Jefferson the Skeptic

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2006 by Allen, Brooke

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.

-Thomas Jefferson

As the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson secured himself a top place in the American pantheon despite personal principles that have been distasteful to Christians throughout our history. Defamed by the religious right of his day as the Virginia Voltaire, Jefferson, like Franklin, was a true Enlightenment philosophe in every sense of the word, a thorough skeptic who valued reason far above faith and subjected every religious tradition, including his own, to scientific scrutiny. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale University during Jefferson's presidency, called him "the real Jacobin, the very child of modern illumination, the foe of man, and the enemy of his country." This was no rant from the lunatic fringe but a common opinion of Jefferson among practicing Christians then and later.

He had earned their enmity for three reasons: first, for writing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, a radical and groundbreaking document that would eventually serve as the model for the legal principle of church/state separation that still obtains in America today; second, as the first and most influential American advocate of the French science and philosophy that was so widely perceived at that time as atheistic; and third, as the author of Notes on the State of Virginia, a classic of eighteenth-century free-thinking. This 1784 document created an outrage among the religiously-minded that could sometimes reach hysterical levels. Consider one extract, which takes Locke's principles much further than Locke himself ever ventured to take them and whose language seems almost deliberately calculated to provoke the zealots of the time:

The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. . . . The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg . . . reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. . . . They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only.

If Jefferson intended to stir things up he certainly succeeded, and this passage soon became notorious. The response of the Reverend William Linn, a Dutch Reformed minister from New York, was typical: "Let my neighbor once persuade himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck. If there be no God, there is no law." Without having to agree with Linn that moral behavior or law and order depend on religion, we can understand why he, and so many of his kind, were offended. For those who believe that there is one true God and only one and that everyone who fails to worship him will be damned, such an apparent carelessness for the souls of others would seem not only flippant but downright cruel. A conclusion that many inevitably drew was that Jefferson was an atheist, although he did not define himself as one, at least not in writing. But it is safe to say that he was definitely not a Christian; for while Jefferson professed to revere Jesus Christ as a philosopher and moralist, he displayed nothing but contempt for the Christian religion as it had been practiced and preached for nearly two millennia.

What are the self-selected Moral Majority, the legions of Americans who consider themselves "saved," to make of a revered founding father who referred to Christianity as "our particular superstition" and to the God of the Old Testament as "a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust"? Jefferson openly professed an unadulterated disgust for clergymen of all denominations: "In every country and in every age," he wrote, "the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." It has been especially galling to believing Christians that this opinion was held by a man who was not only one of the key founding fathers but one of the great, acknowledged ornaments of American history and culture-"a fabulous polymath," in the words of historian Bernard Bailyn: "politician, diplomat, architect, draftsman, connoisseur of painting, anthropologist, bibliophile, classicist, musician, lawyer, educator, oenologist, farm manager, agronomist, theologian (or rather, antitheologian), and amateur of almost every branch of science from astronomy to zoology, with special emphasis on paleontology."

Not being able to ignore Jefferson, the Christian right has decided deliberately to misinterpret his message. Anti-separationists deny that Jefferson's term "wall of separation between Church and State" meant anything like what modern "liberals" mean by the phrase. But if we read the whole passage from which this phrase was extracted, it really seems that he did: