Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

The Religion of Thomas Jefferson
by Reverend John Alexie Crane
I. Jefferson's Achievements
He was a remarkable human being. He was a lawyer and a philosopher, a diplomat and an architect, a politician and a writer, a naturalist and a scientist. He was a major influence in the development of the American Revolution, and in shaping the form of government under which we now live.

As a member of the Continental Congress in 1775, he was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence. ("All men are created equal..." Governments derive their "just powers from the consent of the governed"). The ideas expressed in this Declaration have radically altered the history of the world.

A remarkable human being. He was President of the American Philosophical Society before, during, and several years after his two terms as President of the United States. He was both an idealist and a practical man.

While he was President, he doubled the land area of the US by arranging the Louisiana Purchase from France, taking in the vast area from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.

After he left the presidency, he organized the University of Virginia, and designed the buildings in which it was housed.

Jefferson lived a long and fruitful life. He died at age 91 on the same day as his friend John Adams. Both Jefferson and Adams were Unitarians. Adams and his wife Abigail are buried at the Unitarian Church in Quincy, Massachusetts where they were members.

Jefferson lived in Virginia and in Washington, DC where there were then no Unitarian churches. However, he regarded the Unitarian minister in Philadelphia, Dr Joseph Priestley, as his mentor in religion from the time they met there in 1797.

Indeed, Jefferson's enthusiasm for the Unitarian religion led him to say in a letter written in December 1822 to James Smith of Ohio, "I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States." Our religion so appealed to his rational mind that he was sure others would soon respond similarly.

II. Hostility to Conventional Religion
Joseph Priestley, Jefferson's mentor in religion. Who was he? Like Jefferson, he too was an individual of widely ranging knowledge. In the late 18th century, he was not only a Unitarian parish minister but also one of England's leading scientists.

In his work in chemistry, he discovered oxygen, sulfur dioxide, and ammonia, among other achievements. He wrote a History of Electricity, and for this was named a member of the Royal Society of scientists. He also wrote a History of the Corruptions of Christianity, and this influenced not only Thomas Jeffereson but many others in England and America.

At the peak of his career in England, because of his progressive views on religious and social issues, a mob came in search of him, burned down his house, library, laboratory, and church. Priestley managed to escape, and at the urging of Benjamin Franklin came to America in 1794. He established Unitarian churches at Northumberland and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and the latter church is still there, thriving. It was organized in 1796.

When Jefferson ran for the US presidency in the 1800 election, traditional ministers told their parishioners that voting for Jefferson was a vote against the Christian religion. They declared that if Jefferson won the election, people would have to hide their Bibles in their wells. The man was an atheist, they said.

A number of Jefferson's supporters urged him to reply to these charges, and make his real religious views clear to the electorate. No thanks, Jefferson said. He knew that his religion would be likely to generate hostility in people, just as Priestley's views had earlier in England.

He knew that if he was to achieve anything in politics, he would have to keep his religion to himself. Only in letters to trusted friends did he discuss religious issues.

In a letter to John Adams (August 22, 1813), Jefferson said that he had read Priestley's "Corruptions of Christianity, and Early Opinions of Jesus," over and over again; and I rest on them, and on Middleton's writings... as the basis of my own faith."

Both Priestley and Jefferson were distressed by the corruptions of Christianity that they perceived in organized religion. They saw a fiercely destructive pattern in the history of Christianity because of its distortion from the beginning by small-minded people.

In a private letter written in 1816, Jefferson said tartly, "On the dogmas of religion... all humanity, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."

Millions of innocent people, Jefferson said, have been executed, fined or imprisoned by Christians in an effort to compel them to believe.

This destructive dimension of Christianity moved Jefferson to fury. As he said while running for the presidency in 1800, in a letter to Dr Benjamin Rush (a distinguished Universalist in Philadelphia): the clergy "believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. (The sentence in italics is inscribed on the striking Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC).

III. Jefferson's Religion
It was the corruptions of Christianity that Jefferson found repugnant. He saw himself as a Christian, but in the sense of being a follower of Jesus' teachings, rather than in the sense of being a believer in the exotic theological ideas under which people buried those teachings. I am, he said, a Christian in the only sense in which Jesus wished anyone to be.

After reading a stimulating paper by Dr Priestley titled, "Socrates and Jesus Compared," Jefferson wrote and privately circulated a statement of his own thinking about Jesus.

He said that Jesus was born to an obscure and humble family, and had no formal education. On the other hand, he was a young man of great natural endowments. He was moved profoundly by good will, was patient, intellectually keen, firm, disinterested, and a wonderfully eloquent speaker.

But the transmission of Jesus' spoken teachings, Jefferson said, was hindered because Jesus never wrote them down. Those who heard his teachings believed that the end of the world was imminent, so they felt little need to preserve the teachings.

Some years after Jesus' death, his followers did begin to write down what they remembered; but by the time this occurred, the ideas of Jesus as Savior and the Son of God had developed.

These greatly colored and distorted the original teachings as the attempt was made to get them into writing. Those who carried the original teachings in their heads for some years, the apostles and their followers, were simple, uneducated people. Their limited understanding no doubt added to the distortion of Jesus' thinking.

The result is, Jefferson said, what we have in the New Testament has "come to us mutilated, misstated and often unintelligible."

In addition, the early converts in the Greco-Roman world contributed further to the confusion by adding Greek religious ideas to the growing, tangled mass of Christian thinking. The early Gentile followers grafted alien ideas onto those of Jesus, Jefferson said, "frittering them into subtleties, and obscuring them with jargon, until they have caused good people to reject the whole in disgust..."

However, Jesus natural endowments were so great, that in spite of these disadvantages, said Jefferson, there is a line of ethical thought in the New Testament which, if separated from the distortions in which it is submerged, its implications thought through, "would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by humanity." The notion of Jesus as the Son of God is one of the corruptions of Christianity. What actually matters is "the intrinsic merit" of his teachings.

These teachings, "relating to kindred and friends," Jefferson said, "were more pure and perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers..." The teachings reached out to include in the scope of their moral concern, not only kindred and friends, but extended "to neighbors and countrymen,... to all humankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids."

In addition, Jesus extended the focus of moral concern into the minds and hearts, into the inner life of people. Not only is it wrong to kill another person, he said, it is wrong to make them the brunt of our anger, to attack them verbally.

When we focus on the thinking of Jesus only, and set aside the muddled material that came to surround it, we can, Jefferson said, perceive its superior quality.

Early in his second term as president, Jefferson undertook the task of developing a version of the New Testament from which ancient and extraneous theologizing had been removed, laying bare the essential teachings of Jesus.

After completing a first draft, Jefferson conceived the idea of arranging the text in parallel columns of English, Greek, Latin, and French. He was competent in all four languages. But before he could complete the work, the duties of the presidency became especially pressing, and he did not return to it until about ten years later.

He then did complete the book, had it bound in leather, and stamped with the title, The Morals of Jesus. However, he realized he would do well to keep the book a secret from the public. He had omitted all references to supernatural elements like the miracles, the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, the Son of God, and included only the essential teachings of Jesus. He was sure that the traditional clergy would see his rational Biblical scholarship as clear evidence of his atheism, his impiety.

He was himself convinced that he was more truly Christian than his clergymen critics, who, he said, "have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of humanity," and of which Jesus, "were he to return to earth, would not recognize one feature." The book was not published until after Jefferson's death with the title, The Jefferson Bible.

In relation to the Bible itself Jefferson's thinking was also rational rather than traditional. In a letter to his friend, John Adams, in January of 1814, Jefferson said, in answer to an earlier question from Adams, that he had never before thought about where the Ten Commandments came from. You can't really tell from the Old Testament how the commandments actually came to be in the book.

"But the whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful," Jefferson said to Adams, "that it seems vain to attempt minute inquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text... that we have a right... to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts as to pick out diamonds from dunghills...."

IV. How Can It Be?
Jefferson, you see, was a Unitarian Christian. He did not see himself as a believing Christian but rather as a rational Christian. He cherished the ethical teachings of Jesus, but totally rejected traditional Christian beliefs. He regarded the Bible as of dubious value, more a source of confusion than of insight.

When he was 81, Jefferson described the last book in the Bible, the Book of Revelations, a favorite of charismatics and fundamentalists, as "the ravings of a maniac," beyond understanding or explanation.

Millions of people in centuries past and even now, today, regard that book as the word of God. Jefferson saw it as loony. This is how the book has always looked to me. It is how most UUs see it (of those who know about it at all). Across the centuries, we feel our kinship with Jefferson. We see the world, see religion from a similar perspective.

There is something strange here. Millions of people in the western world have believed that Christ died for their sins, believed in the concept of God as three persons and yet one, found the Book of Revelations had great meaning for them. Yet, Jefferson almost 200 years ago, saw all this as unthinkable.

He found traditional Christian doctrine generally incomprehensible.

He felt it important, throughout his lifetime, that he keep his religious convictions to himself. He was aware that if the public knew about his religion, they would attack him unmercifully, would shut him out of politics. He would not be permitted to take part in the shaping of the United States of America.

How can it be that a small number of people, like Jefferson, like Priestley, like you and me, find ideas accepted by millions impossible to understand or to believe in?

I think the explanation is that in any society the thinking of most people in religion is determined by their social conditioning. They embrace the prevailing belief system. A minority of people, like ourselves, care about religion, but find that we are obliged by our nature to shape it, not by tradition, but by reason and contemporary knowledge. We are often seen by those inside traditional religions as a threat, a menace to all that proper people hold dear. We are often perceived as an enemy.

Fortunately, this is coming to be less and less true, as rational religion has in recent years penetrated many levels of traditional religion.

Unitarians and Universalists, for example, are active participants in the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley which contains many Protestant groups as well as three Catholic orders.

UUs are part of the consortium of theological schools around the University of Chicago. They loom large on the campus of Harvard Divinity School. UU ministers are able now in many parts of the country to meet regularly with mainline colleagues in creative interchange. We learn freely from each other.

The rational Christianity of Thomas Jefferson is becoming increasingly acceptable, increasingly important to people here in the late 20th century. He was a remarkable human being.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com

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