by David Barton
I hope you will have good sense enough to disregard these foolish predictions that the world is to be at an end soon. The Almighty has never made known to anybody at what time He created it, nor will He tell anybody when he means to put an end to it—if ever He means to do it. As to preparations for that event, the best way is for you to be always prepared for it. The only way to be so is never to do nor say anything amiss or to do anything wrong. Consider beforehand; you will feel something within you which will tell you it is wrong and ought not to be said or done; this is your conscience, and be sure to obey it. Our Maker has given us all this faithful internal monitor, and if you always obey it you will always be prepared for the end of the world, or for a much more certain event which is death.47
Jefferson also wrote a lengthy letter to William Short, whom he considered an adopted son, extolling what Jesus taught in the Gospels but deriding what had been taught in the Old Testament:
That sect [the Jews] had presented for the object of their worship a Being of terrific character: cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust. Jesus, taking for His type the best qualities of the human head and heart (wisdom, justice, goodness) and adding to them power, ascribed all of these (but in infinite perfection) to the Supreme Being, and formed Him really worthy of their adoration.48
Jefferson also denounced the Old Testament tendency toward continual fighting between nations, contrasting that practice with what Jesus had taught:
The one [Moses] instilled into his people the most antisocial spirit towards other nations; the other [Jesus] preached philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence.49
Jefferson also noted that the Old Testament position of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was quite different from the system Jesus brought.50 He also disagreed with Old Testament theology “which supposes the God of infinite justice to punish the sins of the fathers upon their children, unto the 3rd and 4th generations.”51 In short, in late life, Jefferson, just like the ministers in Christian Primitivism, focused almost solely on the Gospels, criticizing both the Epistles and the Old Testament.
Anti-Calvinistic
Throughout most of his life, Jefferson had viewed the Presbyterians as his allies, declaring that “the Presbyterian spirit is known to be so congenial with friendly liberty,”52 but in the Restoration Movement he reversed course. With the Movement’s strident rejection of Calvinism, Presbyterians—the denomination most closely affiliated with Calvinism—became the object of Jefferson’s denunciation:
The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical and ambitious—ready at the word of the lawgiver (if such a word could be now obtained) to put the torch to the pile and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus [a leader in the Reformation whom Calvin permitted to be burned at the stake for heresy regarding Trinitarianism], because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed. They want to re-establish by law that holy inquisition which they can now only infuse into public opinion.53
He further declared that “[m]y fundamental principle would be the reverse of Calvin’s”54 and that “Calvinism has introduced into the Christian religion more new absurdities than its leader had purged it of old ones [during the Reformation].”55 Jefferson listed several specific teachings of Calvin with which he vehemently disagreed, including Calvin’s claim “that God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals to be saved and certain others to be damned; and that no crimes of the former can damn them, no virtues of the latter save.”56 He also denounced Calvin’s teaching “that good works, or the love of our neighbor, are nothing” and “that reason in religion is of unlawful use.”57
Jefferson pointedly told John Adams:
I can never join Calvin in addressing his God. He was indeed an atheist (which I can never be), or rather his religion was daemonism [worship of an evil god]. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his five points is not the God Whom you and I acknowledge and adore—the Creator and Benevolent Governor of the world, but a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all than to blaspheme Him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.58
Bible Specific Language and Anti-Trinitarianism
As noted earlier, Restorationists thought that if a term was not in the Bible then it should not be in Christianity. This is why the Reverend Stone said that because the word Trinity did not appear in the Bible, the doctrine should therefore be rejected. In the latter years of Jefferson’s life, he embraced the same view, even though it was a view that he had not held in earlier years. So, like the Reverend Elias Smith before him, Jefferson delineated things that did not appear in actual language of the Scriptures and should therefore be rejected, including the “immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him [instead of God], his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, &c.”59
In earlier years, however, Jefferson had openly embraced doctrinal beliefs he was now rejecting. But having fully embraced the Christian Primitivist position, he predicted, wrongly:
[T]he day will come when the mystical generation [i.e., the conception] of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva [the Roman virgin goddess] in the brain of Jupiter.60
Are such statements heretical by the standards of orthodox Christianity? Absolutely. But unfortunately, this is what was being preached and advocated by the major Christian leaders in central Virginia. Jefferson attended their churches and heard this message directly from them. In fact, it was during his affiliation with Christian Primitivism that he first expressed Anti-Trinitarian views in a letter to John Adams in 1813.61 Of course, it should be remembered that the Restoration Movement also had many sound doctrines (that Jesus was the Savior, baptism and communion were important, the teachings of Jesus were to be diligently studied and followed, and so forth), but they also clearly had several errant ones. It is Jefferson’s writings in the latter category that understandably cause so much consternation among traditional Christians.
Unitarianism
The Primitivist emphasis on Christian unity and Anti-Trinitarianism provided the seedbed in which Unitarianism flourished. However, it is important to note that Unitarianism in Jefferson’s day was not at all what it is has become today.
