The Pious Infidel

Modern conservatives who can't bear to think that the Declaration of Independence was written by a Bible-defacer have spread the rumor that Thomas Jefferson created his own Bible as an ethical guide to civilize American Indians. The so-called 'Jefferson Bible' was really a tool to introduce the teachings of Jesus to the Indians," declared Rev. D. James Kennedy. Actually, Jefferson's editing of the Bible flowed directly from a well-thought out, long-stewing view that Christianity had been fundamentally corrupted -by the Apostle Paul, the early church, the great Protestant reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, and by nearly the entire clerical class for more than a millennium. Secularists love to point to the Jefferson Bible as evidence of his heathen nature; but that misses the point, too. Jefferson was driven to edit the Bible the way a parent whose child was kidnapped is driven to find the culprit. Jefferson loved Jesus and was attempting to rescue him.

Most historians who study the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson's ideas look to the philosophers who influenced him most, some emphasizing John Locke, others the Scot, Frances Hutcheson. And there's no question that these men shaped Jefferson's approach to knowledge, reason and freedom of religion. But read through Jefferson's writings on faith and one finds not only an erudite philosophy but a deep rage. To understand his views on liberty, we must tap into this fury. Jefferson believed that a secret to religious freedom was destroying the concept of heresy, the crime of expressing unauthorized religious thought. And he cared deeply - personally, passionately - about heresy because, in the context of his times, Thomas Jefferson was a heretic, and wanted to live in a nation that tolerated men like him.

Diamonds and Dung
Jefferson had studied early Christian history and was particularly influenced by Joseph Priestley's book, The History of the Corruptions of Christianity, which he read "over and over again." In Jefferson's view, Christianity was ruined almost from the start. "But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in church and state." The authors of the canonical Gospels were "ignorant, unlettered men" who laid "a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms, and fabrications." The Apostle Paul made things worse. "Of this band of dupes and imposters, Paul was the great Corypheaues, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus."

Then, the Council of Nicea and other clerical bodies designed elaborate doctrines that abandoned Jesus and brought great harm to the world, Jefferson believed. Take, for instance, the concept of the Trinity. "Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity," he declared. "It is mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus" and the "hocus-pocus phantasm of a god like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads." The immaculate conception was preposterous, too, Jefferson believed, and would some day be "classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

The Protestant reformation made things no better. John Calvin stressed the idea of predestination - that God chose some to be saved and how they behaved couldn't alter their fate. This idea - at the heart of the faiths practiced by a majority of Americans at the time - disgusted Jefferson. "Calvinism has introduced into the Christian religion more new absurdities than its leader [Jesus] had purged it of old ones," he explained. What would have been the proper response to the "insanities of Calvin"? The "strait jacket alone was their proper remedy." Like Adams, what bothered Jefferson most about this philosophy is that it undermined morality. Any religion that eliminated good behavior as the path to salvation merited no respect, and any god that picked the favored few without considering the lives they led was an imposter, in Jefferson's view. Therefore, he said, Calvin "was indeed an atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshiped a false god, he did."

Jefferson did not believe Jesus was divine. "That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of god physically speaking I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself," he wrote. But he added that Jesus "might conscientiously believe himself inspired from above," since his milieu of Judaism stressed that leadership was invariably based on divine revelation and he might have breathed "the fumes of the most disordered imaginations."

The entire ministerial class - the "priests," as he called all clergy and theologians - was pervasively corrupt, having a vested interest in making Christianity opaque. "Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies." The history of clerical leadership was a relentless, obsessive and wicked focus on peripheral matters for the purpose of dividing and oppressing -- "vestments, ceremonies, physical opinions, and metaphysical speculations, totally unconnected with morality, and unimportant to the legitimate objects of society." He noted the centuries of bloodshed justified in the name of the Prince of Peace, declaring that Protestant catechisms and creeds have "made of Christendom a slaughter-house, and at this day divides it into castes of inextinguishable hatred to one another." Year after year, priests managed to take the "purest system of morals ever before preached to man," and twist it into a "mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves." He was convinced that the obfuscation was often deliberate, since the "mild and simple" principles of Jesus require little explanation. Priests therefore had to "sophisticate it, ramify it, split it into hairs, and twist its texts till they cover the divine morality of it's author with mysteries, and require a priesthood to explain them."

