his reasoning capacities and “endowed” man with the “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The [[Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom]], penned by Jefferson and one of only three accomplishments listed on the epitaph, supports the religious freedoms granted in the Constitution, particularly that
to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;
even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;
and
our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry” among other measures.
Jefferson, if he was anything, was a product of the Enlightenment and was very much influenced by [[John Locke]], [[Stoicisim]], [[Epicureanism]] and classical thinkers. He could read the New Testament in the original Greek and embraced Jesus as a great and moral teacher, but not as a deity. Indeed, he eschewed the Calvinistic and Catholic doctrine of the Trinity with marked vehemence.
According to Sanford:
Jefferson was incensed against Trinitarian Christianity because he regarded it as a relapse from the true ‘religion of Jesus founded in the Unity of God into unintelligible polytheism,’ he wrote Jared Sparks, a minister friend. To James Smith, Jefferson expressed the belief that it was the emphasis by Christianity upon ‘the unity of the Supreme Being which gave it triumph over the polytheism of the ancient’ religions and their immoral and all too human divinities. He regretted the subsequent growth of Trinitarian Christianity, which he called ‘the hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads.’ Over the century, the pure, ‘primitive deism’ of Jesus had been changed and degraded by the church, Jefferson believed.
Thus, to Jefferson, if God the Father was a god, Jesus could not be another. To Jefferson then, like so many other thinkers, the notion of the Trinity was unintelligible, bordering on polytheism. To Jefferson, there was only one true God, and that wasn’t Jesus. To William Short on Oct.31, 1819, he presented nearly a whole-cloth rejection of Jesus as the divine.
In the New Testament, Jefferson said,
we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man; outlines which it is lamentable he did not live to fill up. Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others. The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems …* (My emphasis. The remainder appears in the footnote at the bottom of the letter) e. g. The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, &c.
In his two versions of the New Testament, Jefferson redacts all instances of miracles that were attributed to Jesus, except for four instances of healing that could have been explained by natural causes. He did, one can suppose, to show Jesus’ compassion for mankind, of which Jefferson held in utmost esteem.
Christian apologists like David Barton erroneously claim that Jefferson created his version of the New Testament to bring the pure teachings of Jesus to the Native Americans, so “we could move them toward civilization, and we wouldn’t have to fight them in any wars.”
At least two things are wrong with that statement. First, the Native Americans, as Charles C. Mann makes the case in his book, “1491,” had quite civilized societies in the American mainland and in many parts of the South America and Mexico long before the Europeans (and probably the Chinese) came swashbuckling to North America in the 15th century. Second, nowhere does Jefferson say he created the “[[The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth]]” to bring Christianity to the Indians. He made explicit statements about why he created the so-called Jefferson Bible.
In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson says
In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. … We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use (My emphasis), by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.
“I have prepared this operation for my own use” seems clear enough. He had earlier asked [[Joseph Priestly]] to take up the time-consuming task, but Jefferson eventually did the work himself. Elsewhere, Jefferson said studying the New Testament in this way, that is removing all the miracles and magic tricks that defy the laws of nature, it is necessary to
knock down the mysticisms, fancies, and falsehoods by which the religion-builders have distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus and get back to the pure and simple doctrines He inculcated.
Thus, Jefferson was a Christian, and described himself as one, in the most literal sense possible: as a follower of the moral principles inculcated by Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Mount and in his other teachings that focus on man being good to one another. Jefferson also described himself as a deist, which to him meant a believer in one god and one god only. Based on his letters, he seems to have also believed that man would go to some kind of future state after death and that some form of rewards and punishments awaited people based on how they lived their lives.
Barton also claims the Jefferson Bible only includes direct quotes from Jesus (“the red letters,” as Barton calls them) and not anything else. But this too is wrong. Sanford in his appendix, provides a chart with every passage in the four gospels and whether each appears in either of Jefferson’s New Testaments. Jefferson’s Bible includes the trial with Pilate, the death and burial of Jesus but not the resurrection or the reports of his various appearances to disciples, women and people in the community, depending on which gospel you read, of course. So, no. It doesn’t just include the sayings of Jesus. It includes events about Jesus and the disciples as well.
To say Jefferson was a Christian in the modern sense of the word, that is, that Jesus was God incarnate, rose from the dead on the third day and will judge mankind on the last day, would be a false statement to make any way you slice it. He was a Christian in this sense only: he argued that to be literally “Christ-like” (the meaning of the word itself) was the highest moral height a person could reach, and that is all. Of everything else modern Christians believe about Jesus, Jefferson rejected without compunction, and this is clear from his letters and correspondence. In the modern sense of the word, Jefferson would not be a Christian and would be bound for eternal fire based on the doctrine of today’s Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Church of Gods and Calvinists.
While Jefferson’s true feelings on religion are probably too liberal to satisfy modern evangelicals and too conservative to please atheists, agnostics or even deists, as the latter is defined today, I believe, after studying the topic in some detail, this is a fair representation of one of the nation’s most influential founders.