Wall_of_Separation_Part

. . .all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain,

their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in

no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil rights.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, a founding patriot, author of the Declaration of Independence, the Religious Freedom Statute and the third president of the United States under the Constitution, is credited with establishing “a wall of separation between Church and State.” But did Jefferson really mean what he said and what has been interpreted that he said 200 plus years ago? To understand the importance and purpose of Jefferson’s words as they have been applied in the 20th and 21st centuries, one must have an insight into the religious pilgrimage and beliefs of its author, Thomas Jefferson, as well as the religious climate in Virginia that was so abhorrent to him. That Jefferson was a lifelong student of religion cannot be denied, and he studied it with fervent intent.

From the modern religious and political perspective, Jefferson’s faith remains somewhat of a conundrum and paradox. Jefferson’s faith – at least during his presidential and post-presidency years – was a source of great consternation for many of his associates, religious leaders, and perhaps members of the general public. Both then and now, many Christian leaders would contend that he did not hold true to many of the traditional tenets of most Christian denominations.

Little is known about Jefferson’s religious life prior to entering William and Mary College in 1759 at age sixteen. There, as a student of law under the renowned George Wythe, America’s first professor of law, Jefferson became intrigued with the writings of the Scottish moral philosophers. It was, perhaps, this interest that started him on his lifelong obsession with morals and ethics and his belief that the religious institutions of his day were corrupted by an errant and somewhat fabricated religious doctrine.

“Of his peculiar opinions on religious subjects,” wrote Rev. Charles A. Goodrich in his Lives of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence (1856), “we are designedly silent. In respect to these, the best and wisest of his countrymen have entertained very different sentiments. At a future day, it will be easier to decide in respect to their true character and tendency.”

Jefferson has been labeled an atheist, deist, Unitarian or universalist, infidel, student of the French Enlightenment, and perhaps other religious and sectarian monikers by his contemporaries, as well as historians and religionists alike. Jefferson, however, would more than likely have eschewed all and any such references to describe his personal beliefs.

Born in 1743, Jefferson was raised in the traditions of the Anglican Church and maintained some affiliation with it throughout much of his life. As a fair and theological liberal it has been reported that he contributed financially in equal manner to all churches within his community, no matter what the denomination.

Throughout his entire life, one thing is clear, Jefferson had an insatiable appetite for freedom from tyranny of any kind – monarchial, political or religious. He could not tolerate any oppression of the natural freedom of the individual as ordained by God. However, on his beloved Monticello estate he was the consummate contradiction: a slave owner who was an abolitionist who wanted the slave trade stopped and all slaves set free.

By the time of the American Revolution, the Anglican Church had firmly established a religious stranglehold on the inhabitants of Virginia. Although other Christian persuasions had moved into the commonwealth, the more dominant and powerful Anglican Church acted oppressively and even criminally toward those who did not follow their doctrines of faith. Members of the church were significantly represented in the legislature of the Virginia Commonwealth and had proposed that all citizens of Virginia should be taxed to support the Anglican Church and only its interpretation of the Christian faith. To this, Jefferson was vehemently opposed.

Jefferson describes the religious environment in his beloved commonwealth in his autobiography:

The first settlers of this colony were Englishmen, loyal subjects to their king and church, and the grant to Sr. Walter Raleigh contained an express Proviso that their laws “should not be against the true Christian faith, now professed in the church of England.” As soon as the state of the colony admitted, it was divided into parishes, in each of which was established a minister of the Anglican church, endowed with a fixed salary, in tobacco, a glebe house and land with the other necessary appendages. To meet these expenses all the inhabitants of the parishes were assessed, whether they were or not, members of the established church . . . and by the time of the revolution, a majority of the inhabitants had become dissenters from the established church, but were still obliged to pay contributions to support the Pastors of the minority. This unrighteous compulsion to maintain teachers of what they deemed religious errors was grievously felt during the regal government, and without hope of relief. But the first republican legislature which met in ’76 was crowded with petitions to abolish this spiritual tyranny.