Unitarianism appeared in America as early as 1785. Its doctrines were stated by William Ellery Channing in 1819, and the American Unitarian Association was formed in 1825.62 Unitarianism had some definite theological problems at that time, but it was still universally considered a Christian denomination.63 As observers in that day noted, “[S]everal of the ablest defenders of Christianity against the attacks of infidels have been Unitarians.”64 But in 1838 it underwent a radical change when Ralph Waldo Emerson began slowly reshaping Channing’s 1819 teachings, which were still largely Christian, into
a Transcendentalist version of the ethical theism of Plato, the Stoics and Kant, coordinated with the nascent evolutionist science of the day and the newly explored mysticism of the ancient East. This new religious philosophy, as construed and applied by the Boston preacher Theodore Parker and other disciples of Emerson, included the other great ethnic faiths with Christianity in a universal religion of Humanity and through its intellectual hospitality operated to open Unitarian fellowship to evolutionists, monists, pragmatists, and humanists.65
Many of today’s ultra-heretical Unitarian doctrines did not exist at the time of Jefferson. The primary heterodox doctrine at that time (which still was a genuine problem) was that Jesus was the son of God but not God Himself. But there were at least four reasons why Jeffe
rson found himself comfortable with early Unitarians.
First, perhaps more than any other religious group in that day, the Unitarians placed a very strong emphasis on teaching morals. Recall Jefferson’s keen interest in this subject with his personal and diligent study of the moral teachings of leaders from the previous three millennia. In fact, the Unitarians’ emphasis on morality was so strong that it was the sole reason that President John Quincy Adams (an evangelical Christian) attended a Unitarian Church in Washington, DC. After acknowledging, “I did not subscribe to many of his [the minister’s] doctrines, particularly not to the fundamental one of his Unitarian creed,”66 Adams explained that he attended the church because the minister’s “moral discourses were always good, and . . . I listened to them with pleasure and profit.”67 Jefferson likewise found Unitarian moral teachings to be very appealing, for Unitarian ministers at that time laid great stress on the practical day-to-day aspects of the moral teachings of Jesus and the Bible, as did Jefferson.
Second, Unitarians took a strong position against slavery and for emancipation. Abolition advocates reported that “the Unitarians, next to the Quakers, seem to have acted with more zeal in behalf of the negroes.”68 But some Unitarians disagreed, believing that they had done even more than the Quakers. As Unitarian minister Samuel May explained, “We Unitarians have given to the antislavery cause more preachers, writers, lecturers, agents, poets, than any other denomination.”69 Emancipation was obviously a position that Jefferson had advocated throughout his life, so it is understandable that he felt at home among Unitarians.
Third, Unitarians emphasized the interdenominational cooperation and acceptance that was a lifelong hallmark of Jefferson’s personal beliefs, as has already been demonstrated.
Fourth, while other denominations confined their membership to only those Christians who embraced their specific doctrines, the Unitarians embraced all who called themselves Christian. This type of open Christian acceptance was particularly appealing to Jefferson, for he had been continually attacked and vilified by certain denominations of Christians, even when expressing completely orthodox Christian beliefs. But among Unitarians he found acceptance and a personal peace—relief from unrelenting attacks and controversies. He seemed, however, to forget that many of the Federalists who attacked him during his campaigns had been Unitarians; but at that time he was probably more cognizant of their Federalist political affiliation than their Unitarian religious one.
Perhaps as a result of the vicious attacks he had suffered, Jefferson became generally loath to talk about his personal faith with others unless they were among a handful of close personal friends.70 And even with these, he would still ask them to return his letter after they had read it71 or else burn, destroy, or keep it secret72 so that its contents would not become fodder for his enemies.
In fact, two decades earlier, at a time when his Christian beliefs were still orthodox, Jefferson told his attorney general, Levi Lincoln, that if content from his private letters about religion should “get into print,” the effect would be that he “would become the butt of every set of disquisitions which every priest would undertake to write on every tenet it expresses. Their object is not truth, but matter whereon to write against.”73
Lengthy experience had taught Jefferson to let nothing about his religious views become public, except in general terms. He therefore largely adopted a live-and-let-live philosophy. As he explained to one inquirer:
I take no part in controversies, religious or political. At the age of eighty, tranquility is the greatest good of life; and the strongest of our desires, that of dying in the good will of all mankind. And with the assurances of all my good will to Unitarian and Trinitarian, to Whig and Tory, accept for yourself that of my entire respect.74
Perhaps it was because Jefferson was so drawn to the cooperation and acceptance of early Restoration and Primitivism that he also accepted so many of their other Unitarian beliefs. Nevertheless, he found early Unitarianism to be personally satisfying and hoped it would sweep the country, optimistically declaring, “I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States.”75 Jefferson so embraced the Unitarian emphasis on returning to primitive Christianity that in 1822 he hopefully expressed, “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.”76
But, in this, Jefferson was wrong. By the time he died four years later, the trend was swinging back; the effect of the Second Great Awakening was substantially slowing Unitarianism across the rest of the country. O’Kelly, one of the Founders of the Restoration Movement and the only clear Trinitarian among its four major leaders, wrote in 1824:
The Arians [those who do not believe that the Godhead is equal], or Unitarians, in this state perhaps are fading fast; some of their preachers, I hope, may be convinced of their dangerous error and return to the Christian Church. To me it appears that to deny Jesus Christ as being equal Deity is a destructive idea and in fact is, at least in effect, denying the Atonement.77
Regrettably, Jefferson did not live long enough to experience the reversal that eventually occurred in his central Virginia valley, and, given the pattern of his life, it is certainly possible that had time permitted, he well might have changed his position and come back to his previous and more traditional Christian beliefs on the Trinity. Happily, much of the Anti-Trinitarian element that took hold in Charlottesville did not survive elsewhere, and the Trinitarian branch of the Restoration Movement gradually developed into the denominations known as the Churches of Christ, the Christian Church, and the Disciples of Christ.