To an extent rarely acknowledged, Jefferson also despised Jews - or at least the Jews of the Old Testament and the religion it seemed to spawn. The "vicious ethics" of the Jews were "irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason & morality," encouraged poor relationships between people and were downright "repulsive and anti-social, as respecting other nations." When he began to sketch out a "syllabus" about the life of Jesus, Jefferson explained that the Jewish god bore attributes that "were degrading and injurious." Moses was depicted as "cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." Though his negative attitude about Judaism seemed mostly confined to antiquity, he occasionally revealed an up-to-date bias. Referring to irksome New England federalists, Jefferson declared that "they are marked, like the Jews, with such a perversity of character, as to constitute, from that circumstance, the natural division of our parties. " Referring to the Quaker tendency to support the British, he said contemptuously, "dispersed, as the Jews, they still form, as those do, one nation, foreign to the land they live in."

In contrast to John Adams, Jefferson was convinced that organized religion invariably opposed freedom. "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty," he said. The dynamic repeated itself throughout history: unable to spread their principles through persuasion, religious leaders instead rely on the power and support of the state, in exchange for offering the ruler the legitimacy and moral authority of the church. "He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." These alliances of government and clergy - a "loathsome combination of church and state" -- have brutalized the people throughout history. While James Madison focused on the threat to religion from government, Jefferson wrote more about the effects of religion, and religious leaders, on government, not only in ancient history but contemporary America. By getting themselves "ingrafted into the machine of government," he said, the New England clergy "have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man." The priesthood discouraged thinking, which was essential for Republicanism, so a powerful church hierarchy -- especially one entangled with or supported by government - was a great threat to liberty.

The more one reads Jefferson railing against the "priests," the more one is struck by how personal it seems. It is not merely Jesus who was maligned by the priests, but Jefferson. The opinions reviewed above - against the trinity, the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, Calvin, etc - were violently at odds with orthodox Christianity in Jefferson's time. And Jefferson was conscious of how the clerical class punished such heresies. In Notes on the State of Virginia, for instance, he reviewed the penal laws governing religious belief. "According to an act of 1705, those who don't believe in the Trinity or that scriptures are of 'divine authority' are punishable in the first instance by being banned from holding public office; on the second, a father may lose custody of his children and be sentenced to three years in jail." It was after summarizing these horrors, that Jefferson wrote the words that would get him in trouble during the 1800 presidential election: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

I'm certainly not arguing that Jefferson wanted to change the laws because he feared imminent arrest. But I do believe that for him, the idea that people with unorthodox views should be tolerated was no mere abstraction. During the 1800 campaign, the "genus irritable vatum"- the "irritable tribe of priests" -- were "all in arms against me" and "printing lying pamphlets against me" and spreading "absolute falsehoods." They wanted to preserve or extend their religious establishments - government support of religion - and Jefferson opposed them. "They believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

Indeed, after reading several letters in which he describes how Jesus was maltreated by the priestly class and other letters in which Jefferson describes how he was abused by the clergy, one cannot help but wonder whether Jefferson identified his own plight with that of the earlier misunderstood sage. In August 1801, soon after the bruising election, Jefferson wrote to his attorney general, Levi Lincoln, about how the New England clergy was showing him "no mercy." Unselfconsciously, he declared that while "they crucified their Savior," the "laws of the present day withhold their hands from blood" - but that "lies and slander remain to them." Was he writing about Jesus, or himself, when he declared: "The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation is ever dangerous"? Jesus' efforts to reform religion, he said, were perilous. "A step to right or left might place him within the grip of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race." Same for Jefferson.

