I. Dreisbach on Jefferson's Religion: Fact and Fiction

Closer to Barton than Barton's opponents, Daniel Dreisbach is probably the most eminent scholar who seeks to depict Jefferson as a man of faith and a friend to state supervision of religion. Seeking to eliminate liberals' use of Jefferson's 1802 “wall of separation” apothegm as a weapon against religious establishment, Dreisbach employs three major arguments. First, he notes that, during Jefferson's extensive revisal of Virginia's laws from 1776–1778, he proposed numerous bills whereby the state government would protect religion. Second, as governor of Virginia, Jefferson proclaimed days of fasting and humiliation. Dreisbach infers from these proposals that Jefferson later interpreted the First Amendment as relevant only to religious interference by the national government, as he believed that the individual states should exercise authority over religion and protect it against irreligious elements. Third, Jefferson mentioned “divine Providence” in his inaugural addresses.Footnote ⁴ These proofs of Jefferson's religious devotion, however, deserve greater examination.

Contrary to Dreisbach's interpretation, Jefferson probably never favored executive proclamations of days of fasting, thanksgiving, or humiliation. As president of the United States, he rejected the concept, both in his famous message to the Danbury Baptist Association and in refusing to issue such proclamations during his presidency. In this regard, he was stricter than James Madison, who did issue a few such proclamations during the War of 1812.Footnote ⁵ As both a colony (long before Jefferson was born) and a state, Virginia had issued similar proclamations. As early as 1644, the Governor, Council, and House of Burgesses had directed the Anglican clergy to perform monthly days of fasting and humiliation. Ministers who failed to preach on these fast days (Wednesdays) would forfeit 500 pounds of tobacco.Footnote ⁶ As governor of Virginia, Jefferson was merely following orders from the House of Delegates when he issued proclamations for days of fasting and humiliation.

Dreisbach finds Jefferson's earlier efforts to arouse Virginia to support Massachusetts's opposition to the Intolerable Acts with a fast day in 1774 reflected religious zeal, especially as famously depicted in his draft autobiography, written when he was seventy-seven. Indeed, Jefferson rather derisively reminisced about the fast day resolution he drafted, along with colleagues Patrick Henry, Francis Lightfoot Lee, Richard Henry Lee, and others gathered in the Burgess's library. Hoping to stimulate Virginians' resentment of the Mother Country with a resolution recommending a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, they dredged up some old “Puritan” tomes by John Rushworth “for the revolutionary precedents and forms of the Puritans of that day, preserved by him” from the 1640s and 1650s. Unfortunately, Dreisbach's own quotation from Jefferson's autobiography undermines his argument that Jefferson sincerely wished to propagate religious sentiments. In Jefferson's words, “under the conviction of the necessity of arousing our people from the lethargy into which they had fallen” in resisting Britain, “[we] cooked up a resolution” assigning June 1, 1774, the day the British Government scheduled for closing down the Port of Boston, as a “day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.”Footnote ⁷ As the term “cooked up” reveals, Jefferson, perhaps shamefully, considered the fast day resolution a ludicrous undertaking, but one whose sheer “solemnity” might manipulate Virginians' emotions in favor of Massachusetts. With increasing deviousness, Jefferson, Lee, and Henry—none of whom then had a reputation for religious zeal—visited their colleague Robert Carter Nicholas, “whose grave and religious character was more in unison with the tone of our resolution, to solicit him to move it” in the assembly. Ignoring Jefferson's humorous view of the incident, Dreisbach remarks, “Jefferson seemed pleased with this accommodation between religion and the civil state.”Footnote ⁸

Years later, Edmund Randolph recorded the incident in his unpublished history of Virginia. He seemed aware of Jefferson's reputation for religious infidelity. “Mr. Jefferson, and Charles [sic] Lee, may be said to have originated a fast to electrify the people from the pulpit,” he wrote. Acknowledging Jefferson's opportunistic motives in playing on the religious sentiments of his constituents, he speculated that Jefferson and his friends, “in the cabinet of the politician,” viewed the religiously hypocritical proposal “as an allowable trick of political warfare.” Although the fast day proclamation caused the angry royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, to dissolve the assembly, Randolph applauded its long-term effects in surmounting sectional differences between the colonies, foremost among them slavery. “It was a cement among the colonies,” he wrote, “unconnected as they were in situation and dissimilar as they were in manners, habits, ideas of religion, and government from the states [sic] abounding in slaves.”Footnote ⁹

Jefferson's colleagues viewed the fast day proclamation of 1774, which the House of Burgesses passed on May 24, 1774, as a radical measure in the revolt against Great Britain. As a young revolutionary, Jefferson regarded the movement for colonial autonomy as a unique emergency. He willingly exploited popular religious sentiments (something he might ordinarily be embarrassed to do) to promote the secularly sacred effort for independence from the Mother Country and the ultimate establishment of republicanism.Footnote ¹⁰

Although eagerly utilizing the assembly's powers to advance his partisan goals in 1774, Jefferson thereafter usually objected to governmental religious proclamations or, conversely, theologians' public pronouncements on politics. He did so both as president and during his retirement, even when the clergy involved were Democratic-Republicans. Of course, his sometime friend John Adams, who believed in Divine Revelation and immortality, considered fast days a means of gaining the Lord's approval. That was among the reasons he proclaimed fast days at several points in his presidency during the Quasi-War with France, arousing partisan protests against government interference with religious freedom rather than unity against the “atheistical Jacobin” enemy.Footnote ¹¹

Maintaining the thesis that Jefferson generally favored governmental involvement in promoting religion, Dreisbach argued that, as president, addressing the Danbury Baptist Association 1802, Jefferson intended his remarks to apply solely to restricting the national government, whose participation in the citizens' religious observances was curtailed by the Bill of Rights. That Jefferson believed that, within the system of federalism, state governments and state officials could prescribe religious observance, Dreisbach argues, was demonstrated by his actions as governor of Virginia from 1779–1781 when he “had a hand in crafting proclamations for religious observances. . . . in his native Commonwealth.”Footnote ¹²

Dreisbach labels Jefferson's alleged distinction between state and national authority in religious matters his “jurisdictional interpretation” of the “‘wall’ metaphor.” After noting Jefferson's participation in the colonial assembly's resolution for “a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer” on May 24, 1774, before a national government and a federal division of powers existed, Dreisbach observes that, as Virginia's governor in 1779, Jefferson proclaimed “a day of publick and solemn thanksgiving and prayer to Almighty God.” According to Dreisbach, Jefferson considered his gubernatorial proclamation compatible with his belief in religious freedom because “this proclamation was issued after Jefferson had penned his famous Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” in 1776. (However, it did not become law until 1785.)Footnote ¹³

A closer examination of Governor Jefferson's “Proclamation Appointing a Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer” does not indicate that Jefferson viewed himself as exerting his authority to buttress religion in this instance. The Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer was not Jefferson's idea. The Continental Congress ordered it on October 20, 1779 to assure the public that God had shown “his divine care of these infant states,” as demonstrated by their “plentiful harvests,” victories in battle, and other manifestations of Divine approval of their revolution. Jefferson's entire Proclamation was the verbatim repetition of the text of Congress's directive that the state governors issue the proclamation. It included phraseology like “our generous Redeemer,” “from on high” and “plentiful effusions of divine grace” that ran counter to Jefferson's own opinion about religion. Interposing a secular aspect to its gratitude for divine approval, Congress called Louis XVI of France “the father of his people and the protector of the rights of mankind” because of his alliance with the United States. Distancing himself from the whole procedure, Governor Jefferson only added with a singular lack of eloquence that he issued the proclamation “by authority from the General Assembly.” He wanted to make clear that the proclamation was not his idea, nor was he delivering it by virtue of his meager authority as the state's governor. He was only obeying Congress and the legislature; he would have been suspected of treason or loyalism if he did not. There is no draft of the proclamation in Jefferson's handwriting. It was printed in the newspapers, as part of the nation's civil religion. Jefferson was merely performing his function as ceremonial head of state in issuing the proclamation according to instructions from the President of Congress, Samuel Huntington.Footnote ¹⁴

As a third example of Jefferson's support of government intervention to promote religion Dreisbach notes that Jefferson drafted “A Bill for Appointing Days of Public Fasting and Thanksgiving” as chair of the Committee of Revisors of the laws of Virginia from 1776–1778. Although Dreisbach asserts that Jefferson composed the bill, the editorial note in Jefferson's Papers indicates that this is not the case. In addition, Jefferson's “memorandum on bills to be drafted,” in which he listed some of the bills for which he was personally responsible, does not include Bill 85, “A Bill for Appointing Days of Public Fasting and Thanksgiving.” The bill, in a clerk's handwriting, not Jefferson's, aroused little enthusiasm in the Virginia assembly. During Jefferson's tenure in the legislature, no action was taken on it. Jefferson was merely a member of the committee that presented it in its Report on Revising the Laws. He did not write or speak on its behalf. James Madison introduced the bill pro forma in October 1785 (when Jefferson was in Europe as minister to France), along with the Bill for Religious Freedom and other remaining legislation on revising the laws. Moreover, Madison, who felt the same way as Jefferson did about freedom of religion and had recently defeated Patrick Henry's efforts for a “general assessment” requiring all taxpayers to pay to support the Christian religion, probably was unenthusiastic about it. The bill died several times in the committee of the whole from 1785 to 1786; it never became law.Footnote ¹⁵ It is something of an exaggeration to argue, as Dreisbach does, that “Jefferson and Madison jointly sponsored a bill that authorized Virginia's chief executive to designate days in the public calendar for fasting and thanksgiving,” especially since Jefferson was in Paris at the time.Footnote ¹⁶ There is nothing to suggest that either of them favored the resolution or agitated in the legislature for its passage.

Thus, despite his claims, Dreisbach furnishes little evidence from the time when Jefferson served in state government to support his thesis that Jefferson favored some kind of relationship between church and state other than, as the First Amendment stipulates, to provide physical protection for people in “the free exercise of their religion.” As Dreisbach admits, the evidence that Jefferson favored government intervention in religion is even sparser for the period of his presidency.