It was in this religious atmosphere, that in 1779, three years after he wrote the Declaration, Jefferson authored and proposed his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia. It was also the year that he took his position on June 1 as the newly elected governor of Virginia, succeeding his philosophical rival, Patrick Henry. He served until the end of his term in 1780, willingly relinquishing his office to the strong military leadership of General Thomas Nelson, Jr.

Also in 1779, Jefferson was elected as one of the “Visitors” of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, his alma mater. In this position he was instrumental in abolishing the professorships in Divinity and Oriental languages, and in exchange, added professorships in the Law of Nature & Nations, Fine Arts (added to the duties of the Moral professor), and Natural History.

As for his Bill, due to the pressing issues of war and occupations of the commonwealth by the British, it was not acted upon and passed in the General Assembly of the Virginia Commonwealth until January 16, 1786 when Jefferson was residing in Paris as the U.S. Ambassador to France.

In the preamble to his bill, Jefferson penned:

Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burdens, 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, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone. . . .

Christian conservatives, an apparent minority in the Assembly, tried to introduce a stricter adherence to Jesus Christ. Jefferson, in his autobiography, later expressed his disdain for their attempt.

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” This insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.

During the 1700s in Europe and later in that century in America, an influence was developing strength that would greatly shape the political and religious minds of Jefferson and many of his compatriots. It was the period of the Enlightenment or Age of Reason. It was reaching its zenith in the latter half of the 18th century.

In July, 1784, Jefferson sailed to France as associate envoy and joined Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in Paris in August to assist in negotiating commercial treaties with France. A year later, Jefferson began his five year term as minister plenipotentiary to the French Court in Paris at the Court of Versailles. Back home in America, his fellow patriots were writing and debating what would become the U.S. Constitution. During his stay in Paris, Jefferson was absorbed in the atmosphere that spawned the French Revolution in 1789. It was a time in which the question, “What is truth?,” was on the lips of every free-thinker.

This period of “thinkers” or “scholastics” was a progressive outgrowth of the Italian and French “humanist” movement of the 14th and 15th centuries. Profoundly partial to the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, the thinkers of the Enlightenment assessed that truth was not absolute as professed by the doctrines of the Church, but was relative, and used observations of nature, common sense and the rise of scientific discovery to prove and promote their belief. To the Christian church’s discredit, persecutions and hatred between Catholics and Protestants and later Protestants against other Protestants, furthered the proof and cause of the followers of the Enlightenment.

Always a free-thinker, Jefferson embraced this Age of Reason as the practical and sensible solution to the age of religious and monarchial tyranny that he witnessed and so loathed. Perhaps the thing that attracted Jefferson the most to this new way of approaching religion and humanity was the spawning of the social conscience. For centuries, the Anglican Church and other Christian leaders had taught that God controlled the destinies of men on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, it was reasoned, that if a man were destitute or enslaved, it must be God’s will for him. Jefferson believed that after God created man and his natural environment, He let them follow their own course, good or bad. It was up to man to intervene to right injustices. In addition, as the natural laws were unveiled by scientific discovery, more and more thinkers and their followers saw less and less of a need for the Church and a Sovereign God.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Jefferson apparently did not champion his faith (or lack thereof) publicly, but only in personal communication with his close friends, such as Dr. Benjamin Rush, John Adams, Charles Thomson, Moses Robinson, William Short and others.

Exactly when Jefferson started to formulate his own religious beliefs is uncertain. However, it is apparent from Jefferson’s letters to these individuals and others in the early 1800s, as well as in his autobiography, that his religious beliefs became significantly divergent from the mainline Christian denominations of his era, as well as today. A self-proclaimed seeker of truth and morality, Jefferson became greatly influenced by the writings of Joseph Priestly, an English scientist and Presbyterian minister who turned to the doctrines of Unitarianism. Two of Priestly’s works were of great interest to Jefferson and had a great impact upon him: Corruptions in Christianity (1792) and a treatise written by Priestly, Jesus and Socrates Compared (1803).

