A Magnificent Catastrophe

by Edward J. Larson

  Two years before the election, Timothy Dwight, America’s leading evangelical minister and a virtual institution in his home state of Connecticut, laid down the gauntlet against Jeffersonian secularism in a published Fourth of July patriotic oration. He took a biblical passage from the Revelation of John as his text:

  And the sixth angel poured out his vile [of God’s wrath]…. And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth, and the whole world, to gather them to the battle of…Armageddon.

  Biblical prophecies about the end of time loomed large in Dwight’s theology and they inevitably influenced his political philosophy. A Calvinist, he believed that the state needed the church and political leaders needed Christ.

  Interpreting this biblical prophecy from John’s Revelation, Dwight posited that Americans were living under the outpouring of the sixth vial of God’s wrath, when the Antichrist’s empire crumbled and humankind embarked on what he called “a professed and unusual opposition to God” leading directly to the Final Judgment. Dwight saw the crumbling of the Antichrist’s empire in the collapse of Roman Catholicism before the revolutionary armies of France and marked opposition to God in the rise of Enlightenment naturalism. Deluded by French philosophy, princes and teachers in Europe had become proponents of “irreligion and atheism,” Dwight asserted. “The being of God was denied and ridiculed,” he added. “Chastity and natural affection were declared to be nothing more than groundless prejudices.” Spiritual and social ills merged in his conception of them, with their common root in demonic forces allegedly channeled through the secret Society of the Illuminati in Europe.

  In Dwight’s mind, Jefferson and the Republicans, as proponents of French secularism in America, served as the unwitting link between this vast satanic conspiracy and the United States. “The great bond of union to every people is its government,” Dwight declared. Without Christian rulers, “there is no center left of intelligence, counsel, or action; no system of purposes or measures; no point of rallying or confidence.”

  Secular chaos had replaced Christian order in France, he observed, and it could happen in the United States too if anticlerical leaders like Jefferson took power. “For what end shall we be connected with men of whom this is the character and conduct?” Dwight asked. “Is it that our churches may become temples of reason?…Is it that we may see the Bible cast into a bonfire?…Is it that we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution?” All these acts had become commonplace in France, he claimed. “Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire…or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?” Only Christian leaders can foster ordered liberty, Dwight maintained. “If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it, and nothing would be left which would be worth defending.”

  Dwight’s words carried weight. Dubbed the “Pope of Connecticut” by his detractors, Dwight served as president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817. From that post, he shepherded both his state’s Federalist Party and its established church. His brother represented Connecticut in Congress. Grandson of the legendary evangelical theologian Jonathan Edwards and first cousin of Aaron Burr, Dwight was an ordained minister in the state-supported Congregational Church. In books, sermons, lectures, and even poems, he used his keen intellect and sharp wit to promote his views of politics and religion.

  “Will you trust philosophers?” Dwight asked in his July 4 oration. “Men who set truth at nought, who make justice a butt of mockery, who doubt the being and providence of God?” Widely known for his interest in philosophy and science, Jefferson bore the brunt of Dwight’s assault. On the eve of the 1800 election, an appreciative Federalist leader in Massachusetts wrote, “Dr. Dwight is here stirring us up to oppose the Demon of Jacobinism.” By then, however, Dwight was not alone in this religious crusade.

  During the anxious months leading up to the presidential election, countless tracts, essays, and sermons damned Jefferson as a Deist or worse and called on Christians to oppose his candidacy. The flurry of activity bore the hallmarks of a coordinated campaign, but may have simply emanated from the collective angst of countless Christians, especially from the established churches of the Northeast, confronted with the prospect of something new: a President who did not defer to their beliefs. In their official capacities while President, Washington and Adams had publicly acknowledged God’s sovereignty and Christianity had flourished. Its prospect under Republican rule looked less certain.

  Dwight’s public airing of Illuminati conspiracy theories and invocation of obscure biblical prophecies evoked ridicule from the Republican press, even in Connecticut. “His overheated imagination adopts chimeras for reality,” an article in the New London Bee observed. “This perversion of the prophecies of revelation…increases and confirms the disciples of deism.” By 1800, Christian critics tended to take a subtler approach in their published attacks on Jefferson. In his words and deeds, Jefferson renounced the basic tenets of Christianity, they argued, and voters, as God’s anointed means of choosing America’s political leaders, therefore should reject his bid to become President. Rulers needed the wisdom that comes from faith in Christ and reliance on scripture, some Christians maintained. Although the Constitution permitted non-Christians to hold public office, they conceded, the people should impose their own religious test on candidates.

  In late-eighteenth-century America, most Deists and atheists kept their religious opinions private. Those who did not, such as patriot pamphleteer Thomas Paine in his 1795 book, The Age of Reason, were widely ostracized for their views. Indeed, in their zeal to expose error and attract followers, evangelical Christians probably exaggerated the extent of disbelief in the post-Revolutionary War period.