Jefferson returned to the theme throughout his life. "I am not afraid of the priests," he wrote in 1816. "They have tried upon me all their various batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering, without being able to give me one moment of pain." His counterattacks defended himself and Jesus at the same time. "I abuse the priests indeed," he wrote in 1815, "who have so much abused the pure and holy doctrines of their master, and who have laid me under no obligation to reticence as to the tricks of their trade. The genuine system of Jesus, and the artificial structure they have erected, to make them the instruments of wealth, power and pre-eminence to themselves, are as distinct things in my view as light and darkness: and while I have classed them with soothsayers and necramancer, I place him among the greatest of the reformers of morals, and scourges of priest-craft that have ever existed. They felt him as such, and never rested until they had silenced him by death."

While other philosophers, like Socrates, focused on how humans could govern their passions to procure "our own tranquility," Jesus forced people to connect to a larger whole. While the early Jews thought like a parochial tribe, Jesus extended the principles of neighborliness to "all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids." Jewish law focused on actions, but Jesus "pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man; erected his tribunal in the region of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head." Moses had "bound the Jews to many idle ceremonies, mummeries, and observances, of no effect towards producing the social utilities which constitute the essence of virtue. Jesus exposed their futility and insignificance. The one instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit toward other nations; the other preached philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence." Though he did excise the miracles from the Bible, Jefferson praised Jesus for teaching "the belief of a future state." (Note, however, that Jefferson mostly applauded the idea of heaven's existence because of the practical effect it would have on temporal human behavior.)

For those who think that Jefferson was indifferent about which kind of religion was practiced (be there "20 gods, or no god"), it's worth noting that he clearly viewed the message of Jesus as superior to all others. In fact, he thought that if people could just see his unadulterated teachings, Christianity would conquer the world. "Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian."

All these anti-Christian comments by Jefferson have led to some comic contortions on the part of Christian conservatives reluctant to completely give up on such an important Founding Father. Conservative minister D. James Kennedy, for instance, noted that Jefferson attended church regularly, gave donations to ten different churches, and, as we'll see later, allowed for some government support of religion. A glass-half-full kind of preacher, Kennedy asserts that the man who put razor to Scripture was, in his dedication to understanding the text, "a Bible scholar." As for the unfortunate matter of Jefferson rejecting Christ, Kennedy forgivingly writes, "He faithfully studied it, but apparently, there was no one there to guide him, and he came to a rejection of the deity of Christ." But the most creative rationalization for how we could have such an anti-Christian Founding Father comes from Tim LeHaye, who declares simply that Jefferson wasn't really a Founding Father. "Thomas Jefferson, the closet Unitarian who had nothing to do with the founding of our nation (he was in France being humanized by the French skeptics of the Enlightenment at the time), was no friend of faith."

LeHaye need not despair for there is another facet to Jefferson's theology.

Though the most Deistic of the Founding Fathers, even Jefferson was not a full-fledged Deist if we accept that philosophy as having had two fundamental tenets: a rejection of Biblical revelation and a conviction that God, having created the laws of the universe, had receded from day to day control and intervention. Jefferson clearly did agree with the first part of Deism. But he did not agree with the second.

Jefferson seemed to believe in a God that was still present in, and intervened in, the lives of men and nations. After having read Jefferson attack so many of the legs of religion, it might seem jarring to now read his regular invocations of God as a personal force in life - sometimes in terms so direct and literal that they surpass that of today's politicians. In his First Inaugural address, he declared that we should be "acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter." In his first message to Congress, in 1801, he thanked the "beneficent Being" who instilled in the warring politicians a (temporary) "spirit of conciliation and forgiveness." In his second message, he credited the "smiles of Providence" for economic prosperity, peace abroad and even good relations with the Indians. He never stopped asserting the importance of separating church and state, but he did this in the context of repeated public pronouncements about the powerful role of an intervening God in the fate of America. These two somewhat contradictory themes came together most directly in his second inaugural address. In the first part of the speech, he defended his practice of not issuing days of fasting or thanksgiving proclamations. But toward the end of the speech, he says that to avoid making the mistakes which he, as a human, was prone, "I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life."

