The Jefferson Lies

by David Barton

  Jefferson was born in 1743 during the early stages of the Great Awakening, which lasted approximately from 1730 to 1770, but in Virginia both the beginning and end of that revival occurred about a decade behind the rest of the nation. (Interestingly, it was just the opposite with the Second Great Awakening—it began and ended earlier in Virginia than the rest of the country.) The Great Awakening was characterized by an explosive growth of personal faith and piety as well as a period of unprecedented interdenominational cooperation.

  Virginia had been heavily Anglican since its founding, but the revival caused the rapid growth of the Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and Methodists in the state. Ministers in central Virginia during that time often moved easily between denominations (such as the Reverend Devereaux Jarratt who was trained as a Presbyterian, became an Anglican priest, and spoke regularly in Methodist churches). Similarly, the area’s devout laymen were also often active in multiple denominations. Jefferson’s good friend and neighbor Henry Fry served with Jefferson on the board of Anglican churches in the area but was converted to Methodism and worked in both denominations.

  This type of interdenominational cooperation was possible primarily because leading ministers during the Great Awakening began emphasizing the vital areas of the Scriptures on which nearly all Christians agreed rather than the few areas about which they vigorously disagreed. Under the influence of this revival and its interdenominational cooperation even the Anglican Church in Virginia, softened its policy. As affirmed by Virginia historian William H. B. Thomas, “[t]he necessity of attending an Anglican church was relaxed—provided every man attend some church regularly.”20

  Most pastors in the Charlottesville region at this time can be described as evangelical, regardless of their denominations. They also preached a practical Christianity that specifically addressed daily personal behavior and provided relevant Biblical teaching and social applications. It touched issues such as interpersonal interactions, business dealings, and one’s personal relationship with God as well as moral issues such as integrity, courage, drunkenness, profanity, and immorality. Many sermons also addressed legislative policies of the day, contrasting public policies with Biblical positions on those issues, including taxation, good government, gambling, and slavery. In fact, when Quaker leader John Woolman visited Virginia during this period and witnessed Southern slavery for the first time, he began advocating vigorously in behalf of emancipation. This eventually resulted in the Quakers becoming national leaders in the abolition movement.

  Another characteristic of the First and Second Great Awakenings was that blacks were very active and involved. Many ministers, both black and white, would preach to mixed crowds. National leaders such as Harry Hoosier, the famous black evangelist, spent time in and preached to groups across central Virginia, as did black evangelist John Early. Of this period the Reverend John Leland observed:

  The poor slaves, under all their hardships, discover as great inclination for religion as the free-born do. When they engage in the service of God, they spare no pains. It is nothing strange for them to walk twenty miles on Sunday morning to meeting, and back again at night. . . . [T]hey are remarkably fond of meeting together to sing, pray, and exhort, and sometimes preach. . . . When they attempt to preach, they seldom fail of being very zealous.21

  It was during this time of revival in Virginia that many of the Dissenting (that is, non-Anglican) churches and ministers became active in politics, working to separate the church from the state and to keep the government from interfering with their own religious expressions and activities. For example, the Separate Baptists refused to comply with the Anglican requirement in state law mandating that they obtain government permission before conducting religious services. They asserted that it was their right to do what God had told them, without need of government approval. The Great Awakening not only promoted the concepts of individualism and inalienable rights (personal liberty, religious expression, freedom of conscience, and so on), but also that such rights should be protected by government rather than regulated by it.

  While these traits were common in Charlottesville and across most of the nation during the Great Awakening, there was one area in which Charlottesville differed from the rest of the country. It tended to be a bit more Armenian and less Calvinistic—a characteristic that greatly influenced Jefferson in the years following. And generally speaking, many of the spiritual practices apparent in Charlottesville during that time became established features of Jefferson’s personal religious views.

  For example, he developed a lifelong affinity for things such as interdenominational cooperation and emphasizing the doctrinal majors uniting Christians rather than the things dividing them. He also focused on identifying and protecting God-given inalienable rights; separating state from church and thereby preserving the freedom of conscience; emancipating slaves; leaning against Calvinism; etc.

  The first Great Awakening had barely ended in Virginia before the Second Great Awakening began. But by 1810, while the revival was still going strong in other parts of the country, the spiritual condition of the Charlottesville area had turned in a very unsatisfactory direction. According to evangelical minister John Rice Holt, who had helped Jefferson found the University of Virginia:

  Presbyterian congregations are decreasing every year, and appear as if they would dwindle into nothing. The Baptists and Methodists are at a stand. A strange apathy has seized the people. . . . The people feel about nothing but money. As to religion, the very stillness of death reigns amongst us. I can find no resemblance to this part of the country but in Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones [Ezekiel 37: 1–14].22

  In fact, Holt said that the Methodists were not just “at a stand,” but that “Mr. O’Kelly, the chief of the Christian Methodists, . . . is nearly deserted by his followers.”23

  During that time, many evangelical churches could find no replacements as their pastors died off or retired, and so they closed their doors. In other churches, the pulpit remained unfilled for more than a decade.24

  Concurrent with these gloomy developments in Virginia, several ministers in other parts of the country began a parallel spiritual movement that was to take a deep root in Charlottesville. This new movement was characterized by what became a radical call for a return to the primitive form of Christianity practiced by the Apostles. It decried the corruption of the modern Christian church and wanted to revive an earlier and simpler version of Christianity. This movement became known as Christian Primitivism or the Restoration Movement, and it developed from four primary leaders.

