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“The Religion of Jefferson”
Have you seen the new 2005 Jefferson nickel yet? The design on the front features a new image of Thomas Jefferson. The word “liberty” appears in the style of Jefferson’s own handwriting.
If you are a history buff you may remember that, in the days of Jefferson our country was being newly formed, and there were significant disagreements among our founding fathers about basic matters such as the purpose of government. Thomas Jefferson believed the prime role of government was the protection of liberty and that authority for the power of that government came from the consent of the governed. Alexander Hamilton viewed government’s primary role to be the protection of property and that authority derived from an aristocracy of birth and wealth.
Although Thomas Jefferson wasn’t a perfect man, his role in the founding and formation of this country with liberty as a central value has been significant and we owe him much. Jefferson was principal author of the Declaration of Independence which famously proclaims life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as unalienable rights.
But contemporaries may be surprised to learn that it wasn’t the Declaration of Independence but the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which instituted separation of church and state in Virginia which Thomas Jefferson apparently looked back on as his highest achievement and remembered with the most pride and greatest satisfaction.
It’s the religious side of the man that we’re going to focus on this morning. Although Thomas Jefferson didn’t attend church on a regular basis, he cared deeply about developing a personal theology and was passionate, if private, about his own religious development. I suspect today he would be one to say, “I’m not ‘religious” but I’m very spiritual. But that’s just a guess. The portrait that emerges when one takes a closer look at Jefferson is of someone who takes faith and God seriously – we’ll have more to say to round out his religious portrait later.
Jefferson had a savvy understanding of the media of his day. His political opponents tried very hard to make Jefferson’s religion a factor in elections, because his religious stance wasn’t orthodox. They filled the press with attacks on his “deistical” beliefs. Many Enlightenment thinkers were deists, and Jefferson certainly was one. Deists were convinced that the universe could be understood by the human mind and they believed that God created the universe then left it strictly alone. This theory rules out the possibility of miracles or other special acts by God.
The New England Palladium proclaimed during the election of 1800 that if "that infidel Jefferson should be elected the seal of death is set on our holy religion and some infamous prostitute under the title of the Goddess of Reason will preside in the sanctuaries now devoted to the worship of the Most High."
Jefferson simply made it a policy never to respond to any of these attacks, or, indeed, to make any public statement at all concerning his faith – as a result the criticisms didn’t hurt him publicly in any significant way. Privately, they made him sad.
Many UU’s claim Jefferson as one of us. Theologically speaking the idea has credence but, technically speaking, it isn’t true. Jefferson never joined a Unitarian Church. It is true, however, that much that is known about Jefferson’s religious feelings and identity come from correspondences that he held throughout his life with Unitarians and Universalists in particular.
The fact is that Jefferson was raised as an Anglican and throughout his life maintained some affiliation to the Anglican Church. In spite of this affiliation, Jefferson maintained consistently in correspondence with friends that he thought the Trinity was incompatible with reason. His unorthodoxy was visible also in the fact that he - I love is! – contributed financially to every denomination in his town! Clearly although he may have been anti-trinitarian, he was not anti-religion!
Two of Jefferson’s most basic beliefs about religion were that faith was a personal experience between the individual and God and that it could not be dictated. He felt it was an individual’s most personal decision to come to his or her own views about God through thought and experience. To put it in UU language – he would endorse a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. And this he did in a process that was to last throughout his lifetime.
Jefferson was fascinated by the noble behavior of man in past civilizations and he believed in man's natural goodness and in the unity of God in the minds of men. Although these were ideas being expressed by Unitarians and Universalists of his day, they were radical thoughts for that time. Calvinist clergy, who preached the doctrine of original sin and worried about man’s depravity, charged Jefferson with being at best an agnostic, or at worst, an atheist.
Jefferson wrote privately in a letter to Charles Thompson: "I am a real Christian." He was angered by those, "who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said or saw."
Jefferson’s religious formation began when he was a student at William and Mary College. There he read the Scottish moral philosophers and other authors on church history. These scholars opened the door for Jefferson's informed criticism of prevailing religious institutions and beliefs. But it was his friend, the English Unitarian minister and scientist, Joseph Priestley, who had the most profound impact on his religious thought.
Joseph Priestley (who by the way is the scientist who discovered oxygen) had preached to and befriended Benjamin Franklin. When Priestley’s home and lab in England were burned to the ground by royal zealots critical of Priestley’s political sympathies toward the French Revolution, and his religious unorthodoxy, Franklin invited Priestley to Philadelphia. Priestley emigrated and first established a Unitarian and then a Universalist church in that city. Thomas Jefferson was a visitor in the pews when he preached there and became enamored of Priestley’s Unitarian doctrine.
Priestley charged that the teachings of Jesus and his very humanity were obscured in the early Christian centuries as a result of Greek cultural influence on the early Christian fathers. The unfortunate result was that doctrines altogether foreign to the Bible, such as the doctrine of the Trinity were contrived. Also, the scientist Joseph Priestly would recognize no conflict between science and religion; both were realms of truth established by God, and reason was to be used in both realms to discover the truth.
Like Priestley, Jefferson's early writings on religion show a heavy reliance on reason. In a letter to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787, Jefferson advised, "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god."