Among the examples that Dreisbach and the distinguished theological historian Thomas E. Buckley use to restore Jefferson's religiosity are the third president's pro forma thanks to the Creator in his inaugural addresses and messages to Congress. Dreisbach claims these statements were essentially proclamations of public days of fasting.Footnote ¹⁷ In his First Inaugural Address, however, Jefferson reaffirmed his insistence on religious freedom, claiming that all faiths practiced in America “inculcated honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man.” Especially after the barrage of attacks on him by the Federalist Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches in New York and New England during the presidential election, Jefferson may have only uttered these platitudes with reluctance. He reserved solely for public addresses his exhortations to “an overruling Providence [a phrase he probably borrowed from Adams's inaugural address], which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter.” (An attentive listener or reader would have been aware that Jefferson's mention of “hereafter” only meant that God approved of Americans' future prosperity on earth; while if Jefferson had said, “in the hereafter,” he would have been alluding to the possibility of human immortality.) Rarely if ever did he make similar statements in letters to his friends. His first inaugural's final sentence, imploring “that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe [to] lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue,” was designed to assure the public that he was not a dangerous atheist determined to crush religious worship. In a more confident mood after his overwhelming reelection in 1804, Jefferson concluded his Second Inaugural Address in the guise of a modern-day Moses who, closely collaborating with the Creator, led his people to the land of milk and honey. “I shall need, too [in addition to the people's ‘indulgence’],” he said, “the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with his providence, and our riper years with his wisdom and power.”Footnote ¹⁸

Such clichés were most likely rhetorical devices to please his audience rather than sincere statements of religious faith. His predecessors Washington and Adams had adopted such rhetoric in their Inaugural Addresses. Indeed, Adams went so far as to “consider a decent respect for Christianity [perhaps preferring this to the more irreverent ‘decent respect for the opinion of mankind’ of Jefferson's Declaration] among the best recommendations for the public service.”Footnote ¹⁹

To buttress his claim that Jefferson distinguished between state and national governments concerning powers in matters of faith, Dreisbach employed an 1808 letter from Jefferson to a New York Democratic-Republican Presbyterian minister, Samuel Miller. Dreisbach argued that the letter proved that Jefferson favored a role for the individual states in encouraging popular religious belief. The letter, however, reveals Jefferson's staunch insistence that government refrain from any religious position and uphold its secular identity, while private religious bodies ministered to their constituents' spiritual needs and kept out of governmental policy-making. Whatever concession he made to a pro-theological view was only out of politeness to Miller, a fellow Republican.Footnote ²⁰ Even Dreisbach will only go so far as to claim that Jefferson, while denying the national government an opinion in religious matters because of the First Amendment, favored individual state governments' promoting religious faith.

II. Jefferson's Letter to Miller: A Closer Look

Miller initiated contact with Jefferson in January 1808, when his popularity as president had declined. Jefferson's recent Embargo Act alienated those who favored war with Great Britain as well as New England Federalist merchants who desired continued trade despite British violations of international law and harassment of U.S. shipping. British insults were climaxed by the British frigate Leopard's attack on the Chesapeake, a U.S. warship, within U.S. territorial waters in June 1807. Miller wanted Jefferson's advance approval of several New York ministers' public request that he “recommend a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer” during the crisis. Miller anticipated that Jefferson would consider such an announcement unconstitutional. He suggested that, if Jefferson had constitutional scruples or did not think a proclamation “expedient,” his fears might be assuaged if a body of clergy made the overture to him, allowing him to demonstrate to the public that he, as “civil magistrate,” had not initiated the idea. “A cordial well-wisher to your happy administration” and Jefferson's “sincere friend,” Miller assured him that he considered it his “duty” to quash the recommendation if the President objected. At the same time, he confessed that the idea was his alone, and he had presented it to Jefferson without anyone else's knowledge.Footnote ²¹

Although Jefferson perhaps had qualms about rebuffing a political supporter, his reply bluntly denied the right of governments (“civil magistrates”) to make any religious regulations or recommendations. He insisted that only “religious societies” could do so. Nominally adhering to his erstwhile reputation as a friend of strict construction of the Constitution, which he flouted during his presidency, he argued that both the First and the Tenth Amendment (the latter of which “reserves to the States the powers not delegated to the United States”) barred “the General Government” from recommending “any religious exercise.” He concluded, “it must then rest with the States, as far as it can be in any human [governmental] authority.” However, Jefferson denied the right of any secular “human authorities” to make religious rules and regulations, which belonged only to private “religious societies.” “Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, and the objects proper for them,” he asserted, “according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the Constitution has deposited it.”Footnote ²²

Conscious that Washington and Adams, perhaps emulating royal and state governors, had proclaimed days of fasting and prayer during their presidencies, Jefferson defended his refusal to follow their example. Attempting to appease Miller, he said, “I am aware that the practice of my predecessors may be quoted. But I have ever believed that the example of state executives led to the assumption of that authority by the general government, without due examination,” he asserted, “which would have discovered that what might be a right in a state government, was a violation of that right when assumed by another” [emphasis added]. He continued cautiously, perhaps fearing to alienate Miller, “be that as it may, every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, & mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the U.S., and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.” Thereby, Jefferson was hardly affirming state executives' power to issue religious orders, but he perhaps felt it incumbent to condone Adams's and Washington's acts, especially in replying to a man of the cloth who favored national fast days. As president, he made clear, he rejected his predecessors' likely rationale. “I consider the government of the U.S. as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, disciplines, or exercises,” he insisted. Nevertheless, he was glad that Miller had given him the opportunity to “explain himself in a private letter,” probably because he wanted to avoid clerical attacks.Footnote ²³

With a combination of wit and politeness, Jefferson rejected Miller's proposal; nor did he advise him to take it to New York's Republican Governor Daniel D. Tompkins. However evasive Jefferson appeared in this letter, there was no doubt about his views in his famous letter to Benjamin Rush on September 23, 1800, later engraved on the wall of the Jefferson Memorial: “I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Ironically, Jefferson made this forthright assertion in responding to a letter from Rush asking for a statement of his religious beliefs, one in which Rush attested his own evangelical devotion to Protestant Christianity. “You promised when we parted . . . to send me your religious Creed,” Rush wrote. “I have always considered Christianity as the strong ground of Republicanism. Its Spirit is opposed, not only to the Splendor, but even to the very forms of monarchy, and many of its Precepts have for their Objects, republican liberty & equality, as well as simplicity, integrity & Oconomy [sic] in government. It is only necessary for Republicanism to ally itself to the christian Religion, to overturn all the corrupted political and religious institutions in the World.”Footnote ²⁴

III. Jefferson, Adams, Christianity, and Gaustad's Thesis

The late, distinguished religious historian Edwin S. Gaustad's interpretation of Jefferson's often controversial religious opinions in Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson was widely heralded after its publication. On a larger scale than his earlier essay, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, Gaustad examined Jefferson's ideas on God and the afterlife. He sought, by depicting Jefferson as more a Christian than a deist, to assimilate his forthright, often extreme opinions on organized religion to John Adams's more orthodox, less frequently examined views on immortality, Divine Providence and Sovereignty, and the necessity for belief in God and an afterlife for a virtuous, happy, law-abiding existence.Footnote ²⁵ Gaustad's earlier summary likewise posited that Jefferson's religious credo embraced a belief in “God, freedom, and immortality.” In effect, Gaustad finds little difference between the religious views of Adams and Jefferson, although the latter is generally perceived as more revolutionary, skeptical, and anticlerical in temperament.Footnote ²⁶

In Adams's view, for a government to have some kind of religious establishment was both inevitable and necessary. He believed that it was logically impossible for a society or a state to maintain an attitude of genuine neutrality in matters of religion: to argue otherwise was to uphold a “philosophical fiction,” as historian John Witte calls it. Although as a young revolutionist, Adams argued that the laws should punish acts of blasphemy and sacrilege, he rejected laws against blasphemy in old age, at least when writing to his libertarian friend Jefferson. Deploring statutes based on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, a document that he had in large part written, Adams favored the repeal of laws that incriminated doubting the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments as blasphemous. Adams professed agreement with Jefferson that the “whole Christian world,” which continued to punish those who doubted the divine inspiration of the Bible with torture or death, required greater enlightenment on religious questions. He lamented, “in America it is not much better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the states, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all blasphemers.”Footnote ²⁷

With unusual succinctness, drama, and eloquence, Adams attested his belief in the afterlife in Discourses on Davila, in which he designated the worst of all possible worlds one where human beings had nothing to look forward to beyond the grave, making them little more than transitory “fireflies” in the scale of being. Adams particularly feared that the French Revolution would degenerate into an atheistic regime, ruled by “men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies and that this [universe] all is without a father.” He warned that, by preaching atheism, philosophes not only degraded “man” but made “murder itself as indifferent as shooting a plover, and the extermination of the Rohilla nation [a tribe annihilated during the British conquest of India] as innocent as the swallowing of mites on a morsel of cheese.” Greek polytheism and paganism, and certainly “the more intelligible as well as more comfortable systems of Athanasious and Calvin,” even Roman Catholic “popes and hierarchies . . . superstition and fanaticism, injustices and tyranny,” did more for social well-being than atheism.Footnote ²⁸

Unlike the cool Jefferson, Adams gained a warm feeling of comfort when he reflected on God's “protecting Providence.”Footnote ²⁹ Even after his daughter Nabby's premature death and in confronting his dear wife Abigail's dying moments, Adams was not ashamed to admit his devotion and acceptance of God's will. In 1818, he wrote his close friend, the Dutch Unitarian minister Francis Van der Kemp:

Priding himself on his liberality for endorsing even this limited form of freedom of religion, Adams viewed religion as the most important aspect of life, and the most desirable means by which governments could manipulate their subjects or citizens. “Religion always has and always will govern mankind,” he was certain. “Man is constitutionally, essentially, and unchangeably a religious animal. Neither philosophers or Politicians can ever govern him any other way.” Despite this seemingly authoritarian pronouncement, Adams considered himself a proponent of religious freedom. “I will not condescend to employ the word Toleration,” he declared. “I assert that unlimited freedom of religion, consistent with morals & property, is essential to the progress of society & the amelioration of the condition of mankind.”Footnote ³⁰

As he grew older and confronted death, Adams found belief in immortality far more than a stimulus to a moral life and a social deterrent to crime and murder; it became for him personally a matter of life and death. Attempting to assuage his fears as his health deteriorated, at the age of eighty-seven Adams asserted, “a future state will set all right; without the supposition of a future state I can make nothing of this Universe, but a Chaos.” To Jefferson, who had long since resigned himself to the inevitability of death, Adams wrote several years earlier, after his wife Abigail's demise, “I believe in God and in his Wisdom and Benevolence: and I cannot conceive that such a Being could make such a Species as the human merely to live and die on this Earth. If I did not believe in a future State, I should believe in no God. This Universe . . . would appear with all its swelling Pomp, a boyish Fire Work.”Footnote ³¹

In contrast to Jefferson, Adams endorsed a spiritualist concept of the world, which he viewed as composed of spirit and matter. In the margins of a book about religion by the French atheist Dupuis, which he read avidly, probably in order to refute its teachings, Adams wrote, “the Unity of the Universe, its Author, Government, and End are the sublimest conceptions of which any intellect is capable. Dupuis may call the Active Power Matter if he will. I call it spirit and I know what I mean as well as he does.”Footnote ³² Still, Adams resented Dupuis for putting Christianity on the same footing as pagan religions. He bluntly observed, “the 10 Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount contain my religion.”Footnote ³³ Jefferson would agree with Adams that the 10 Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount were basic elements in his morality as well.Footnote ³⁴

In his obsession with this now forgotten French atheist, Adams hoped the National Bible Society would sponsor a useful contest for the best refutation of Dupuis's ideas, rather than endeavor to convert heathen savages to a corrupted version of Christianity. In his last years, Adams, with a renewed attachment to puritan Congregationalism and increased doubt about the virtues of Unitarianism (as he revealed in a letter to Jefferson in 1813, in which he attacked their journal, the Repository), lashed out against the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church with the fury of Voltaire.Footnote ³⁵ On the eve of attending the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention as a delegate in 1820, he reasserted his devotion to Article Three of its Declaration of Rights, which set up the Congregational Church as the established church of the state. “An abolition of this law would have so great an effect in this State that it seems hazardous to touch it,” he wrote to a Unitarian. He feared that the people might not contribute sufficient sums to the Church if its existence depended solely on voluntary contributions, even though, he thought, “the feelings of the people will have pomp and parade of some sort or other, in the State as well as in the Church.”Footnote ³⁶

Despite his ultimate embrace of orthodoxy, Adams's rational, intellectual side conceived a respect for what he called “mythographers,” critics of the Bible who analyzed all religions objectively and scientifically. At least when writing the more aggressively deistic Jefferson, he denied the Trinity, uncharacteristically asserting, “this would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.” But he immediately said he was not serious about this statement. Ultimately rejecting materialism, Adams wrote to Harvard College chemistry professor John Gorham, “I believe with Father Abraham and Sir Isaac Newton in the existence of Spirit distinct from Matter, and resign to the Universal Spirit the government of his Heavens and Earth.”Footnote ³⁷ He poured his heart out to this professor, confessing his belief in old-fashioned puritan “special providences,” as they were called, in a way that he would never do in writing to Jefferson. “The Material Universe is a chemical experiment,” he asserted. “Its Author and conductor is now, ever was, and ever will be, the only perfect Chymist [sic] in the Universe. I believe he constantly superintends the operation, and interposes whenever, if ever, his Special Providence is necessary or beneficial.” Reiterating his contempt for the philosophes and materialists, Adams continued: “Modern Philosophers say, Spirit is a word void of sense. I say Matter is a word void of sense.”Footnote ³⁸ Unlike Adams, Jefferson's religious opinions, at least on special occasions, partook more of the visceral.

A seldom-mentioned anecdote about President Jefferson's alleged behavior during an impromptu celebration at the Capitol reveals better than any quotation the vast difference that separated his religious mentalité and tone from that of Adams. Recorded in the diaries of William Plumer, a moderate Federalist senator from New Hampshire, the incident took place in the chamber of the House of Representatives on March 26, 1804. A navy baker baked an enormous loaf of bread and brought it to the Capitol, emulating the famous event in January 1802 when Massachusetts Republicans delivered a twelve-hundred pound “mammoth cheese” to Washington in Jefferson's honor. Entertained by the monstrous loaf, Jefferson ordered wine, cider and whiskey, as well as sirloin steaks, for the growing crowd attending the impromptu feast. According to Plumer's memorandum, “at twelve O Clock the Chamber was crowded with people of all classes & colors from the President of the United States to the meanest vilest Virginia slave. Mr. Jefferson took his jack knife from his pocket & cut & eat [sic] of the beef & bread & drank of the liquors. He compared the drunken frolic to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.”Footnote ³⁹

Avoiding such unpleasant anecdotes, Gaustad's delineation of Jefferson's religious views in Sworn on the Altar of God portrays him as even more conservative than in Faith of Our Fathers. Ostensibly, Gaustad broke new ground with his argument that, especially in his old age, Jefferson insisted that only those who believed in the existence of God possessed sufficient moral fiber to lead a decent life. Gaustad's book (which, unfortunately, lacks footnotes) cited a letter Jefferson wrote sometime in 1814 to Charles Clay (1745–1820). A friend and Bedford County neighbor near Poplar Forest where Jefferson spent his summers, Clay formerly had been rector of St. Anne's parish from 1769–1782 (which included Albemarle County), where Jefferson was a vestryman.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Gaustad's words:

Gaustad's attempt to portray Jefferson as a patron of religious conservatism and defender of religion's indispensability for morality and social control, based as it is on one letter, is not very compelling. Moreover, the letter he ascribes to Jefferson diverges so drastically from Jefferson's usual views on religious freedom and belief, expressed over the course of a lifetime, that it deserves a second reading. It contradicts virtually everything else Jefferson wrote on whether an individual could be moral and law-abiding while lacking religious faith. In fact, Jefferson was not the author of the letter; it was a letter from Charles Clay to Jefferson, rather than from Jefferson to Clay. Gaustad made the same error in his earlier book, Faith of Our Fathers. The letter is currently available in several sources, including the standard primary source on Jefferson's religious views, Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels.Footnote ⁴²

Another historian, Paul Conkin, likewise insists on Jefferson's religiosity, arguing, at least, that he believed in the afterlife. Undoubtedly, as Conkin points out, Jefferson was knowledgeable about and interested in matters of religious faith. On the other hand, it is far from certain that he “was always confident of life after death, a belief that gave him consolation and also one that seemed necessary as a support for public morality.” Furthermore, Conkin supplies no statements of Jefferson's or footnotes to support his assertion.Footnote ⁴³ Acknowledging Jefferson's anticlericalism and denunciation of religious “priesthood,” Conkin notes that Jefferson had little involvement with the Anglican/Episcopal Church or any other “organized religious sect, possibly because he found the options available to him so uninviting.” Although Jefferson rejected the Trinity as adverse to his philosophical axioms, Conkin argues that he simultaneously embraced a “providential god” and found “authentic atheism” incomprehensible. Jefferson upheld teleological arguments of a creative, purposeful “masculine god” who imposed “design in nature and in the human mind” as “self-evident,” but did not consider Jesus a Messiah or a god. At the same time, Conkin is certain, Jefferson was sure of “life after death.” Conkin believes that at the end of his life Jefferson became a “minimalist Unitarian [sic],” although he fails to mention that few Unitarians believed in personal immortality. Nevertheless, he concedes, “in times of stress and anxiety he sought inspiration and consolation not in Christian sources but in Stoic and Epicurean moral philosophers.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet if Jefferson adhered to the materialist doctrines of the pre-Socratic philosophers and Epicureans, it is unlikely that he was the ardent adherent of immortality that Conkin posits. Let us further examine Jefferson's actual statements on the subject of atheism, morality, and viable religious belief, which comprise an important segment of his struggle in defense of freedom of thought.

IV. Jefferson on Atheism and Morality

Although Jefferson never personally embraced atheism, he early rejected belief in the Trinity and its accompanying ceremonialism. He made this clear in Notes on the State of Virginia. In 1788, when a French Roman Catholic whom he had helped financially wanted him to sponsor his newborn son's baptism as godfather, Jefferson said that his conscience would not permit it. He was sensitive to the man's religious convictions, but said, with a touch of irony, that he did not believe in Christianity himself. “I am truly sensible, Sir, of the honour you do me in proposing to me that of becoming one of the Sponsors of your child, and return you my sincere thinks for it,” he wrote, continuing:

He claimed that he was a “moral” man, and on that basis friends in the past had asked him to sponsor their children, but he concluded that his very morality inhibited him from doing so. As he put it, “The difficulty of reconciling the ideas of Unity and Trinity, have, from a very early part of my life, excluded me from the office of sponsorship, often proposed to me by my friends, who would have trusted, for the faithful discharge of it, to morality alone instead of which the church requires faith.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Feigning the possibility that his own intellectual shortcomings prevented him from acknowledging the reasonableness of the Trinity, he asked his friend to “accept this conscientious excuse which I make with regret, which must find it's apology in my heart, while perhaps it may do no greater honour to my head.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Although this letter is the first case in which Jefferson mentioned having doubted the Trinity from his youth, perhaps his distinction between morality and religious faith is more important. This was the first time he insisted in a letter to an acquaintance that there was little if any relationship between moral conduct and belief in God, particularly Trinitarianism. Thus, in this letter as well as in his great Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson clearly accepted the possibility that an atheist could be a decent, moral person even though many others in his generation could not.