So what conclusions can be made about Jefferson’s spiritual condition and whether or not he was a Christian? Well, Jefferson definitely called himself a Christian. For example, during the Restoration Movement he told his old friend Charles Thomson, “I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”78
Even well before the Restoration movement, he had similarly told Benjamin Rush:
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 any one to be: sincerely attached to His doctrines in preference to all others.79
But such unequivocal declarations are not the end of the story, for many of the declarations made by Jefferson during the period of the Restoration Movement definitely do not comport with an orthodox understanding of what it means to be a Christian, although they are consistent with Christian Primitivism. Apparently, Jefferson himself recognized this, and in 1819 he acknowledged to the Reverend Ezra Stiles, a military chaplain during the Revolution and the president of Yale, “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.”80
Dumas Malone, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Thomas Jefferson, understood the difficulty of analyzing the orthodoxy of Jefferson’s faith. He acknowledged that on the one hand, “This apostle of spiritual freedom regarded himself as a Christian, and unquestionably he was one in his ethical standards.”81 But on the other hand, when one references the statements he made during his latter fifteen years, “Jefferson did not refer to the Messiah, the Savior, or the Christ,” although he did continue to have “unbounded admiration for Jesus.”82
Significantly, for nearly every Christian doctrine that Jefferson called into question in his last fifteen years, across his earlier sixty-eight years he had embraced that very same doctrine as orthodox. In fact, only a decade before Jefferson entered the Restoration Movement, he personally assured Dr. Benjamin Rush that “he believed in the Divine mission of the Savior of the World,” “in the Divine institution of the Sabbath,” and “likewise in the resurrection, and a future state of rewards and punishments.” (Although Rush acknowledged that there still existed some theological differences between himself and Jefferson.83) After conversing with Jefferson on his personal religious views of Christianity, Rush confessed to Jefferson that “you are by no means so he
terodox as you have been supposed to be by your enemies.”84
Probably no human today can know for sure whether or not Jefferson finished his life as a Christian in good standing with God through Jesus Christ; only God knows for sure. Perhaps Jefferson, having once had a strong early Christian faith which later became contaminated and weak, fits into the category of 1 Corinthians 3:15 that “[i]f anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.”
Several things are certain, however, including the clear fact that Jefferson was not an atheist. As he affirmed to John Adams, “[A]n atheist . . . I can never be.”85
Jefferson also was definitely not a deist. A deist believes in an impersonal God uninvolved with mankind and embraces the “clockmaker theory” that there was once a God Who made the universe and wound it up like a clock but that it now runs of its own volition; the clockmaker is gone. Prayer is therefore unavailing, for the clockmaker no longer intervenes in the affairs of men.86 It is clear that none of Jefferson’s religious writings from any period of his life reveal anything less than his strong conviction in a personal God87 Who answers prayers and intervenes in the affairs of mankind88 and before Whom every individual would stand to be judged.89
Not only was Jefferson definitely not an atheist or a deist, he clearly was not a secularist—nor was he irreligious. To the contrary, he strongly promoted religion in general and Christianity in particular. He regularly expressed his personal affinity for the teachings of Jesus90 and frequently referenced the Bible in his own writings.91 In fact, after Jefferson’s death when his grandson was asked about Jefferson’s religious opinions and beliefs, he reported:
I never heard from him the expression of one thought, feeling, or sentiment inconsistent with the highest moral standard or the purest Christian charity in its most enlarged sense. His moral character was of the highest order, founded upon the purest and sternest models of antiquity, softened, chastened and developed by the influences of the all-pervading benevolence of the doctrines of Christ, which he had intensely and admiringly studied. . . . In his contemplative moments, his mind turned to religion, which he studied thoroughly. He had seen and read much of the abuses and perversions of Christianity; he abhorred those abuses and their authors and denounced them without reserve. He was regular in his attendance on church, taking his prayer-book with him. He drew the plan of the Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, was one of the largest contributors to its erection, and contributed regularly to the support of its minister. I paid, after his death, his subscription of $200 to the erection of the Presbyterian Church in the same village. A gentleman of some distinction calling on him, and expressing his disbelief in the truths of the Bible, his reply was, “Then, sir, you have studied it to little purpose.” He was guilty of no profanity himself, and did not tolerate it in others—he detested impiety, and his favorite quotation for his young friends as a basis for their morals was the XV Psalm of David.92
