Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

by Denise A. Spellberg

  Leland knew, however, that he could expect no such support from local political leaders when he began a similar effort in New England in 1791. The struggle against religious repression there would consume him into the nineteenth century.

  LELAND RETURNS TO NEW ENGLAND TO END CONGREGATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS OF RELIGION, 1791

  Leland, born in Grafton, Massachusetts, had begun his own spiritual quest in 1772 when, at the age of eighteen, he heard a voice from the skies telling him, “You are not about the work which you have got to do.”43 Two years later he became a Baptist and a “volunteer for Christ.”44 When he began his life’s evangelical ministry in 1774, he heard that the eminent minister Isaac Backus, among other Baptists, had journeyed to Philadelphia to meet with John and Sam Adams, their representatives to the First Continental Congress. The delegation’s aim was to protest not only their unjust taxation by George III, but that forced on them by the Bay State’s Congregational establishment.45 Baptists could avoid paying for the support of Congregational ministers and churches only by acquiring a certificate of spiritual dedication and economic contribution to their own faith, which document had to be sought annually from town authorities. The Baptists considered these requirements an infringement on their rights of conscience as well as a civil inequity.46 Those who refused to pay taxes or produce the certificates were fined, imprisoned, and sometimes had their property confiscated.47

  John Adams’s recorded response to this Philadelphia meeting with Baptist and Quaker constituents in the same bind suggests a rather different outlook on religious persecution than that of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison during the 1770s: He privately notes that he was “somewhat indignant” at being “thus summoned before a self-created tribunal, which was neither legal nor constitutional,”48 and he suspected the Baptists of treacherously wishing to “break up the [Continental] Congress” with their protests. Adams defended his state’s maintenance of “the most mild and equitable establishment of religion that was ever known in the world, if indeed they could be called an establishment,” and he concluded that he would “not deceive” the Baptists of his state “by insinuating the faintest hope” that the Congregational Protestant majority would ever end their ascendancy in Massachusetts.49

  After visiting his family in New England in 1790, Leland resettled there the following year as minister of Cheshire, Massachusetts, a town founded by Baptists from Rhode Island a few years before the Revolution.50 His duties in this small settlement in the western part of the state did not keep him from joining the public fight over religious and political equality elsewhere. Like other Baptists, he immediately objected to particularly onerous new certificate laws in neighboring Connecticut, which required applicants to get the signatures of two government officials or, if there were only one, that of the justice of the peace. These local officeholders, then, had complete discretion, without means for appeal, to decide whether non-Congregationalists would be granted exemption from being taxed to support an established religion from which they dissented.51

  “I am not a citizen of Connecticut—the religious laws of the state do not oppress me, and I expect never will personally,” Leland preached. “But a love of religious liberty in general induces me thus to speak.”52 In a powerful sermon, “The Rights of Conscience Inalienable and, therefore, Religious Opinions Not Cognizable by Law,” first published in New London, Connecticut, in 1791, and later reprinted in Virginia and throughout New England, he outlined the historical evils of state-mandated religion.53

  Leland might have protested as a Baptist, or solely in defense of other Protestants, but he elected to speak on behalf of non-Protestants as well. He argued that “heathens, deists, and Jews, are not indulged in the certificate law; all of them, as well as Turks, must therefore be taxed for the standing order” of the state’s established Congregational faith.54 In other words, the greatest unfairness was toward those not even acknowledged to be believers of a legitimate faith. There were no known Muslim residents, but there were minuscule Jewish and Catholic populations. If they had clergymen to support their claims of affiliation (and often there were none), those rabbis and priests had no standing in the eyes of state authorities, and thus “Jews, Turks, heathens, and deists, if such there are in Connecticut, are bound and have no redress.”55

  Leland had earlier argued that “forcing all to pay some preacher, amounts to an establishment,” and such was an affront to the sanctity of religion by making the preacher beholden to civil authority:

  That moment a minister is so fixed as to receive a stipend by legal force, that moment he ceases to be a gospel ambassador, and becomes a minister of state. This emolument is a temptation too great for avaricious men to withstand. This doctrine turns the gospel into merchandise, and sinks religion upon a level with other things.56

  Notably, the plea he made on behalf of non-Protestants reveals a certain basic understanding of their traditions:

  Is it the duty of a Jew to support the religion of Jesus Christ, when he really believes that he was an impostor? Must the Papists be forced to pay men for preaching down the supremacy of the pope, whom they are sure is the head of the church? Must a Turk maintain a religion opposed to the Alkoran, which he holds as the sacred oracle of heaven? These things want better confirmation. If we suppose that it is the duty of all these to support the Protestant Christian religion, as being the best religion in the world; yet how comes it to pass, that human legislatures have a right to force them so to do?57