In his earlier publication, History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ (1786), Priestly defended Unitarianism while he assailed the accepted Christian doctrines that professed that scripture was inspired by God; that Jesus was born of a virgin; that God was three persons in one and that Jesus’ death on the cross was an atoning sacrifice for mankind. Priestly emigrated to the United States in 1794 and established residence in Northumberland in east-central Pennsylvania. Both Jefferson and John Adams became close friends with Priestly and spent considerable time in correspondence and visits with him until his death in 1804.

That Jefferson was greatly influenced by the philosophy espoused in Socrates and Jesus Compared, is evident in his letter to his dear and devoutly religious friend, Dr. Rush, on April 21, 1803.

The result [of reading the treatise] was, to arrange in my mind a syllabus, or outline of such an estimate of the comparative merits of Christianity. . . . And in confiding it to you, I know it will not be exposed to the malignant perversions of those who make every word from me a text for new misrepresentations and calumnies. I am moreover averse to the communication of my religious tenets to the public. . . . It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others. . . . It behooves him, too, in his own case, to give no example of concession, betraying the common right of independent opinion, by answering questions of faith which the laws have left between God and himself.

From Jefferson’s own confession to his friends, it can be concluded, that while he considered himself to be a moral Christian, he did not believe Jesus to be the Son of God or divine. In the beginning of his letter to Rush, he wrote,

I then promised you that one day or other I would give you my views of [the Christian religion]. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.

Jefferson also did not accept the doctrine of the trinity (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and believed it to be a contrivance of the first century church. “That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking,” he wrote to his protégé, William Short, on August 14, 1820, “I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. But that [Jesus] might conscientiously believe himself inspired from above, is very possible. The whole religion of the Jews, inculcated on him from his infancy, was founded in the belief of divine inspiration. . . . Elevated by the enthusiasm of a warm and pure heart, conscious of the high strains of an eloquence which had not been taught him, he might readily mistake the coruscations [moments of intellectual brilliance] of his own fine genius for inspirations of an higher order. This belief carried, therefore, no more personal imputation, than the belief of Socrates. . . .” Socrates, it should be noted, believed himself to be under the demonic inspiration of a guardian daemon.

Although Jefferson believed Jesus to be the greatest historical teacher of human ethics and morals, he also alleged that Jesus died before he achieved maturity in wisdom and knowledge. In his letter of March 23, 1801 to Moses Robinson, former Vermont governor and U.S. Senator from Vermont from 1791-96, Jefferson expressed his sentiments for Christianity: “. . . the Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor [Jesus Christ], is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.”

Because Jesus was not fully mature in his wisdom, according to Jefferson, “. . . the doctrines he really delivered were defective as a whole,” he further wrote in his 1803 letter to Rush, “and fragments only of what he did deliver have come to us mutilated, misstated, and often unintelligible.”

Despite, in Jefferson’s view, that Jesus lacked the full maturity of reason and that his teachings were misrepresented by the Apostles, he wrote that “a system of morals is presented to us which, if filled up in the style and spirit of the rich fragments he left us, would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man. The question of his being a member of the Godhead, or in direct communication with it, claimed for him by some of his followers and denied by others, is foreign to the present view, which is merely an estimate of the intrinsic merits of his doctrines.”

Any miracles attributed to Jesus in the Gospels or in Paul’s Epistles he believed were fabrications and misrepresentations of the facts by the Apostles. Jefferson did not believe in the virgin birth of Jesus or in Jesus’ resurrection after his crucifixion. He did not believe in the redemptive work of Christ – seeing no purpose in the crucifixion – or in the professed need for salvation. He believed that if everyone followed Jesus’ moral example, the world would be a fine and healthy place.

“I am a Materialist;” Jefferson would later pen to his protégé and former private secretary in Paris, William Short, on April 13, 1820, “[Jesus] takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance towards forgiveness of sin; I require counterpoise of good works to redeem it, etc., etc.”

To further state his position, Jefferson continued to share his insights with Short.

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him by His biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; the others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus [spokesperson], and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of His doctrines, led me to try to sift them apart.

Jefferson did not believe the Bible was the perfect Word of God, but that it was a corrupt fabrication of those, who in an attempt to record history, made up stories to manipulate the people. He did not believe that Jesus’ wisdom was divinely inspired, but rather, that it was influenced by his Judaic upbringing and teaching and that God used that to correct the weaknesses in the Jewish faith.

In his next letter to Short on August 4, 1820, Jefferson further clarified his position.

My aim in that [last letter] was, to justify the character of Jesus against the fictions of his pseudo-followers . . . . For if we could believe that he really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods and the charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind, that he was an impostor. I give no credit to their falsifications of his actions and doctrines, and to rescue his character.

. . . I say that this free exercise of reason is all I ask for the vindication of the character of Jesus. We find in the writings of his biographers matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications. Intermixed with these, again, are sublime ideas of the Supreme Being, aphorisms and precepts of the purest morality and benevolence, sanctioned by a life of humility, innocence and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, absence of worldly ambition and honors, with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed.

While Jefferson was concerned about the moral purity of Jesus’ teachings and life, and tried to peel away what he considered religious dogma, church leaders saw his attempt as an apostasy. The Apostle Paul would have concurred. For the Corinthians of his time had a similar notion, to which Paul replied:

Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up---if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable. But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since by one man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead.

1 Corinthians 15:12-21 (NKJV)

But then, Jefferson only saw the Apostle Paul as the “first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus.”

To commit his notions of belief to paper, Jefferson, around 1803, wrote his Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others. He enclosed a copy to Dr. Rush with his letter of April 21, 1803.

In section III of his Syllabus, Jefferson composed, “In this state of things among the Jews [deism and imperfect ethics], Jesus appeared. His parentage was obscure; his condition poor; his education null; his natural endowments great; his life correct and innocent: he was meek, benevolent, patient, firm, disinterested, and of the sublimest eloquence.

“. . . all the learned of his country, entrenched in its power and riches, were opposed to him, lest his labors should undermine their advantages; and the committing to writing his life and doctrines fell on unlettered and ignorant men, who wrote, too, from memory, and not till long after the transactions had passed.”

Jefferson had a strong and often outspoken disdain for Christian denominations and ministers who, in his mind, had perverted the teachings of Jesus. In his widely publicized but unpublished “Jefferson Bible” (ca. 1804) that he created for his own use and reflection, he attempted to distill the Gospels into what he viewed as the simplicity of Jesus’ moral code of ethics.

As he enclosed a copy of his Syllabus with his letter to John Adams on October 12, 1813, he shared his reasons for his scriptural rearrangement.

“To compare the morals of the old, with those of the new testament, would require an attentive study of the former,” he wrote Adams, “a search thro’ all its books for its precepts, and through all its history for its practices, and the principles they prove.”

In the same correspondence he later continued, “We must reduce our volume [of words of the ancient philosophers] to the simple evangelists [of the four Gospels], select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the Amphibologisms into which they have been led by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from [Christ], by giving their own misconceptions as [Christ’s] dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

In citing his reason for creating his own New Testament Bible, he stated,

I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging, the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is . . . unsophisticated doctrines, such as were professed and acted on by the unlettered apostles, the Apostolic fathers, and the Christians of the 1st century. Their Platonising successors indeed, in after times, in order to legitimate the corruptions which they had incorporated into the doctrines of Jesus, found it necessary to disavow the primitive Christians, who had taken their principles from the mouth of Jesus himself, of his Apostles, and the Fathers cotemporary with them.

. . . We must leave therefore to others, younger and more learned than we are, to prepare this euthanasia for Platonic Christianity, and its restoration to the primitive simplicity of its founder. I think you give a just outline of the theism of the three religions when you say that the principle of the Hebrew was the fear, of the Gentile the honor, and of the Christian the love of God.

On January 9, 1816, Jefferson sent a letter to Charles Thomson. He told Thomson, his friend for 52 years, that theirs was “a friendship unaffected by the jarring elements by which we have been surrounded, of revolutions of government, of party and opinion.”