As one who resisted any limitations on religious freedom, Jefferson did not hesitate to criticize the shortcomings and illogical statements of one of his favorite theorists, John Locke. Certainly, Jefferson valued Locke's arguments for religious toleration for Protestants, his insistence upon separation of church and state, and his assertion that God did not intend to coerce piety because faith was a voluntary act. He obviously agreed with Locke's Letters on Toleration and The Reasonableness of Christianity's assertion that pagans, atheists, Moslems, and Jews be allowed to participate in civil society's economic realms and help guard the “public peace” along with Christians. However, he balked at Locke's argument that non-Protestant religious faiths, specifically “Moslems” but by implication also Roman Catholics (whom Locke viewed as owing allegiance to a “foreign prince,” the Pope), must forfeit the right to practice their faith freely. As Sanford Kessler notes, Locke's Letter on Toleration argued that the government should “deny toleration to religious practices violating civil law [that is, the established state church] and to religious doctrines leading to actions inimical to the public good.” Regarding atheists as dangers to the peace of civil society, Locke refused toleration to those who denied the existence of the Deity. He desired every citizen to belong to a church that emphasized the reasonable aspects of Christianity rather than its miraculous or absurd dogmas. Locke would also deny religious toleration to those who denied it to those whose faith differed from theirs. As Kessler notes:

Jefferson argued that only the events in Jesus' life that were normal and natural to human beings deserved to be taken seriously; these were the only ones he included in his abridged versions of the Gospels in four different languages (English, French, Latin, and Greek).Footnote ⁴⁸

More religiously conservative than he appeared to be, Locke argued that religious belief was necessary to foster moral values, such as obedience to the laws and personal self-control. He concluded that the Christian concept of heaven and hell was congenial to “reason and interest.” Contrariwise, Jefferson “seemed to countenance a greater degree of separation between church and state than Locke because, in contrast to Locke, he did not think that religion was the mainstay of morality.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Jefferson's insistence on the separation of church and state and absolute freedom of or from religion accorded with his defense of the morality of atheism. Locke was somewhat willing to entrust government with the power to define religion because he confided in government to mold religion in a more rational, secularized manner than the public might do on its own. Jefferson, however, generally distrusted government, and saw no reason why it should play a role in dictating or engendering an individual's religious opinions.Footnote ⁵⁰ Jefferson astutely analyzed the shortcomings of Locke's ideas on religious freedom in his notes on Locke's religious treatises, which he composed while preparing for the struggle for religious freedom in the Virginia legislature in the fall of 1776. Jefferson observed that Locke withheld religious toleration from several groups, not only atheists. “Locke denies toleration to those who entertain opinions contrary to those moral rules necessary for the preservation of society,” he wrote, including those who violated the religious freedom of others, those who claimed that kings ruled by divine right, or those who believed foreign rulers (Locke's code word for the Pope) should be obeyed rather than those of one's own country. Along with those intolerant of others' religious beliefs, those “who deny the existence of a god” should also be refused freedom of religion, Locke advised. Jefferson could not agree with such banality. Of Locke's dictum extending religious freedom to all Protestants, which hardly transcended Parliament's Act of Toleration of 1689, Jefferson lukewarmly wrote, “it was a great thing to go so far (as he himself says of the Parliament who framed the act of toleration) but where he stopped short, we may go on.” Nevertheless, Jefferson sympathized with the idea that all individuals must take an oath to be tolerant of others' faith, before they gained toleration.Footnote ⁵¹

Jefferson grew indignant when he contemplated the limitations of Locke's liberalism on religious matters. Objecting to Locke's murky, self-contradictory idea that non-Christians should have some legal equality but remain unable to publicly practice their religion, Jefferson wrote, “[Locke] says ‘neither Pagan nor Mahamedan [sic] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’ Shall we suffer a Pagan to deal with us and not suffer him to pray to his god?”Footnote ⁵²

Revealing statements of Jefferson's matured opinions on religion are contained in letters he wrote in 1809, a few months after retiring from the presidency. Writing to James Fishback, a Kentucky Presbyterian and Trinitarian who later became a Baptist minister, Jefferson foreshadowed the view he expressed more bluntly to Thomas Law in 1814: that an atheist could be as moral as a believer. Fishback, seeking to learn Jefferson's religious opinions, enclosed a pamphlet he had composed in defense of the Trinity and divine revelation. He concluded his letter to Jefferson with the benediction, “may your death be a sweet transition to a blessed immortality.” For Jefferson, a convinced materialist and deist who probably considered belief in the afterlife puerile, such sentiments must have been less than gratifying. His cautious reply to Fishback, with whom he was personally unacquainted, was that all religions enjoined that people should not “murder, steal, plunder, or bear false witness.” They only disagreed in their various “dogmas,” among which he included (in a portion of the letter not included in the sent version) the Immaculate Conception and transubstantiation. Jefferson considered these canons, with their intrinsic connection to Divine Revelation, as useless superstitions. Nevertheless, he wrote Fishback with his tolerant veneer,

He argued that the innate moral sense, God-given in varying degrees to everyone, insured that even diversity of dogmas would not impair the basic similarity in the social and moral teachings of the various religions and sects. As he put it, “The practice of morality being necessary for the well-being of society, he [God] has taken care to impress it's [sic] precepts so indelibly on our hearts that they shall not be effaced by the subtleties of our brain.”Footnote ⁵³

Jefferson was more candid in a letter to the Philadelphia tobacco manufacturer and deist Thomas Leiper. He charged that the clergy had concocted the disparate tenets of religious sects as a means to gain for themselves money and power. “My religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ, all have a different set,” he pointed out, as he had in letters to Fishback and others. “The former instructs us how to live well and worthily in society; the latter are made to interest our minds in the support of the teachers who inculcate them. Hence, for one sermon on a moral subject, you hear ten on the dogmas of the sect.” He continued to stress the privacy of religious opinions, happy that neither man knew the other's faith; “that is a matter between our Maker and ourselves.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Since the idea of personal immortality was not common to all religions, as Jefferson occasionally observed, it is likely that he regarded it primarily as a dogma that had a beneficial social byproduct in goading individual moral behavior on earth.Footnote ⁵⁵

One of Jefferson's earliest and perhaps the best statement of his ideas about freedom of religion is contained in his Notes on the State of Virginia. In Query XVII of the Notes, titled “Religion,” Jefferson referred to a law that was still on the books. Passed by the Virginia assembly in 1705, it imposed civil and criminal penalties upon those who rejected the Trinity or the divine inspiration of the Bible. Denying that religious coercion provided an incentive to moral behavior, he despised it as “that religious slavery, under which a people have been willing to remain, who have lavished their lives and fortunes for the establishment of their civil freedom” during the Revolution.

Asserting that laws had jurisdiction only over antisocial acts, rather than the “operations of the mind,” Jefferson argued that freedom of thought and religious opinion were among the “natural rights” Virginians retained rather than “submitted” (yielded) when they set up new governments and elected their governors. Enforced religious belief did not make an individual moral, nor did one's lack of religion make her/him a menace to society. As Jefferson put it in one of the text's most eloquent passages: “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. 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.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In later years, in letters to friends, Jefferson more precisely argued his conviction that atheists were not necessarily immoral; they might even possess a stronger “moral sense” than did Christians. In 1789, while Jefferson was U.S. minister in Paris, he corresponded with Dr. Richard Price. A radical English Presbyterian minister, later a Unitarian, Price denounced revealed religion. Disparaging both “Popery” and orthodox Protestantism, he equated their sacraments and ceremonials with idolatry. “Is Atheism less pernicious than Demonism?” Price exclaimed. “And what is the religion of many persons but a kind of demonism that delights in human Sacrifices and causes them to look with horror on the greatest part of mankind? Plutarch, it is well known, has observed very justly that it is better not to believe in a God than to believe him to be a capricious and malevolent being?”Footnote ⁵⁷ Jefferson agreed. “I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians,” he asserted. Although Jefferson failed to elaborate at this time, he later listed among objectionable “artificial systems” such non-rational features of Christianity as “the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection, the visible ascension, his corporal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc.”Footnote ⁵⁸

After retiring from the presidency, Jefferson could express his religious opinions more freely without fear that his political enemies would use his statements, which often leaked out, against him at the polls. Therefore, he made explicit his belief in the compatibility between atheism and a moral life. His famous letter to Thomas Law in 1814 reiterated his view that an innate moral sense belonged in some degree to most individuals in all societies. Jefferson argued that the Creator made conscience a component of human nature prior to “reasoning or speculation.” Denying that atheists were prima facie depraved, he questioned the judgment of those who “made the love of God the foundation of morality.” While there existed “duties to God and duties to men,” he thought the former a less essential aspect of the moral life than the latter. “If we did a good act merely from the love of god and a belief that it is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist?” he queried, mocking the orthodox religionists, who presupposed nonbelievers' immorality. “It is idle to say, as some do, that no such being [that is, a virtuous atheist] exists.” Jefferson noted that many of the greatest French philosophes were admitted atheists who had carefully reasoned out their positions. He discerned diverse manifestations of freethinking among European intellectuals. “I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism.”Footnote ⁵⁹

As early as 1787, Jefferson urged his nephew Peter Carr to apply reason in formulating his religious beliefs, especially concerning the existence of God, the historical validity of the Old and New Testaments, and the question of Jesus' origin and alleged divinity. He instructed Carr to eschew religious fads but rather to utilize his reason to decide which religious concepts were valid. “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion,” he advised. “Question with boldness even the existence of a god, because, if there be any he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” Pointing to the biblical account of Joshua's conquest of Palestine, in which the sun stood still to facilitate the Hebrews' victory, Jefferson doubted that its writer's claim to divine inspiration compensated for the story's palpable violation of the laws of nature, even though “millions believe it.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Stressing that religious stories and dogmas must be tested for their rationality before securing acceptance, Jefferson affected little reverence for standard authorities. Advising Carr to interrogate even the deistic works he admired by Bolingbroke, Hume, Voltaire, and others which denied biblical truth Jefferson told him, “they will assist you in your enquiries, but keep your reason firmly on the watch in reading them all.” He advised against trusting any authority or following any “prejudices” in matters of religion. “Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision,” he asserted.Footnote ⁶¹

