Jefferson the Skeptic

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2006 by Allen, Brooke

Jefferson wrote of Priestley: "I have read his Corruptions of Christianity, and Early opinions of Jesus, over and over again; and I rest on them, and on [Conyers] Middleton's writings, especially his letters from Rome, and to Waterland, as the basis of my own faith." Priestley, as we have seen, espoused a simple system of ethics as preached by Jesus and denounced subsequent corruptions; Middleton (1683-1750), an English divine, spoke out against all Biblical miracles and mysteries. What Jefferson called his "faith," then, was indistinguishable from what most of us would define as ethics, informed by reason. Faith for faith's sake, the leap of faith which has been so important in Christian thought, meant nothing to him: he himself defined belief, religious and otherwise, as "the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition." Much, far too much, of Christian dogma he considered the very opposite of intelligible.

Jefferson's lifelong hatred of the clergy applied equally to every sect and creed and verged on the paranoiac. He seemed to see every single Christian priest and minister throughout history as having been involved in some vast right-wing conspiracy. "The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from it's indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence," he claimed. The exploitation of mysticism and magic, he assured his friends, "constitutes the power and the profits of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies." He insisted that "the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus" were able to flourish only by obscuring simple truth with mumbojumbo: if their nonsensical doctrines could be understood, "it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the scuttle-fish, thro' the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy."

As a democrat with distinctly radical, Jacobin leanings (he openly supported the extremists during the French Revolution), Jefferson automatically disapproved of the priesthood as a hierarchical and tradition-bound institution. As an amateur scientist and Enlightenment intellectual, he despised its resistance to science and reason. Priests, he wrote, "dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light." This cry, incidentally, would be echoed by H. L. Mencken more than a century later: "every priest who really understands the nature of his business is well aware that science is its natural and implacable enemy." Mencken was writing within the context of the 1925 Scopes trial which pitted Creationists against the expounders of evolution. We, in the twenty-first century, are replaying the old drama with our own concerns: not only evolution versus "intelligent design" this time, but stem-cell research and other bioethical issues. Can there be any doubt which side of the debate Jefferson would take?