Another influence on Jefferson’s religious ideas was Dr. Benjamin Rush a scientist and outspoken Universalist. In these days there was no TV and there were no cell phones. This may explain why, from 1798-99 when Jefferson was John Adam’s vice-president, Jefferson and Rush engaged in a series of “delightful” conversations that affected them both. This is back when conversation was an ‘art.’ In the course of one of their conversations Jefferson promised Rush that he would write down his view of the Christian religion. In September of 1800, with Jefferson very busy and now a candidate for the presidency, he wrote Rush to say that he hadn’t forgotten his promise. He delayed, not because it had been given so little thought, but because the task was so important it would take more time than he presently had.
Four years later now-President Jefferson unexpectedly received a short treatise from his Unitarian friend Priestley entitled Socrates and Jesus Compared. Jefferson took it on a train ride and read it in one sitting. Inspired, he wrote Priestly back, mentioning his promise to Benjamin Rush from so many years ago. He described his intended project, saying:
“This view would purposely omit the question of his divinity, and even his inspiration. To do him justice, it would be necessary to remark the disadvantages his doctrines had to encounter, not having been committed to writing himself, but by the most unlettered of men, by memory, long after they had heard from him…yet fragments remaining as to show a master workman, and that his system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has ever been taught……….. and his …the most benevolent, and the most eloquent and sublime character that has ever been exhibited to man.” [1]
Two weeks later Jefferson sent an outline of his idea to Rush. He called it “Syllabus of an estimate of the merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, compared with those of others”. In his cover letter Jefferson described the syllabus as “the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.” [2]
President Jefferson also sent a copy to Priestley, knowing his interest and asking if he’d possibly be able to flesh the syllabus out into a completed work, knowing he himself wouldn’t have the time. In that letter Jefferson mentions the idea for yet a new project to cut out “the morsels of morality [spoken by Jesus] and to paste them on the leaves of a book.” This is the first intimation of the Jefferson Bible. The UU Historical Society writes: “Of immense appeal is the image of President Jefferson, up late at night in his study at the White House, using a razor to cut out large segments of the four Gospels and pasting the parts he decided to keep onto the pages of a blank book.” However, when Priestley died later that year Jefferson’s voice went silent on the subject of religion for nearly a decade.
As fate would have it, in 1813, former President (and Unitarian) John Adams, while reading The Memoirs of Theophilus Lindsay a British Unitarian minister, stumbled on Jefferson’s letter to Priestley of 1803 in which he had described his compact with Rush and had asked Priestley to pick up the project. Adams and Jefferson hadn’t spoken for years since they’d had a disagreement over the meaning of the French Revolution. But the idea of Jefferson’s analysis of the true words of Jesus intrigued Adams enough so that he wrote to Jefferson and encouraged him to follow through on it.
The existence of an actual draft of the Jefferson Bible is first mentioned in a letter to Adams in 1813. He writes, “I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and by arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavio of 46 pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines, such as were professed and acted on by the unlettered Apostles, the Apostolic Fathers and the Christians of the first century. The final product, completed in 1820, when he was 77, he called the "Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." This is the version which is published by Congress.
Jefferson's little book argued no theology. He omitted the virgin birth, miracle stories, claims to Jesus' divinity and the resurrection plus any words he felt were not authentic to Jesus. And then he kept the rest. In a letter to his old friend Charles Thompson he wrote: “A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen.” Jefferson was in the habit of reading from it nightly before he went to bed. [3]
Joseph Priestly and John Adams were both Unitarians. Benjamin Rush was a noted Universalist. Without the enthusiasm, collegial conversation and encouragement, of these men of letters Jefferson wouldn’t have completed this work, which is now known as the Jefferson Bible. Two years later Jefferson wrote the following:
“I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian… and I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.”[4]
The man was a poor prophet!
Another year before he died, he wrote the following to theologian James Smith about his Unitarian views:
"I write with freedom, because while I claim a right to believe in one God, if so my reason tells me, I yield as freely to others that of believing in three. Both religions, I find, make honest men, and that is the only point society has any right to look to. Although this mutual freedom should produce mutual indulgence, yet I wish not to be brought in question before the public on this or any other subject, and I pray you to consider me as writing under that trust. I take no part in controversies, religious or political. At the age of eighty, tranquility is the greatest good of life, and the strongest of our desires that of dying in the good will of all mankind. And with the assurance of all my good will to Unitarian and Trinitarian, to Whig and Tory, accept for yourself that of my entire respect." [5]
So this is some background on Thomas Jefferson’s development of what is now known as the Jefferson Bible. But it is more than that. What we see here is a man who was very religious yet believed fervently in the separation of church and state and he lived by that belief. Jefferson’s religious views were his own – even when he served his two terms as President of the United States he held just as strongly in the liberty of others to make their own religious determinations and he honored those with whom he differed.
After two hundred some odd years of history, Jefferson’s point of view remains as relevant today than it has been at any time in our history. These are values which we struggle to uphold in the public realm today when there is pressure to place the Ten Commandments in our courthouses and to set nativity scenes alone on Town Hall lawns.
If you go to the National web site for the Declaration of Independence, you’ll find that it is interactive. You are invited to read it and sign it – and your name appears in a handwriting you choose in the style of the day. What’s fun about it is that there is no religious litmus test drafted into the language of this famous document – we are endowed “by our creator” and the “Laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God” are referred to – there is no document that is more welcoming to those who may arrive on our shores. This is part of America’s greatness bequeathed to us by Thomas Jefferson and the founders who found the document to their liking and worthy of their signatures.
So, keep your eyes peeled for the new Jefferson nickel inscribed in Jefferson’s style of writing with the word “liberty.” This great country and the liberty it stands for are worth celebrating – and protecting.