Jefferson was consistent in his rejection of the requests of most people who wanted a statement of his religious faith. He considered this a private matter, which, if he discussed it at all, he would do as a matter of his free choice. When he was president and Edward Dowse, a Massachusetts Democratic-Republican merchant captain, urged him to promote Christianity among the Native American tribes by using his own funds to distribute a Dissenting preacher's pamphlet, Jefferson adamantly refused. He told him not to publish his letter, and added that he was not much impressed by the pamphlet either. Jefferson agreed with its author that Jesus' moral thought was superior to that of the ancient Greek philosophers, who confined their benevolent intent to members of their own tribe or country instead of advocating kindness to all humankind, but he objected to the “libeling” of the ancients, who he believed said much of ethical value. Although it was possible that Christians who suspected him of atheism would be appeased if his praise of Jesus' teachings were made public, he unwaveringly demanded respect for the privacy of his religious opinions. “I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance,” he wrote, “or admit a right of enquiry into the religious opinions of others. On the contrary, we are bound, you and I, and every one, to make common cause even with error itself, to maintain the common right of freedom of conscience.” When he inveighed against the threat of a tyranny of the majority that might persecute a minority of divergent religious views, he implied that the right of religious freedom extended to atheists as well. “We ought with one heart and one hand to hew down the daring and dangerous efforts of those who would seduce the public opinion to substitute itself into that tyranny over religious faith which the laws have so justly abdicated,” he advised. He rejected Dowse's proposal that he kowtow to his New England Congregationalist opponents in the vain hope that he would thereby gain the Federalist clergy's votes and approval. “For this reason, were my opinions up to the standard of those who arrogate the right of questioning them,” he concluded, “I would not countenance that arrogance by descending to an explanation.”Footnote ⁶²

After such eloquently irreverent sentiments, it was only a short step for Jefferson to condone atheism. “Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences,” he advised Carr. “If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you find in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.” While thus accepting in advance Carr's choice should he espouse atheism, Jefferson proceeded to note the advantages to one's homeostasis of faith in God and an afterlife: “If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement.” He pointed out, “If that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a God [Jefferson wrote “god”], you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love.”Footnote ⁶³ On the other hand, by employing the phrase “a god,” as if he considered Christianity analogous to ancient polytheistic religions, Jefferson subliminally revealed his rejection of traditional Christianity. As Carr must have sensed after reading this letter, in Jefferson's dialectic, the phrase “upright atheist” was no oxymoron.Footnote ⁶⁴

Many years later, while gently insisting on the privacy of his religious views in a letter to a religious enthusiast, Jefferson urged this unlikely candidate to employ reason in discovering religious truth. In old age, he wrote, as he had to Carr almost thirty years earlier, that his God-given reason, which he followed “faithfully in all important cases,” was the only means of assessing the authenticity of God and Revelation. Seemingly ignoring Jesus' Passion on the Cross, Jefferson advised that the Creator “has formed us moral agents” to help each other, even though he felt no “pain or pleasure from any thing we may do.” Conversely, Jefferson said, we should respect the rights of all, “especially their freedom of conscience, as we value our own.” He implied that, by leading an “honest life,” even an atheist (or at least a non-Christian) could be a decent, upright individual. Asserting that morality was more important than adherence to a specific religious creed, he concluded, “I must ever believe that religion substantially good which produces an honest life, and we have been authorised [sic] by one, whom you and I equally respect, to judge of the tree by it's [sic] fruit.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Thus, Jefferson at least attested his “respect” for Jesus, if not his worship.

By the end of his life, Jefferson was familiar with the works of some of the most distinguished atheists of the Enlightenment, pointing to them as proof that atheists could be good men: “Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men,” he said, continuing “their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.” Jefferson owned copies of the works of several atheistic philosophes—Denis Diderot, Paul Thierry, Baron d'Holbach, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and the Marquis de Condorcet, the latter was one of his favorite writers and his friend while he was in Paris as minister. Although d'Alembert was primarily a mathematician, in later life Jefferson owned only his philosophical works, Mélange de Littérature, d'Histoire, et de Philosophie (Amsterdam, 1764), as well as a compilation of essays that included his writings, edited by Jean Chas, Synonymes Français, par Diderot, d'Alembert, et de Jaucourt . . . (Paris, 1801). He owned copies of most of Diderot's works, including the monumental Encyclopédie that Diderot edited, Mémoires sur différens Sujets de Mathématiques, and his oeuvres on theatre and philosophy. Apparently, Jefferson enjoyed Baron d'Holbach's notorious exposition of atheism, The System of Nature. He owned an English translation of volume one of this work, published in 1808, as well as an abridged version, titled Le Bon Sens, although he mistakenly believed that Diderot, another atheist, wrote the latter.Footnote ⁶⁶ Jefferson also included Claude Helvétius, “one of the best men on earth,” an atheist who believed that individuals derived pleasure from benevolent actions, among those whose example refuted the charge that unbelievers were invariably ruthless and selfish.Footnote ⁶⁷

In a letter to John Adams in 1816, Jefferson even more vehemently disparaged Anglo-Protestant “theists,” while reiterating his preference for ex-Roman Catholic atheists. Recalling his years as U.S. minister to Paris during the 1780s, when he met many leading Enlightenment figures, such as the famous German poet and writer Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm, he observed, “although I never heard Grimm express the opinion directly, yet I always supposed him to be of the school of Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach; the first of whom committed his system of atheism to writing in ‘Le bon sens,’ and the last in his ‘Systeme de la Nature.’” While the atheists comprised “a numerous school in the Catholic countries,” deviation from Christian uniformity in Protestant states took the less extreme “form of theism.” At one point in the letter, discussing the conflict between atheists and theists, Jefferson asserted that atheists, attempting to win over the theists, held that “they both agreed in the order of the existing [solar] system, but the one [atheists] supposed it from eternity, the other as having begun in time.” The atheists attempted to conciliate the deists, according to Jefferson, by insisting that divergence between them was “a mere question of definition.” Atheists stressed the eternal duration of the Universe, which was not merely the product of six days of Divine labor; while theists emphasized the order existing in Nature for which God was responsible. Theists upheld the teleological argument for God's existence, finding first and final causes for all things, while the atheist instead perceived the wild disorder in Nature as the primary evidence that an Unmoved Mover did not exist. Comparing them, Jefferson, who often mocked Aristotle's pseudo-empiricism, from which St. Thomas Aquinas derived the concepts of First and Final Causes, decried what he considered the theists' unduly optimistic, “best-of-all possible worlds” attitude:

Religious scholar Charles B. Sanford, a Methodist minister, oblivious to the irony in Jefferson's letter, interprets it as evidence that Jefferson was a theist who endorsed the validity of “final causes.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In his standard study, The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson Sanford often stresses Jefferson's religiosity and even tries to depict him as essentially a Christian. For example, based on a few reminiscences by Jefferson's granddaughter he concludes that Jefferson “had an Anglican reverence for God and Jesus Christ and a fondness for worship and private devotion.” This takes some special pleading; Sanford even silently adds a few words of his own to the Jefferson letter quoted above, making Jefferson assert that atheists and theists “agreed in the order of the existing system of Nature, but the one supposed it from eternity, the other as having begun in time by God.”Footnote ⁷⁰

In discussing Christianity, Jefferson often wrote with a derisive edge, as in this case, when he sneeringly referred to the “philosopher demonstrating the nonexistence of motion.” Moreover, Jefferson deliberately wrote this letter to Adams with tongue-in-cheek, conscious that his deism was more radical than Adams's religious views, which combined puritan orthodoxy with a denial of the Trinity and an ambivalence about Jesus' immortality. As he explained to Adams, “and as you began yours of March the 2d, with a declaration that you were about to write me the most frivolous letter I had ever read, so I will close mine by saying, I have written you a full match for it.” Indeed, it was well-known to Adams and others that Jefferson regarded Newton as one of the world's three greatest men, on a par with Francis Bacon and John Locke, all three of whom he hung life-sized portraits in an oval arrangement on his wall (apparently Jesus did not make the grade for Jefferson kept no likenesses of him). “I consider them [Bacon, Locke, and Newton] the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception,” Jefferson wrote in a famous letter, “and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical & Moral sciences.”Footnote ⁷¹

Jefferson continued to view the atheistic concept of Creation as superior to that of orthodox Christians, especially those who viewed the Holy Spirit as a reality that in some sense, through the “Word,” created the universe. In a later letter to Adams, he derided the Christian claim that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and that this Word, a second, inferior kind of God, created the world. “The Atheist here plumes himself on the uselessness of such a God, and the simpler hypothesis of a self-existent universe,” he observed, with seeming satisfaction: “the truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words.”Footnote ⁷²

Jefferson considered Christian theology a hodgepodge of superstitions and non sequitur reasoning that mocked Jesus' original “pure principles.” For Jefferson, Jesus' philosophy was epitomized by his phrase, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” and its application, extending from the individual's immediate family, community, and country to all the peoples of the world. He also believed that Jesus' concern with the individual's inner motivation and intentions in spurring his/her actions distinguished him from earlier philosopher/theologians. As he wrote Adams in an earlier letter,

As Daniel Boorstin argued long ago, Jefferson created Jesus in his own image, projecting onto him his own personality characteristics and beliefs. Thus, Jefferson viewed Jesus as a pragmatist, an anti-metaphysician, and a moral reformer, not a system-builder. According to Jefferson, Jesus and the early Christians were naïve empiricists, whose science rested on observation and their morality on “a healthy moral faculty,” as Boorstin put it. They welcomed the “self-evident demands of active life.” After a great deal of thought, Jefferson concluded that the concept of Jesus' divinity was not held by his early followers, but concocted afterward by priests in order to filch wealth from their parishioners, hungry for reassurance about their immortality.Footnote ⁷⁴