  Then Leland asked “for an instance, where Jesus Christ, the author of his religion, or the apostles, who were divinely inspired, ever gave orders to, or intimated, that the civil powers on earth, ought to force people to observe the rules and doctrines of the gospel.” He proceeded, with recourse to a common notion, to appeal to the better nature of his Christian listeners: “Mahomet called in the use of the law and the sword, to convert people to his religion; but Jesus did not—does not.”58 George Sale, translator of Jefferson’s Qur’an, had been among the earliest to refute the idea that conversion to Islam had been by force, but Leland’s awareness did not extend that far. Unlike other contemporaries, however, he did propagate the misconception in defense of Islamic believers against a Christian regime.

  In the same spirit he indicted all governments that presumed to dictate religion, from the first Christian emperor, Constantine, whom he charged with persecuting pagans and heretics; to the pope, who “exalts himself above all who are called gods (i.e., kings and rulers,) and where no Protestant heretic is allowed the liberty of a citizen”; to the Ottoman Empire, “where it is death to call in question the divinity of Mahomet, or the authenticity of the Alcoran.”59 Again, Leland’s imperfect knowledge of Islam partially failed him: He did not understand that the Prophet’s humanity is a tenet of the faith, though he was right about the consequence of a Muslim’s questioning the divine authorship of the Qur’an.

  Seeking to establish a historical foundation for rights of conscience, Leland explained that there were four forms of government on earth, one of which (the third) he distinguished for requiring “a religious test to qualify an officer of the state, proscribing all nonconformists from civil and religious liberty.”60 He then cited the Lockean notion of government as compact to describe the American system, asking “does a man, upon entering into a social compact, surrender his conscience to that society, to be controlled by laws thereof.” Leland answered, “I judge not.”61

  The idea of inalienable rights Leland knew from both Madison and Jefferson’s Virginia legislation. Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia described any infringement on a citizen’s “civil capacities” as interference with “the natural rights of mankind,”62 while Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785 held:

  The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, bec
ause the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty toward the Creator.63

  Leland would himself express the same sentiment this way:

  Every man must give an account of himself to God, and therefore every man ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that he can best reconcile to his conscience. If government can answer for individuals at the judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.64

  Of course, Locke preceded all these Americans when he wrote a century earlier that “the care of souls does not belong to the magistrate.”65 Madison would render the idea somewhat more prosaically, denying that “the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy.” Not unlike Leland, he believed that the Christian religion flourished “not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them.”66

  Jefferson had argued in his Notes on Virginia that any attempt to institute conformity in religion was the error of “fallible men” and their “coercion.”67 Leland mentioned those same “fallible men” in his tract on the rights of conscience to describe their coercive “tests of orthodoxy.”68 He also borrowed from his hero a reference to the legendary Greek robber Procrustes, who habitually chopped or stretched the limbs of his victims to fit the size of his bed. Jefferson argued, “Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there is a danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter.” He concluded, “Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.”69 Leland presses the image further, making the “iron bedstead” of his villain “Pocrustes” analogous to the state’s coercive rack “to stretch and measure the consciences of all others by.”70 Jefferson reminded his readers, “Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”71

  Leland expresses the same idea this way: “Millions of men, women, and children, have been tortured to death to produce uniformity, and yet the world has not advanced one inch towards it.” He writes, “Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics,”72 just as Jefferson had done earlier in his Virginia legislation, saying that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”73 In fact, Leland would express more hyperbolically the very sentiment that had branded Jefferson an infidel. Following the latter’s infamous and incendiary proclamation of 1784—“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”74—Leland’s tract of 1791 adds more faith options and explicitly sets monotheism on a par with the worshipping multiple gods or none: “Let every man speak freely without fear, maintain the principle that he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God, or twenty Gods; and let government protect him in so doing.”75

  The same universal inclusion is evident when he argues that Christian, Islamic, and pagan forms of established religions are wrong: “The common objection ‘that the ignorant part of the community are not capacitated to judge for themselves,’ supports the Popish hierarchy, and all Protestant, as well as Turkish and Pagan establishments in idea.”76

  Leland was not above embarrassing the religious prejudices and provincialism of Connecticut authorities by pointing out that they discouraged foreign immigration. Demonstrating how certificates discouraged this, he even slipped in a cameo role for his hero Jefferson, referring to him simply as “an Episcopalian”:

