Jefferson the Skeptic

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2006 by Allen, Brooke

All priests were bad, in Jefferson's view, but the Presbyterians were the worst of the lot.

The Presbyterian clergy are 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 now be obtained, to put their torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flame in which their oracle, Calvin, consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not subscribe to the proposition of Calvin, that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to the Calvinistic creed! They pant to re-establish by law that holy inquisition which they can now only infuse into public opinion.

His native Virginia he believed to be a fairly tolerant state, but this was not true, he claimed, "in the districts where Presbyterianism prevails undividedly. Their ambition and tyranny would tolerate no rival if they had power. Systematical in grasping at an ascendancy over all other sects, they aim, like the Jesuits, at engrossing the education of the country, are hostile to every institution they do not direct, and jealous at seeing others begin to attend at all to that object." And he was overjoyed when in 1817 the diehard Calvinistic state of Connecticut elected as governor the liberal Oliver Wolcott, who would finally disestablish the powerful Congregational Church in that state, following the example Jefferson had set more than thirty years earlier with his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Connecticut, Jefferson said, had been resurrected to "light and liberality," and he rejoiced that "this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character." Adams did not share his optimism on this subject and reminded his friend that the Calvinist denizens of New England and elsewhere would "whip and crop, pillory and roast" if they could. But in the event, ironically, New England soon did become theologically more liberal, while Jefferson's tolerant Virginia and its neighboring Southern states would succumb to a neo-Calvinist fundamentalism that has proved to be, if not a Protestant popedom, then certainly what Jefferson-and Adams-would have considered a disgrace to the American history and character.

As with other Enlightenment gentlemen such as George Washington, Jefferson seems really to have been more concerned with philosophical than with religious ideals, in particular the principles of Stoicism and Epicureanism. "I too am an Epicurean," he wrote to his friend William Short. "I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epictetus, indeed, has given us what was good of the Stoics. . . ." An extremely telling missive of 1821 expresses Jefferson's hope "that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago. This country, which has given the world an example of physical liberty, owes to it that of moral emancipation also." To express the belief that intellectual freedom had reached a height during ancient times that it had never again equaled was an implicit attack on Christianity, the mental system that replaced classical philosophy: Edmund Gibbon's ferociously anti-Christian Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written during Jefferson's youth, was the most famous book expounding this theory, and nothing in Jefferson's voluminous writings would lead one to think that his own views diverged in any way from Gibbon's.