Thomson was a decade’s long resister of British tyranny and served as the Secretary to the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1789. Only he and John Hancock signed the Declaration on July 4, 1776. He was a man of sincerity, who was even adopted by the Delaware tribe, referring to him in their language as “man of truth.” Up until the ratification of the Constitution, delegates returned home after governmental sessions, leaving Thomson with the responsibility of carrying on the day-to-day affairs of the government.

In 1808, after 19 years of labor, Thomson published his four volume translation of the Greek Septuagint (the oldest version of the Old Testament) and his translation of the New Testament. In 1815, he published A Synopsis of the Four Evangelicals.

Jefferson had just received a copy of this Synopsis from his friend whom he applauded for his effort.

This work bears the stamp of that accuracy which marks everything from you and will be useful to those who, not taking things on trust, recur for themselves to the fountain of pure morals. I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials [the Gospels], which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book [Bible], and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time and subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen;it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw.

Jefferson’s effort, paralleled in four columns in four languages, became known as the Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels. In his version of the New Testament Bible, Jefferson assembled in a cut-and-paste fashion the life and teachings of Jesus into seventeen chapters that he titled, “The Life and Morals of Jesus.” In the last chapter of his bible, Jefferson ends his version with the crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus, but leaves out any account of Christ’s resurrection. Jefferson apparently did not accept the resurrection of Jesus as historical fact. Because of this and other discrepancies of his “Christian” faith, many denominational preachers and church leaders of his day did not receive Jefferson as a bona fide Christian, one who had accepted Jesus’ redemptive work on the cross for his sins and thus acknowledged Him as Lord and Savior of his life.

Some contend that Jefferson concocted his version of the New Testament gospels to simplify the scriptures for the Indians whom he hoped to evangelize. But there is little evidence that this was his intent. To the contrary, his own words would deny such a personal benevolent interest or design for his effort. In fact, while Jefferson had a curious interest in the Native American, during his presidency, he saw the establishment of an inroad with the Indian only as a means to secure more land and passage to the West and the Pacific coast.

That Jefferson was guarded about his particular biblical interpretation is evident in his letter to William Short on April 13, 1820. In this letter Jefferson enclosed a copy of his Syllabus, the same copy he had sent to Rush. Upon Rush’s death in 1813, Jefferson, feared that it might be made known publicly and requested its return from Rush’s family. However, upon lending it to another friend, who then lent it to another who copied it, the Syllabus, much to Jefferson’s consternation, was published a few months later in the Theological Magazine of London. “Happily,” Jefferson wrote to Short, “that repository is scarcely known in this country, and the syllabus, therefore, is still a secret, and in your hands I am sure it will continue so.”

He further wrote to Short: “But while this syllabus is meant to place the character of Jesus in its true and high light, as no imposter Himself, but a great Reformer of the Hebrew code of religion, it is not to be understood that I am with Him in all His doctrines.

“. . . It is the innocence of His character, the purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the eloquence of His inculcations, the beauty of the apologues [stories with a moral] in which He conveys them, that I so much admire. . . .

“The syllabus is therefore of His doctrines, not all of mine. I read them as I do those of other ancient and modern moralists, with a mixture of approbation and dissent. .”

As Jefferson’s statute or Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia awaited its fair hearing and passage by the Virginia assembly, it was strongly resisted by Patrick Henry and others who pushed for a law of their own in 1784, A Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion. It was an edict, which if passed would require all Virginians to be taxed in order to financially support ministers and teachers of the Gospel and religious societies of the people’s choice.

As a result of the opposition effort, Jefferson (who was now in France) found that he and his bill had a strong ally in fellow Virginian, James Madison.

Madison also argued against Henry’s approach and state supported religion and authored his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments in 1785, a few months before Jefferson’s statute was adopted by the Virginia assembly.

Mainly as a result of Madison’s well presented argument, the Virginia legislature tabled the Henry bill and a few months later enacted Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom. The framework of the bill was influential in forming the basis for the Religion Clauses in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution and still stands as a part of the present-day constitution of Virginia.

Excerpted from We the People, Volume II: Birth of a Nation, 2005, by James F. Gauss, Ph.D.