  Jefferson never publicly professed either Deism or atheism, even though critics regularly accused him of holding such views. When asked about the subject at this time, Jefferson later recalled, “My answer was, ‘say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone’”—which was hardly the response of either a Deist or an atheist. They would not speak of God knowing or caring about their religion: A personal God played no part in their thinking.

  Although Jefferson may have been a Deist at one time, by 1800 he probably was a Unitarian. His private writings from the period reveal a profound regard for Christ’s moral teachings and a deep interest in the gospels and comparative religion. “I am a Christian,” Jefferson confided to Benjamin Rush in 1803, “in the only sense that [Jesus] wished any one 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.” As Jefferson read the Bible, Jesus never professed to be God. Although his private denial of Christ’s divinity separated him from trinitarian Christians, his public statements and writings did not clearly betray the extent of his heterodoxy. To use it against him in 1800, Federalists needed to draw on circumstantial evidence. Jefferson was too circumspect a politician and Virginia gentleman to have published his innermost religious thoughts to the world.

  As the election approached, Federalist orators and pamphleteers endlessly repeated the same few hints of heresy drawn from Jefferson’s words and actions. Notes on the State of Virginia, written by Jefferson nearly two decades earlier, provided most of the fodder for his opponents. In it, for example, he defended his position on the separation of church and state by observing, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. 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.” No one would make such claims who believed in God or appreciated religion’s role in maintaining ordered liberty, Federalists charged. “Ponder well this paragraph. Ten thousand impieties and mischiefs lurk in its womb,” the Reverend John Mason of New York warned
in a partisan sermon published as a campaign pamphlet in September 1800. “I will not abuse you by asking whether the author of such an opinion can be a Christian? Or whether he has any regard for the scriptures which confine all wisdom and blessedness and glory…to the fear and the favor of God?” Another New York minister, William Linn, noted in his popular pamphlet, also published in 1800, “Let my neighbor once perceive himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket and break not only my leg but my neck.”

  Three other passages in Notes on the State of Virginia caught the eye of election-year religious inquisitors. First, Jefferson denied that the flood of Noah’s time, described in the Bible as covering all the earth, could have submerged Virginia’s mountains. Second, he suggested that the various human races had separate origins, which allegedly contradicted the biblical account of Adam and Eve as the first parents of all people. Third, he proposed that public-school students learn history rather than study the Bible “at an age where their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries.” Some Federalists openly asserted that such a critical approach toward scripture disqualified Jefferson for the presidency. He failed their religious test for public office. “On account of his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures, and his attempts to discredit them, he ought to be rejected for the Presidency,” the Reverend Linn concluded in his pamphlet. “Would Jews or Mahometans, consistently with their beliefs, elect a Christian? And should Christians be less zealous and active than them?” At the time, most readers of popular pamphlets and newspaper articles lacked access to Jefferson’s published writings, and so could not evaluate the accuracy of the claims made about them.

  In their public attacks, Christian critics drew on evidence from Jefferson’s private and public life to complete their picture of him as an infidel. Jefferson rarely attended church services, they noted. He desecrated the Sabbath by working and entertaining on Sunday. He did not invoke biblical authority or acknowledge Christ in the Declaration of Independence. When a foreign visitor to Virginia commented on the shabby condition of local churches, Jefferson reportedly replied, “It is good enough for him that was born in a manger!” Federalists eagerly repeated the visitor’s conclusion: “Such a contemptuous fling at the blessed Jesus could issue from the lips of no other than a deadly foe to his name and his glory.”

  A campaign tract addressed to Delaware voters by a self-proclaimed “Christian Federalist” put the issue in blunt terms. “If Jefferson is elected and the Jacobins get into authority,” it declared, “those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin, which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence, defend our property from plunder and devaluation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will be trampled upon and exploded.” With Republicans in power, this Christian warned, America would follow France into the moral and political abyss where the people turned “more ferocious than savages, more bloody than tigers, more impious than demons.”

  In a boldface notice captioned “THE GRAND QUESTION STATED” and reprinted almost daily during September and October, the Gazette of the United States, the nation’s premier Federalist newspaper, starkly presented the choice facing Christian voters in austere terms. “At the present solemn and momentous epoch,” it declared, “the only question to be asked by every American, laying his hand on his heart, is, ‘Shall I continue in allegiance to GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; or impiously declare for JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD!!!’” Stated this way, the choice seemed easy.

  Although Jefferson privately denounced the “lying pamphlets” and “absolute falsehoods” of his Christian critics, he feared that responding to them publicly would make matters worse. “As to the calumny of atheism, I am so broken to calumnies of every kind…that I entirely disregard it,” Jefferson wrote to James Monroe in May 1800. “It has been so impossible to contradict all their lies that I have determined to contradict none; for while I should be engaged with one, they would publish twenty new ones.” Nevertheless, assaults on his personal beliefs wounded Jefferson deeply. “I have a view of the subject which ought to displease neither the rational Christian nor Deists,” he assured Benjamin Rush in September 1800. “I do not know that it would reconcile the [irritable race of critics] who are in arms against me.” These critics opposed him because they believed that he would scuttle their schemes to establish their religion through law, Jefferson claimed. “And they believe rightly,” he added, “for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Clearly, Jefferson saw himself as the righteous party in this dispute.

  While Jefferson remained publicly above the fray, Republicans rushed to his defense. In separate pamphlets, longtime Republican propagandist John Beckley characterized Jefferson as “an adorer of our God” and George Clinton’s nephew, the rising New York politician DeWitt Clinton, hailed him as “a real Christian.” In their hands, Notes on Virginia became an epistle of orthodoxy. Both pamphlets circulated widely, with Beckley boasting in August that his work had gone through five printings in four different states of one thousand copies each. “It will, I trust, do some good,” he wrote in a letter to Monroe enclosed with a bundle of the pamphlets for distribution in Virginia.

  Republicans everywhere wooed Baptists, Methodists, and local members of smaller denominations by contrasting Jefferson’s support for religious liberty in Virginia with Adams’s deference to an established church in Massachusetts. Jefferson supported the “sound practical equality of the Quaker,” Pennsylvanians heard. He “does not think that a Catholic should be banished for believing in transubstantiation, or a Jew for believing in the God of Abraham,” a New Jersey Republican leader proclaimed. “The fact is, Mr. Jefferson is entitled to the applause of every sect of Christians throughout the United States,” a partisan essayist concluded. “He is a friend to real religion, which consists of this, that every man worships God agreeable to the dictates of his conscience.”

  Turning the tables on their accusers, Republicans also questioned the piety or religious orthodoxy of many leading Federalists. In an obvious reference to Hamilton’s admitted extramarital affair, for example, one partisan essayist asked smugly, “Mr. Jefferson stands preeminent for his political, social, moral, and religious virtues. He is in fact what his enemies pretend to be. But what shall we say of a faction who has at its head a confessed and professed adulterer?” Yankee Federalists countered with scandalous stories about the sex lives of Southern slaveholders but did not yet connect Jefferson with any one particular Black mistress.

  Other Republican writers took on Adams and Pinckney. Despite his bow to civil religion by participating in public worship and proclaiming national days of prayer and fasting, Adams privately differed little from Jefferson in his personal beliefs about God. Both men inclined toward Unitarianism, though Adams kept it under wraps better than Jefferson did and regularly attended conventional Christian church services during his presidency. This led some partisans to accuse Adams of hypocrisy. In their publications, Republicans also alluded to unfounded rumors about Pinckney’s reputation as an impious libertine. “I have always understood that Mr. Jefferson belonged to the Episcopal Church,” DeWitt Clinton wryly noted in his pamphlet. “How often he attends it I have not enquired, but I believe he does with as much sincerity as Mr. Adams and fully as frequently as Mr. Pinckney.” Partisan critics made taunting references to a 1788 satirical poem by Timothy Dwight, The Triumph of Infidelity, in which a profligate, prideful Deist, supposedly based on Pinckney, boasted of being “the first of men in the ways of evil” with “two whores already in my chariot.” The latter line alluded to Pinckney’s purported amorous affairs while an American diplomat in Paris.

  With all the candidates sullied, some partisans descended to the level of debating the relative merits of a pious hypocrite versus a known infidel as President. In a long newspaper essay, for example, a Republican wrote, “Now I don’t know that John Adams is a hypocr
ite, or Jefferson a Deist; yet supposing they are, I am of the opinion the last ought to be preferred to the first [because] a secret enemy is worse than an open and avowed one.” Even if Adams was a religious hypocrite, a Federalist pamphleteer shot back, “Your President, if an open infidel, will be a center of contagion to the whole continent.” Writing for the Carolina Gazette, an exasperated commentator reached a similar conclusion. “Mr. Adams may have no more real religion than my horse,” he declared, but in a contest with an open infidel, “all serious men would prefer the one who acknowledges his respect to his Maker.”

  For the most part, however, Christians on both sides probably accepted the professions of faith made on behalf of their party’s candidates and voted accordingly. Federalists proudly pointed to Adams’s public support for religious institutions: The President attended church, invoked God’s name in his speeches, and declared days of prayer and fasting. Republicans countered by noting Jefferson’s passion for religious liberty: He authored the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. Both political parties took Christian voters seriously.

  Mainly, however, Jefferson’s supporters simply urged voters to reject the concept of a religious test for public office and denounced Federalists for invoking one. Republican newspapers increasingly pushed this theme as the election approached. “No people differ more in their religious opinions than the people of the United States,” an editorial in Washington’s National Intelligencer noted, and therefore “religion ought to be kept distinct from politics.” The bellwether Republican Aurora presented the choice as one between “an established church, a religious test, and an order of priesthood” with the Federalists or “religious liberty, the rights of conscience, no priesthood, truth and Jefferson.” Given this choice, Aurora editor William Duane safely assumed that his readers would favor liberty.