  One was Presbyterian minister Barton Stone of Kentucky, who led the famous Cane Ridge revival. He called for an end to denominations and advocated that Christians have no creed but the Bible. He therefore used only the simple descriptive title “Christian” for his congregations. (Stone had grown up Anglican but had also been a Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian.)

  Another Restoration leader was Presbyterian minister Thomas Campbell of Pennsylvania. He held many of the same beliefs as Stone and Campbell’s son, Alexander, advocated those positions in the western parts of Virginia. Their followers also embraced the unpretentious title of “Christian.” Alexander explained that their purpose was to “espouse the cause of no religious sect, excepting that ancient sect called Christians first at Antioch” [Acts 11:26].25

  A third leader was the Reverend Elias Smith of New Hampshire, who left the Baptist denomination and began a new group that “agreed to consider ourselves Christians, without the addition of any unscriptural name.”26

  A fourth leader was Jefferson’s good friend, the Reverend James O’Kelly of Virginia, who had actually started this trend well before any of the other three changing the name of his group from “Republican Methodists” to simply “Christians.”

  The followers of Stone, Smith, and O’Kelly came together in 1810, calling themselves “Christian Connection” (sometimes “Christian Connexion”). Campbell’s group, while philosophically aligned w
ith the other three, did not combine with them until years later, but in 1811 it did take the name “Christian Association.”

  Ministers of these four groups became leaders in the Charlottesville area, having great spiritual influence, and their followers increased rapidly for the next decade. But regrettably, in their fervor to restore primitive Christianity and return to the Bible as the only model, they ended up rejecting several long-standing doctrines of orthodox Christianity, including the concept of the Trinity. As bluntly explained by the Reverend Barton Stone, “The word Trinity is not found in the Bible.”27

  The Reverend Elias Smith agreed:

  In all the glorious things said of Christ, there is no mention of his Divinity, his being God-man, his incarnation, the human and the Divine nature, the human soul of Christ, his being God the Creator and yet the son of the Creator; these things are inventions of men and ought to be rejected.28

  Of the four major leaders, only O’Kelly openly embraced Trinitarianism.29 Smith and Stone did not embrace the doctrine, and since Thomas Campbell took no position on the doctrine,30 his followers included those from both Trinitarian and Anti-Trinitarian positions. It is interesting to note that none of the four groups rejected Jesus as the son of God, but only as a part of the Trinity. Sadly, this was the doctrinal position widely expounded by leading Christian ministers across Charlottesville for the last fifteen years of Jefferson’s life.

  Because Restorationists (Primitivists) claimed that the Bible was their only guidebook, they also rejected several other “traditions” of Christianity. For example, Smith thundered:

  I am a Christian . . . holding as abominable in the sight of God, everything . . . such as Calvinism, Arminianism, Freewillism, Universalism, Reverends, Parsons, Chaplains, Doctors of Divinity, Clergy, Bands, Surplices, Notes, Creeds, Covenants, and Platforms.31

  While the Primitivists rejected many church practices, there were many that they still continued to embrace. Holt recounted the Reverend O’Kelly’s description of what was preserved by the movement.

  He says, “That there has sprung up in the country a sect under the general name of ‘Christians,’ who administer adult baptism only to please the Baptists; who hold Arminian sentiments to catch the Methodists; and yet will not allow a man to be a Calvinist if he chooses; that they prove Socinian tenets [that Jesus was a man inspired by God but not Divine Himself] and make that profession the only bond of union. . . . He states too, that they are increasing rapidly.32

  The distinct religious tenets, that characterized the Restoration Movement included:

  • A rejection of denominationalism and all denominational titles except that of Christian

  • A stress on Christian unity

  • An emphasis on the Gospels rather than the Epistles—on getting back to the teachings of Jesus, and therefore a de-emphasis on the Epistles and the Old Testament

  • A rejection of church hierarchal structure: each church was local, and locally controlled

  • Anti-Trinitarianism, with an emphasis on using only Bible language and Bible terms

  • Anti-Calvinic almost to the point of loathing it

  Interestingly, the movement’s hatred for Calvinism was so strong that part of the reason Restorationists rejected the Trinity was simply because Calvin had embraced it. For example, Alexander Campbell declared, “I object to the Calvinistic doctrine of the Trinity.”33 He thereafter attempted to defend his own concept of the Trinity, but his effort was so convoluted that the Reverend Stone rebuked him, claiming that by his attempt to defend Trinitarianism, he was actually embracing the Calvinism that they all claimed to deplore.34

  Restorationist leaders reached the point that if any doctrine had been espoused by Calvin, then they believed it must be wrong. In fact, the Reverend Elias Smith even characterized Calvinism as part of ungodliness, declaring, “[M]y mind was delivered from Calvinism, universalism, and deism—three doctrines of men, which people love who do not love holiness.”35

  The Restoration and Christian Primitivist Movement came to be the dominant religious force in Charlottesville, and Jefferson openly embraced and promoted it. Not surprisingly, then, Jefferson’s writings during his latter years reflect all the major tenets of Christian Primitivism and Restorationism, using almost the exact tenor and words as the Restoration minsters surrounding him. Consider some of Jefferson’s declarations about each of the major beliefs of the Movement.

  On Primitivism and Restoration

  In his latter years Jefferson repeatedly wrote of the need to return to primitive Christianity and restore it to the time of Jesus and the Apostles.

  [T]he genuine and simple religion of Jesus will one day be restored such as it was preached and practiced by Himself. . . . I hope that the day of restoration is to come.36

  Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.37

  I . . . express my gratification with your efforts for the revival of primitive Christianity in your quarter.38

  [I]t is only by . . . getting back to the plain and unsophisticated precepts of Christ that we become real Christians.39

  Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from His lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian.40

  On Christian Unity and Cooperation

  Jefferson had already adopted this precept during the Great Awakening, and it remained with him throughout his life, including during the Restoration Movement. This trait had been apparent in his 1779 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which established denominational nonpreferentialism in the state. Again in 1800, when the church at the Capitol was started, Jefferson demonstrated a sense of unity by helping establish the policy whereby ministers from all denominations were invited to preach and yet again in 1819 when he invited all denominations to establish seminaries at his beloved University of Virginia. Recall, too, that Jefferson had regularly given financially to all types of Christian churches and helped build new ones for many differing denominations.

  Jefferson also openly celebrated those parts of the country wherein the denominations “condescend to interchange with . . . the other sects the civilities of preaching freely and frequently in each other’s meetinghouses,”41 and he specifically praised the locations in Charlottesville (such as the “union building” and the county courthouse) where ministers from various denominations would rotate preaching. As he extolled to a friend during the height of the Restoration Movement:

  In our village of Charlottesville . . . [w]e have four sects, but without either church or meeting-house. The court house is the common temple, one Sunday in the month to each. Here, Episcopalian and Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist meet together, join in hymning their Maker, listen with attention and devotion to each other’s preachers, and all mix in society with perfect harmony.42

  Jefferson believed strongly that the teachings of Jesus brought unity but that the teachings of denominations brought disunity and conflict. As he explained to John Adams in 1819:

  No doctrines of His lead to schism. It is the speculations of crazy theologists which have made a Babel of a religion the most moral and sublime ever preached to man, and calculated to heal and not to create differences. These religious animosities I impute to those who call themselves His ministers and who engraft their casuistries [personal interpretations] on the stock of His simple precepts. I am sometimes more angry with them than is authorized by the blessed charities which He preached.43

  On Emphasizing the Gospels and De-emphasizing the Epistles and Old Testament

  Jefferson had always drawn a clear distinction between the teachings found in the Gospels and those found in the rest of the Bible, but during the Restoration Movement that distinction took on a new fervor, leading almost to a wholesale rejection of those things not found in the Gospels. For example, he declared during the Mo
vement:

  In the New Testament, there is internal evidence that parts of it [i.e., the Gospels] have proceeded from an extraordinary man, and that other parts [i.e., the Epistles] are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.44

  Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him [Jesus] by His biographers [in the Gospels], I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others [in the Epistles], 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 [leader and spokesperson] and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus.45

  Another non-Gospel book on which Jefferson held a clear opinion was the book of Revelation. In 1825 General Alexander Smyth, a military officer from the War of 1812 and a longtime Virginia legislator, sought Jefferson’s opinion about a work he had prepared on the end times and the book of Revelation. Jefferson responded, telling Smith:

  [Y]ou must be so good as to excuse me, because I make it an invariable rule to decline ever giving opinions on new publications in any case whatever. No man on earth has less taste or talent for criticism than myself, and least and last of all should I undertake to criticize works on the Apocalypse. It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it, and I then considered it as merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherencies of our own nightly dreams.46

  But this negative opinion about the book of Revelation did not mean that Jefferson had no opinion on the end times, for he did. Jesus had specifically addressed this subject in the Gospels, so Jefferson had reached a conclusion on it much earlier in life. He therefore instructed his daughter Martha: