Jefferson the Skeptic

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2006 by Allen, Brooke

Could there be more potent evidence that Jefferson was what our own contemporaries would call a religious relativist and a liberal humanist par exellence? Notes on the State of Virginia created a sensation in the salons of Paris when it was published there in 1785, raising its author's already high reputation in those circles.

Despite the fact that there was no established church in Virginia, a number of its prominent men, led by Patrick Henry, believed that citizens of the state should pay a tax to support all churches there. James Madison spearheaded the resistance to Henry's proposed Bill for a Religious Assessment, and Jefferson egged him on from France, where he was serving as American Minister. Then, in 1786, Madison steered through the Virginia legislature the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which Jefferson had composed nearly a decade before. This document, still included in the Virginia constitution, would become the basis for the Religious Clauses in the Bill of Rights three years later. Written in the same ringing prose that etched the Declaration of Independence on the nation's collective memory, it deserves to be quoted in full. (The italics in paragraphs One and Three are mine.)

I. WHEREAS Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do; that the impious presumptions of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, hath established and maintainted false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics and geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow-citizens he has a natural right; that it tends only to corrupt the principles of that religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of wor[l]dly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and confirm to it; that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment; and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.