Implying that atheists could behave virtuously Jefferson, in a single instance, a letter to William Short in 1820 enclosing a copy of his “Syllabus,” briefly distinguished his ethics from those of Jesus. He argued that his opposition to “spiritualism” and “immaterialism” divided them. While distinguishing Jesus from contemporary clergy, as “no imposter [sic] himself, but a great Reformer of the Hebrew code of religion,” Jefferson qualified his approval of Jesus' teachings. “It is not to be understood that I am with him in all his doctrines,” he asserted. “I am a Materialist; he [Jesus] takes the side of spiritualism.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Jefferson claimed that he had successfully separated the “gold from the dross” in Jesus' biblical statements, determining which “beautiful morsel[s] of morality” Jesus had uttered, as opposed to those that power-seeking “priests” put in his mouth centuries later. On the other hand, Jefferson's “Syllabus” did not completely summarize Jefferson's own religious views: “The Syllabus is therefore of his [Jesus'] doctrines, not all of mine.” He explained, “I read them as I do those of other ancient and modern moralists, with a mixture of approbation and dissent.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Although Jefferson's “Syllabus” approved of immortality as a Christian doctrine that facilitated law and order, Jefferson did not affirm a belief in an afterlife. Jefferson told Short that, perhaps unlike Jesus, he regarded humane actions as more important than religious devotion: “He preaches the efficacy of repentance towards forgiveness of sin; I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it etc. etc.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Unlike his friend Jefferson, Adams leaned to spiritualism, at least half-way “immaterialism.” A few months after his letter to Short, Jefferson, seeking to dissuade Adams from his inclination to believe in dualism between spirit and matter, argued that Jesus was indeed a materialist: “at what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it.”Footnote ⁷⁸ He even charged that such an idea degraded God's omnipotence. Replying to Adams in August 1820, Jefferson famously wrote,

He was a strict empiricist like Hume, Locke, or Condillac. “When once we quit the basis of sensation,” he lectured Adams, “all is in the wind. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say that they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise; but I believe that I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, [Destutt de] Tracy, and [Dugald] Stewart.” He derided Christian “immaterialists”—Trinitarians and others who believed in Platonic/Cartesian dualism between mind and matter—as “masked atheists.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In old age, Jefferson became more strident in his materialism.Footnote ⁸⁰

At the end of his life, Jefferson lent tacit approval to atheism. He sardonically claimed that Calvin's image of God as a “malignant daemon,” arbitrary and amoral, revealed that he “was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be.” He ventured to tell Adams,

Continuing to spell “god” in the lower case, thereby unconsciously implying irreverence, Jefferson considered revelation such a ridiculous concept that it buttressed atheistic doctrines. “Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma, that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god,” he declared. Observing that only one-sixth of the human race adhered to Christianity, he thought it unfair to label “the other five-sixths who do not believe in the Jewish and Christian revelation” ignorant “of the existence of a god” and, consequently destined for eternal damnation.

Finding such an uncharitable conclusion unacceptable, Jefferson implied he theoretically preferred atheism to traditional Christianity. Listing several atheistic and pantheist luminaries he warned, “this gives completely a gain de cause to the disciples of Ocellus, Timaeus, Spinosa [sic], Diderot and D'Holbach.” Jefferson sympathetically summarized the atheistic position as based on science. He understood atheists' desire to eliminate superfluous hypotheses (as Newton's cosmogony and Occam's Razor had done from a Christian perspective) by getting rid of the idea of God and retaining that of the “eternal pre-existence of the world” rather than retaining both concepts. The philosophical empiricist and materialist Jefferson vigorously, if rhetorically, expounded the atheistic position. He painstakingly elaborated on atheists' rejection of “the eternal pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or Creator of the world, a being whom we see not, and know not, of whose form substance and mode or place of existence, or of action no sense informs us, no power of the mind enables us to delineate or comprehend.

In this significant letter, Jefferson's defense of belief in God seemed considerably less than authoritative. He continually referred, not to himself personally (except in explicitly denying Revelation), but to the tendencies of the “human mind” (always fallible and arranging things to suit itself as Jefferson knew). In upholding deism, Jefferson defended his conviction in a First Cause. “On the contrary I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe,” he wrote, “in it's parts general or particular, it is impossible not to percieve [sic] and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it's composition.”Footnote ⁸¹

V. Jefferson's Doubts About the Afterlife

Jefferson's skepticism about an afterlife originally manifested itself when he was a young college student. In his first preserved letter, to his college friend John Page on Christmas Day 1762, he derisively commented on Satan, immortality, and Job's suffering.Footnote ⁸² As an adolescent, Jefferson was already interested in materialism and the material nature of the soul. By the age of twenty-one, he had decided that the “soul” was a physical thing, not some ethereal, dream-like gossamer. In a letter in 1764, probably again to Page, he described his exhilaration at reading a magazine article about a man who had been declared dead for 24 hours after drowning, but was successfully revived by cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (as we might call it), which Jefferson thought was possible because there were no lesions on his body. Concluding that this incident disproved the dualism between spirit and body, young Jefferson observed, somewhat unorthodoxly, “we are generally told that the soul leaves the body at the instant of death, that is, at the instant in which the organs of the body cease totally to perform their functions. But does not this story contradict this opinion?” Jefferson implied that the account proved the mythical nature of the doctrine of the spiritual soul. Fearing, even at this young age, to expound his views publicly, he urged Page to destroy their correspondence on immortality. Suspecting that his ideas were heretical, he wrote, “let me know your opinion candidly and at length on this subject. And as these are doubts which, were they to come to light, might do injustice to a man's moral principles in the eyes of persons of narrow and confined views it will be proper to take great care of our letters” by not signing them and by burning them after receipt.Footnote ⁸³

Jefferson's attendance at atheistic salons during his ministry to France in the late 1780s perhaps exacerbated the irreverent attitude toward the deity he displayed in Notes on Virginia. However, as early as 1776, when Jefferson composed his bill for religious freedom, he maintained that one could be a moral individual and still deny the existence of personal immortality and life after death. Demonstrating knowledge of ancient Jewish history, Jefferson's notes contain the assertion that, even though the ancient Jewish sect of Sadducees denied the immortality of the soul, they nonetheless led virtuous lives. He may have read the article, “Sadducees,” in Pierre Bayle's renowned Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1740), at this time. On the other hand, Jefferson seems not to have appreciated the fact that the Pharisees, who preceded Jesus by hundreds of years, expounded the concept of immortality, which Jesus probably learned from them.Footnote ⁸⁴

Thus Jefferson, incorrectly, categorically praised Jesus for teaching the idea of an afterlife to the Jews, who he implied rejected it. In 1803, during his presidency, after Dr. Joseph Priestley sent him a copy of his book comparing the doctrines of Socrates and Jesus, Jefferson's interest in setting down his own religious beliefs grew. His objective was to compare Jesus' moral and ethical values (qualities which he equated with religion) with those of the Greek and Roman philosophers, the Pythagoreans, the Socratics, the Epicureans, and Stoics, and finally with Jesus' immediate predecessors, the Jews. He compared the Jews' religious and social ethics with those of Jesus, whom he did not consider divinely inspired, but whose teaching he found far superior to Judaism in its humaneness and tendency to increase personal and social happiness. Around the same time, Jefferson assured his devout friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, that, in following Jesus' ethical doctrines, he (Jefferson) was “a Christian, in the only sense he [Jesus] wished any one to be.” Pondering Priestley's book, Jefferson told Rush, he imagined an outline of the comparative merits of Christianity and Judaism on his ride (either in a carriage or alone on horseback) from Monticello to Washington, D.C.Footnote ⁸⁵

Jefferson eventually wrote down his observations and sent them in confidentiality to Rush. The resulting “Syllabus of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others” made plain that he preferred Jesus' depiction of a benevolent God to the Jewish characterization of an angry, vindictive Jehovah. Jefferson also thought that Jesus showed greater consciousness of the brotherhood of mankind and the desirability of peace in the world, which Jefferson considered valuable. Jefferson applauded the “philanthropy” of Jesus' preaching, and he particularly appreciated the social utility of such testaments as the Sermon on the Mount, which advised individuals to curb evil thoughts as well as mean acts. “His moral doctrines, relating to kindred & friends, were more pure & perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers, and greatly more so than those of the Jews”; he wrote Rush, “and they went far beyond both in inculcating universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbors and countrymen, but to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids.” Elaborating further on the social utility of Jesus' preaching, Jefferson betrayed a jaundiced interpretation of Judaism. He was seemingly unaware that the Old Testament Book of Leviticus was first to assert, “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and that Jesus copied its doctrines. Ascribing to Jesus responsibility for implanting a salutary obsession with immortality, which promoted obedience to the laws and nonviolent behavior among his followers, Jefferson concluded, “He taught, emphatically, the doctrines of a future state, which was either doubted, or disbelieved by the Jews; and wielded it with efficacy, as an important incentive, supplementary to the other motives to moral conduct.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In praising Jesus as a religious pragmatist, whose teachings about a future life and “rewards and punishments” did much to sell his faith to his fellow Jews among others, Jefferson was also highly critical of Judaism. Jefferson invariably insisted that Judaism, in the manner in which it was expounded in the Old Testament, was a parochial, self-centered religion lacking respect for outsiders. But he was not inclined to believe in immortality himself, considering it valuable solely for its power in restraining the masses from illegal and immoral conduct.

Jefferson was politely insincere when writing the religiously devout, especially when they were women with whom he had indulged in fondly remembered romantic flings, like Maria Cosway. A devout Roman Catholic Englishwoman born in Florence, she was sixteen years his junior; they may have had an extramarital sexual affair in Paris from 1786 to 1787. Long afterward, when he was in his seventies and she in her late fifties and living in a convent in Italy, he consoled her about the death of some mutual acquaintances, remarking, “the religion you so sincerely profess tells us we shall meet again; and we have all so lived as to be assured it will be in happiness.” Then, ruminating on the aging process, Jefferson's serenity turned to sorrowful resignation—his “sensationalistic positivist” preference, as Adrienne Koch calls it, for physical death rather than the living-death of the “vegetable”:

Jefferson concluded on a jarringly upbeat note: “May these, my dear friend, be as many as yourself may wish, and all of them filled with health and happiness, will be among the last & warmest wishes of an unchangeable friend.”Footnote ⁸⁷

In corresponding with members of the clergy, Jefferson was similarly noncommittal but hortatory in discussing the afterlife. Early in his presidency, Jefferson wrote on this topic to Isaac Story, a New England Congregationalist clergyman claiming to be a Republican and requesting a government job. Story had sent Jefferson a pamphlet that he wrote endorsing reincarnation, but Jefferson considered conjectures about the afterlife a waste of time. Jefferson viewed the concept of immortality as useful if belief in a future state of rewards and punishments promoted private and public morality. In a tactful manner aware that he was addressing a man of the cloth, Jefferson wrote,

He neglected to mention that his “youthful speculations,” as his recently found letter to John Page indicates, had left him a thoroughgoing convert to materialism, who denied the spiritual nature of the “soul.”

Although conceding the existence of a “benevolent creator,” Jefferson doubted that life after death was part of God's repertoire. Jefferson was invariably more interested in the social and the secular, life in the here-and-now. “I have thought it better by nourishing the good passions, and controuling [sic] the bad, to merit an inheritance in a state of being of which I can know so little, and to trust for the future to him who has been so good for the past,” he soothingly explained. Ascribing a similar secularism to Story, he assumed that “these speculations have with you been only the amusement of leisure hours; while your labours have been devoted to the education of your children, making them good members of society, to instructing men in their duties, and performing the other offices of a large parish.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Although he employed a serious, empiricist tone less flippant than that used when he wrote Page years before, Jefferson's emphasis on Story's devotion to his children and parishioners suggested that in his view God's kingdom still resided on Earth if it was anywhere.

On the other hand, Jefferson's close friend and devout correspondent, the evangelical Presbyterian Republican Dr. Benjamin Rush, ostensibly assumed that his confidant devoutly believed in the afterlife. This is puzzling, since Jefferson had often insisted that Jesus was mortal, without pretensions to divinity, divine inspiration, or supernatural powers. And few, if any Christians, believe that they will be immortal but that Jesus was not! In any event, Rush's autobiography indicates that Jefferson had told him he had some sense of the afterlife: “He believed in the divine mission of the Saviour of the world, but he did not believe that he was the Son of God in the way in which many Christians believed it . . . . He believed likewise in the resurrection, and a future state of rewards and punishments.” Still, while Rush admired Jefferson's “genius” and “benevolence,” he seemed less certain about his religious views. Reminiscing about his experiences during the Second Continental Congress from 1775–1776, which they both attended, Rush wrote that Jefferson arrived with a reputation for hostility to Christianity:

Ironically, Jefferson had not yet given any public indication of opposition to Christianity.

These comments seem sarcastic rather than devout in that Jefferson was obviously implying that poor people and slaves welcomed the Sabbath, not because it gave them an opportunity to pray, but because it furnished them with a day off from labor. The tone of Rush's “autobiographical” remarks, in this case at least, leads one to believe that they are not authentic, and may have been invented by his friend George W. Corner. To Rush himself, Jefferson bluntly wrote in a famous letter that denied Jesus' resurrection: “To the corruptions of Christianity, I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished.” Footnote ⁹¹

Ironically, in 1812 Rush mentioned a specific instance of Jefferson's disrespect for religion. In a letter to John Adams, Rush recalled Jefferson's opposition to fast days when all three men served together in the Continental Congress, writing: “the anecdote I alluded to respecting the fast day is as follows. Upon a motion for such a day, Mr. Jefferson not only opposed it but treated it with ridicule, and hinted some objections to the Christian religion. You rose and defended the motion,” he praised Adams, “and in reply to Mr. Jefferson's objections to Christianity you said ‘you were sorry to hear such sentiments from a gentleman whom you so highly respected and with whom you agreed upon so many subjects, and that it was the only instance you had ever known of a man of sound sense and real genius that was an enemy of Christianity.’” Jefferson's religious views, or lack of them, must have also appalled Adams. Rush's concluding remark suggests that Jefferson had not yet developed the disgust with those who violated the privacy of his religious opinions that he felt later: “you [Adams] suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the next chair to you.”Footnote ⁹²

Adams told Rush that he remembered the incident, which he referred to as Jefferson's “flirtation” with him. Indeed, Adams's fragmentary unpublished autobiography, written in 1804 before his reconciliation with Jefferson, scathingly depicted Jefferson's religious infidelity. Probably alluding to this matter, Adams recalled the period when Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, writing:

Adams reminded Rush that Rush had also reprimanded Jefferson's irreverence. When the Continental Congress “appealed to the God of armies and nations for support, and he [Jefferson] blamed both their councils and their arms” for recent military failures, the Braintree scholar said, “do you recollect the rebuke you gave Mr. Jefferson in Congress upon this subject?”Footnote ⁹⁴

How did Rush later gain an impression of Jefferson's devoutness, since he constantly asserted an ignorance of, if not disbelief in, a physical or spiritual existence after death? It is possible that this portion of Rush's autobiography, which was not published until years after his death, was a forgery added by its editor, the distinguished physician George W. Corner. On the other hand, Jefferson may have lied later in his life about his true beliefs to appease the devout Presbyterian Rush. Jefferson's Syllabus of the Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a long letter describing his thoughts on Jesus' significance that he wrote specifically for Rush in 1803, did not contain an endorsement of the idea of immortality but merely admired the “efficacy” with which Jesus recommended its utility, speculating that Jesus appreciated its agency in social control. As for Jesus' physical ascendancy into heaven, Jefferson always denied the truth of the Biblical account of Jesus' physical resurrection, which he believed was written centuries after its alleged occurrence. In the Syllabus, which he sent to Rush, he merely said that the idea of the afterlife was beneficial because it encouraged believers to lead moral lives, not that he actually believed in an afterlife.

VI. Jefferson's Rejection of Christianity in Old AgeFootnote ⁹⁵

In his final years, Jefferson, sickened by the growing popularity of the Second Great Awakening in the South despite his exaggerated optimism over the spread of Unitarianism in High Federalist Massachusetts, wrote his angriest diatribes against organized religion. Among the most violent of these was a letter in 1815 to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, a Unitarian whom Jefferson admired for popularizing vaccination against smallpox in Massachusetts despite the vehement opposition of the clergy, whom Jefferson bitterly called the “Cossac priests.”Footnote ⁹⁶

First attacking New England's Protestant “priests,” consisting of burgeoning “Presbyterian” revivalists as well as old-fashioned Congregationalists, he then castigated their Federalist hangers-on who committed near-treason at the ill-fated Hartford Convention in December 1814 during the War of 1812. Again charging that the clergy's ideas of the Trinity, predestination, and liturgy had corrupted Jesus' original teachings, he asserted, “the priests have so disfigured the simple religion of Jesus that no one who reads the sophistications they have engrafted on it, from the jargon of Plato, of Aristotle & other mystics, would conceive these could have been fathered on the sublime preacher of the sermon on the mount.” Turning his wrath upon the New England Federalists and clergy, whom he perhaps felt had rejected the olive branch he offered them long ago in his First Inaugural Address, he claimed that they exploited their followers' religious faith, molding them into diehard party loyalists and coconspirators in their treasonable conduct. Figuratively emasculating his enemies, whom he portrayed as weak and effeminate, Jefferson labeled the Federalists “bawds,” which signified female pimps or “madams.” “Like bawds, religion becomes to them a refuge from the despair of their loathsome vices,” he raged. “They seek in it only an oblivion of the disgrace with which they have loaded themselves, in their political ravings, and of their mortification at the ridiculous issue of their Hartford convention.”Footnote ⁹⁷

A few years later, Jefferson targeted Virginia's Protestant revival for his scorn. Blaming Virginia's Presbyterian clergy led by John Holt Rice for thwarting his efforts to make his University of Virginia a nonsectarian, hopefully a Unitarian paradise, Jefferson was irate at Rice's attack on Jefferson's appointment of deist Thomas Cooper as a professor. The pressure that Presbyterians exerted on the university's Board of Visitors and the state legislature, which tended anyway to be stingy in granting funds claiming it diverted money from the public grammar schools, led Cooper to resign before the university opened.Footnote ⁹⁸

Jefferson was disheartened and enraged by this turn of events. In writing to one of his closest friends, William Short, he cast an inordinate share of blame upon the well-liked moderate Rice, and anathematized revivalist Christianity to the extent of wishing to abolish Sunday religious services, contending that ministers brainwashed the parishioners. Regarding Trinitarian, “Presbyterian” Christianity as a mere “superstition,” he execrated their clergymen as the “loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical, and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained . . . to exterminate all heretics to Calvinist creed.” He charged that they hoped to establish the European Inquisition in Virginia. So low was his opinion of the people's intelligence that he professed a fear that they might succeed. “They pant to reestablish by law that holy inquisition, which they can now only infuse into public opinion,” he fumed. “We have most unwisely committed to the hierophants of our particular superstition, the direction of public opinion, that lord of the Universe. We have given them stated and privileged days to collect and catechize us, opportunities of delivering their oracles to the people in mass, and of moulding their minds as wax in the hollow of their hands.” After this philippic against Christianity and the people's common sense, he concluded, almost as an afterthought to cheer up his undoubtedly traumatized friend, that the University would prevail: “In despite of their fulminations against endeavors to enlighten the general mind, to improve the reason of the people, and encourage them in the use of it, the liberality of this state will support this institution, and give fair play to the cultivation of reason.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Despite his rage at what he considered Christian ignorance and obscurantism, Jefferson demanded that all sects respect their competitors' equal rights. Having perhaps heard about Massachusetts Unitarians' high-handed actions against Congregationalists in Dedham in 1821, Jefferson urged members of that faith to refrain from oppressing Trinitarians. “Much I fear that when this great truth [belief in ‘one God’] shall be re-established, it's Votaries will fall into the fatal error of fabricating formulas of creed, and Confessions of faith, the engines of which so soon destroyed the religion of Jesus, and made of Christendom a mere Aceldama,” he warned, and “that they will give up morals for mysteries, and Jesus for Plato.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In old age, Jefferson insisted that he was “an Epicurean” and a materialist, implicitly denying Christianity's belief in the afterlife. Writing to his confidant Short, he explained that one of the doctrines of Epicurus to which he apparently lent credence was that “the Universe [is] eternal: Its parts, great and small, interchangeable. Matter and void alone.” He had no criticism of these patently atheistic teachings.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Although prominent historians like Andrew Burstein and Carl J. Richard contend that as an old man, Jefferson abandoned Epicureanism's materialistic view that body and soul died together in death for the Christian dogma that they survived together in the afterlife, they make little effort to validate their arguments. Burstein cites a January 1825 letter from Jefferson to John Adams's close friend Francis Van der Kemp, a Dutch Unitarian minister with whom he had been corresponding. Judging from Burstein's perfunctory quotation of the letter, in which Jefferson asks the absurd question, “can it [the soul] be received in heaven while it's body is living on earth?” Jefferson is either a fool or a knave, mocking Christian views of the afterlife. Neither stance seems typical of Jefferson. Certainly, the vapid query does little to prove Burstein's argument that Jefferson believed in immortality and the afterlife. Burstein ignores the actual topic of Jefferson's commentary: an examination of Marie Jean Pierre Flourens's famous experiments on the brain of a chicken, which Jefferson viewed as disproving the existence of a spiritual soul that ascended to Heaven after death. In Jefferson's words, Flourens “demonstrates in fact that the cerebrum is the organ of thought, and possesses alone the faculty of thinking . . . This is a terrible tub thrown out to the Athanasians.”Footnote ¹⁰²

With Flourens's experiments in mind, Jefferson rhetorically asked the devout minister Van der Kemp what the soul does after the cerebrum's removal, since the power of thought, necessary for the soul to have an identity, is gone. Since Jefferson considered the power of thought synonymous with the soul, he tended to believe that Flourens proved that the soul left the body with the removal of the cerebrum “as in death.” Thus, to him it was important to know the answer to the silly question, can the soul go to heaven “while it's body is living on earth” like a chicken without a cerebrum? Burstein cites this single letter to demonstrate that Jefferson believed that the immaterial soul could be “received in heaven” while the body was still living, quoting the fragment, “can it be received in heaven while it's body is living on earth?” This query is so prima facie ridiculous that Jefferson probably only meant it sarcastically. We may better discern his actual meaning by examining the whole letter.Footnote ¹⁰³

First Jefferson offered Van Der Kemp his “condolences” about recent deaths, an unusual act for Jefferson who often said that by ignoring the subject of death it became less painful to those who suffered recent losses. Then he reiterated his confidence in the material nature of the soul, emphasizing his preoccupation with life against death. “Mine has been too much a life of action to allow my mind to wander from the occurrences pressing on it,” he asserted. Mixing biological studies with his quotidian activities, he confessed himself greatly impressed by Flourens's recent book describing his experiments on the brains of animals and his discovery that the cerebrum controlled all functions of the sense organs, knowledge, and memory. Thus, Jefferson argued, Flourens's work proved that the cerebrum was in effect the “soul” and matter rather than ethereal spirit; its removal deprived the animal (a chicken in this case) of “every sense, of perception, intelligence, memory and thought of every degree.” Elucidating his materialism, which may have been a hesitant late-life atheism, Jefferson bluntly told Van Der Kemp, “it [the chicken] retains the powers of motion, but feeling no motive, it never moves unless from external excitement. He [Flourens] demonstrates in fact that the cerebrum is the organ of thought, and possesses alone the faculty of thinking. This is a terrible taunt thrown out to the Athanasians.” Jefferson warned, “These and a multitude of other questions it will be incumbent on them to answer otherwise than by the dogma that every one who believeth not with them, without doubt shall perish everlastingly.” Casting obloquy on the idea that Hell relentlessly waited for those who did not believe in Christ's divinity, Jefferson continued with a defense of materialism, although he did not want to convey his views too strongly to spiritualists, desiring to make as few enemies as possible. Nevertheless, tempted to mock “Athanasian” intolerance of rejecters of the immateriality of the spirit/soul (which materialists insisted was composed of organic material) and the reality of the Trinity, and impressed by the cogency of Flourens's experiments, Jefferson boasted, “the materialist fortified with these new proofs of his own creed, will hear with derision these Athanasian Denunciations.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He concluded on a politely noncommittal, agnostic note, “it will not be very long before you and I shall know the truth of all this, and in the meantime I pray for the continuance of your health, contentment & comfort.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

VII. Conclusion: Historians and Jefferson's Religious Declaration of Independence

Several modern historians, most recently Peter Onuf, Thomas E. Buckley, and Eva Sheppard Wolf in essays published in Seeing Jefferson Anew, join Gaustad, Burstein, and Sanford in viewing Jefferson as possessing a spiritual temperament, and in Onuf's case, as deeply sympathetic with evangelical Christianity in his final years.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Onuf claims that, in his old age, Jefferson supported the idea that parochial schools fill the void left by Virginia's failure to provide adequate tax-supported public schools for its citizens. (In fact, Jefferson consistently opposed such an alternative, and Onuf provides no evidence for his assertion.) According to Onuf, as Jefferson aged he viewed the Second Great Awakening “in an increasingly positive light.” But Jefferson was essentially lukewarm even toward his Baptist and Methodist allies. He never praised their revivalistic religious techniques; indeed, he never said anything positive about them, despite Roger Williams's ancient Baptist association with religious freedom. It is well known that Jefferson despised the powerful Lyman Beecher/Timothy Dwight “Presbyterian” revivalists.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nonetheless, Onuf asserts, “Jefferson admired the evangelicals' democratic theology and ecclesiology” and looked forward to the evangelicals' incorporating the (anti-revivalist) Unitarians.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In fact, Jefferson, who viewed participatory democracy purely from a secular political, “ward-republic” perspective (following the model of the New England town meeting rather than any church), seldom corresponded with Baptists, and probably never even wrote letters to his most devout Baptist advocates Isaac Backus and Elder John Leland (of Cheshire cheese fame).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Eva S. Wolf claims that Jefferson considered being elected to office by the voters as equivalent to the puritan's “election” by God for eternal life. In effect, she argues that Jefferson literally believed in the people's infallibility: vox populi, vox dei. As she puts it, he felt that public office was a “divine calling” and that he was one of the “elect.” Thus, Wolf, like Buckley, depicts Jefferson as a believer in God's intervention in human affairs through voters' expression of His “providence”: “When the people in whom Thomas Jefferson believed called leaders to office, it was an act at once natural, right, and ordained.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

On the contrary, Jefferson was always ready to admit that the people made mistakes, especially during the late 1790s when they elected his Federalist adversaries to office and appeared to support the Alien and Sedition Acts and the undeclared war with France.Footnote ¹¹¹ Perhaps Jefferson made his most favorable assessment of the wisdom of the majority in his famous address to the citizens of Albemarle County when he returned from his mission to Paris in 1790, when he said that the success of the United States' experiment in self-government justified his “attachment to the general rights of mankind.” Additionally it showed,

He made no mention of God's oversight or involvement; he merely insisted that the “will of the majority” was the only legitimate form of government.

Jefferson would have been more likely to recognize himself in the acidulous comments of President John Quincy Adams than in these recent portrayals of his religious faith by historians. Three years after Jefferson's death, when the first edition of Jefferson's writings appeared, Adams, convinced that his father's erstwhile friend was an “infidel” who did not believe in human immortality, concluded that Jefferson's keen sense of humor arose from being “a disbeliever in a future state and a double-dealer in the present.” Because Jefferson did not believe in an afterlife, he considered “his duties to his neighbor . . . under no stronger guarantee than the laws of the land and the opinion of the world.”Footnote ¹¹³

In his last years, weary after interminable political combat and Federalist insults, even reading Republican newspapers that extolled his greatness did not mollify Jefferson. When a veteran Republican editor asked him to subscribe to his newspaper, Jefferson said he was not interested. He wanted instead to “indulge myself in more favorite reading, in Tacitus & Horace, and the writers of that philosophy which is the old man's consolation & preparation for what is to come.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The aging Jefferson gained more solace from pagan writers like the virtuous Stoic Tacitus, who placed duty and integrity above all, and the life-affirming Epicurean Horace, who believed that there was nothing but atoms and the void, in preparing for “what is to come,” that is, the inevitability of death, than he did from Christian epiphanies of the Resurrection and the afterlife, which he dourly considered “nonsense.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ He never forgave aggressive Christians for their lifetime abuse of him, especially during presidential elections and in his retirement, when he sought to mold the University of Virginia into a nonsectarian, indeed irreligious, institution. As his life ebbed, Jefferson penned his most hostile comments against organized religion. To a Unitarian clergyman, Thomas Whittemore, he damned “Christendom” as a “slaughterhouse.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Jefferson died, as he lived, as an Epicurean deistic pagan, whose only concept of “afterlife” was the end of life: death. For him, that was “what is to come.” In his final act of self-assertion, composing his epitaph, Jefferson identified his three proudest achievements--as “author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, Father of the University of Virginia; because, by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I want most to be remembered.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was the first law in the United States or the world to assert each person's freedom to believe in “twenty gods, or no god,” as Jefferson stated at the time. The University of Virginia was the first institution of higher education in the United States whose rector deliberately began it without a divinity school. The Declaration of Independence, one of the most famous documents in history, was Jefferson's ultimate celebration of moral principle. In words copied from the notorious deist and anticlerical Bolingbroke, he invoked the “laws of nature & nature's God” to justify Americans in seizing the “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” with which they had been “endowed by their Creator.” Such rhetorical appeals to “nature's God” bore greater similarity to pantheism than to the religious orthodoxies of the time.

The most compelling evidence of the defiant attitude toward religion in his Declaration lay quietly buried in his autobiography, written when he was seventy-seven. Here Jefferson placed in two parallel columns his original text of the Declaration and the final version ratified by Congress, the one in the appendices of history textbooks. Jefferson's own final sentence reads, “And to the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, & our sacred honor.” The nearly identical Congressional Declaration states, “And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, & our sacred honor.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Were Jefferson alive, he would probably say, contrary to the claims of the Religious Right and its scholarly adherents, who fecklessly attempt to depict him as a man of devout Christian faith, “let the wall of separation stand.”