Some look at Jefferson's public pronouncements and sense cynicism. Recall his comment about "cooking up" an effective prayer proclamation to rally lethargic Americans. Perhaps he was just being a pol, using the language he thought would most appeal to his audience. But the evidence is stronger that Jefferson genuinely believed in a personal God and a spirit life. For one thing, he went way farther in his public pronouncements than he needed to, attributing a wide range of events and policies to God's "smiles." More important, his private letters reflected a similar view about the nature of God. In a letter to Eliza Trist, he declared that "it is not easy to reconcile ourselves to the many useless miseries to which Providence seems to expose us. But his justice affords a prospect that we shall all be made even some day." In 1763, he wrote John Page that to fortify ourselves from misfortunes "The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider whatever does happen, must happen." In 1801, he commended "your endeavours to the Being, in whose hand we are." When Napoleon was defeated he wrote a friend that, "it proves that we have a god in heaven. That he is just, and not careless of what passes in the world."

How could this ultra-rationalist - believer in science and reason - so fully embrace a supernatural god watching over our lives? This is another case in which today's activists and scholars, by applying the standards and definitions of our time, misunderstand the ideas of a Founding Father. Remember: in this era before Charles Darwin, most of the enlightenment leaders were not arguing against the existence of God. On the contrary, they argued that the laws of science actually proved the existence of God, if you knew how to look at it the right way.

Jefferson believed that our spiritual journeys must be led by reason, not faith. In a letter to his nephew Peter Carr, he urged rigorous application of scientific principles to the Bible. For instance, he encouraged him to look at the story of Joshua making the sun stand still and then added, "you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature that a body revolving on its axis, as the earth does, should have stopped" without then having "prostrated animals, trees, buildings." Jefferson conceded that such an investigation might take the young man away from God. "Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. " If, on the other hand, "you find reason to believe there is a God," you will find comfort and happiness in that, too. And you should not feel badly or anti-God should your mind take you away from the church since "your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven."

It's not absurd to read such passages and conclude that Jefferson was a relativist. If it's up to everyone's individual reasoning process to determine religious truth, then is there any genuine reality? This impression was reinforced by his statement in Notes on the State of Virginia, that "it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god." But Jefferson did believe in religious truth; he just had an overriding conviction that it was reason, acting in a marketplace of ideas, that would lead people to find it. "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Jefferson himself was not an agnostic on this point. He applied reason and critical scientific thought to the world and concluded that God does exist. Read this extraordinary letter from Jefferson to Adams April 11, 1823, and it's possible to see how his anti-Christian, rationalist approach nonetheless led him to a deep love of God. "I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with it's distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.

"We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in it's course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro' all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe. "

Yes, Thomas Jefferson - hero of modern liberals -- believed in intelligent design.

Even though most of Jefferson's important actions on behalf of religious liberty took place from 1776 to 1809, the quotations in this chapter are taken from throughout his life. His anger at the priesthood intensified as he aged, and his focus on Jesus sharpened, but the basics of Jefferson's views were there throughout. What emerges is a picture of Thomas Jefferson that belies stereotypes created by modern culture warriors. He is anti-Christian and pro-Jesus. He is anti-religion and pro-God. He's against blind faith and in favor of reason-based belief. He turns to the power of science to explain the world, and to prove the existence of God. As he put it later, he is a "sect of one."

How does this all relate to the history of religious freedom in America? What it shows is that the classical view of how Jefferson came to support separation of church and state and fight for religious freedom - i.e. that his views grew out of his study of Locke and other thinkers - misses one part of the picture. Jefferson was on a personal spiritual journey that took him outside the mainstream. He resented being considered a heretic because he believed that his approach to God and Jesus was more faithful to both of them. He believed that oppression of "the mind" not only led to persecution but constrained the process of rational exploration that would lead to religious truth. This was no mere abstraction for him. He knew that had he been forced to believe the official line, he would have been deprived of an unobstructed journey to God. Jefferson wanted religious freedom in part because he wanted to be, religiously, free.