  How mortifying it must be to foreigners, and how far from conciliatory is it to citizens of the American states, that when they come into Connecticut to reside, they must either conform to the religion of Connecticut, or produce a certificate? Does this look like religious liberty or human friendship? Suppose that man, whose name need not be mentioned, but which fills every American heart with pleasure and awe, should remove to Connecticut for his health, or any other cause, what a scandal would it be to the state, to tax him … unless he produced a certificate, informing them that he was an Episcopalian.77

  Such musings led Leland to conclude with praise for the federal Constitution’s First Amendment and Article VI, paragraph 3, respectively, which forbids Congress ever to establish any kind of religion, or require any religious test to qualify any officer in any department of federal government. The beauty of his country’s (as against Connecticut’s) form of government, Leland argued, was its legal guarantee of universal inclusion: “Let a man be Pagan, Turk, Jew or Christian, he is eligible to any post in that government.”78

  Even when Connecticut’s new certificate law was repealed after a six-month battle Leland waged alongside other dissenters, he would continue his advocacy for the rights of the state’s Baptists, addressing a gathering of them on the steps of the state’s assembly in 1794. As ever, he spoke in defense of the individual’s right to worship without government interference.79 But not until 1818 would Connecticut officially disestablish Congregational Protestantism, the referendum decided by a close vote of 13,918 to 12,361.80 In Leland’s native Massachusetts, once the heartland of the Puritans, his work would take considerably longer.

  CONDEMNING THE PROTESTANT ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION IN MASSACHUSETTS, 1794

  “What think you of the Constitution of Massachusetts?” Leland asked rhetorically three years later in his essay “The Yankee Spy.”81 His answer: “It is as good a performance as could be expected in a state where religious bigotry and enthusiasm have been so predominant.”82 Leland objected to several articles of the state’s 1780 Bill of Rights on the grounds that they meddled in religion and discriminated against not just Baptists but also Deists, pagans, Muslims, Jews, and Catholics.83

  Paraphrasing the second article of the Massachusetts constitution, he wrote that “it is the right and duty of all men publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being” (adding, “This article would read much better in a catechism than in a state constitution, and sound more concordant in a pulpit than in a state-house”).84 He explained that the statute would coerce a pagan, who, “upon hearing that it is their duty to worship one Supreme Being only, must consequently renounce all other deities whom they have been taught to adore.” He concluded that “here their consciences must be dispensed with, or the constitution broken.” Leland made a similar case for the hardship inflicted upon a Deist, “who believes all religion to be a cheat,” to either “act the hypocrite, or disregard the supreme law of the State.” As a man of faith, he “heartily believed” that “it is the duty of men, and women too, to worship God publicly,” but he no less heartily objected to the government’s imposition of that duty, a stance he insisted was consistent with Christian precedent “until an instance can be given in the New Testament, that Jesus, or his apostles, gave orders therefore to the rulers of this world.” And he supplemented biblical wisdom with that of Jefferson, paraphrasing his famous formulation once again: “If a man worships one God, three Gods, twenty Gods, or no God—if he pays adoration one day in a week, seven days, or no day—wherein does he injure the life, liberty or property of another?”85

  Leland found the third article of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights no less an affront. It endowed the legislature “with power to authorize and require” taxes to maintain “Protestant preachers.”86 More than a decade before, Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance had successfully challenged the practice in Virginia of the state supporting Anglicanism. But supporting only Protestant clerics generally was still problematic state interference in religion for Leland. The evangelical Baptist took up the cause of all non-Protestant clergy:r />
  Pagans, Turks and Jews, must not only preach for nothing; but Papists, those marvelous Christians, cannot obtain a maintenance for their preachers by the laws of their commonwealth. Such preachers must either be supported voluntarily, support themselves, or starve. Is this good policy? Should one sect be pampered above others? Should not government protect all kinds of people, of every species of religion, without showing the least partiality?87

  His familiar themes abounded: the pernicious preferment of one faith over another, with the familiar consequences—“Has not the world had enough proofs of the impolicy and cruelty of favoring a Jew more than a Pagan, Turk, or Christian; or a Christian more than either of them?” And finally, he added the wisdom of judging individuals not by spiritual beliefs but by civic virtues: “Why should a man be proscribed, or any wife disgraced, for being a Jew, a Turk, a Pagan, or a Christian of any denomination, when his talents and veracity as a civilian, entitles him to the confidence of the public.”88

  Another section of the third article was more inclusive, defining “every denomination of Christians” as “under the protection of the law.” But this too provoked Leland, who demanded it be amended to read “all men instead of every denomination of Christians.”89 Nor could he help objecting that only self-professed Christians could be elected to office in his native state. His own revisionary constitutional language read this way: