And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a Virgin Mary, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.... But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding. (Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, 11 April 1823, as quoted by E. S. Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, p. 287.)
... Jefferson expressed himself strongly on that larger apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, in a letter to Alexander Smyth of 17 January 1825: it is "merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy, nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams." Apocalyptic writing deserved no commentary, for "what has no meaning admits no explanation"; therefore, apocalyptic prophecies associated with Jesus deserved and would receive no attention from Jefferson in his Life and Morals of Jesus. (E. S. Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, p. 287.)
... our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day [Fourth of July] forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.... (Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826 [Jefferson's last letter, dated ten days before he died]; from Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 372.)
Jefferson wrote voluminously to prove that Christianity was not part of the law of the land and that religion or irreligion was purely a private matter, not cognizable by the state. (Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy, New York: Schocken Books, 1981, p. 335.)
So much is Jefferson identified in the American mind with his battle for political liberty that it is difficult to entertain the possibility that he felt even more strongly about religious liberty. If the letters and activities of his post presidential years can be taken as a fair guide, however, he maintained an unrelenting vigilance with respect to freedom in religion, and an unrelenting, perhaps even unforgiving, distrust of all those who would seek in any way to mitigate or limit or nullify that freedom. (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, pp. 46-47.)
... Jefferson, who as a careful historian had made a study of the origin of the maxim [that the common law is inextricably linked with Christianity], challenged such an assertion. He noted that "the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or that such a character existed .... What a conspiracy this, between Church and State." (Leo Pfeffer, Religion, State, and the Burger Court, Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1984, p. 121.)
... The most revealing writings concerned the commonly repeated maxim that Christianity was part of the common law. In two posthumously published writings, an appendix to his Reports of Cases Determined in the General Court and a letter to Major John Cartwright, Thomas Jefferson took issue with the maxim. He traced the erroneous interpretation to a seventeenth-century law commentator who, Jefferson argued, misinterpreted a fifteenth-century precedent. He then traced the error forward to his favorite bte noire, Lord Mansfield, who wrote that "the essential principles of revealed religion are part of the common law." Jefferson responded with a classic, positivistic critique: Mansfield "leaves us at our peril to find out what, in the opinion of the judge, and according to the measures of his foot or his faith, are those essential principles of revealed religion, obligatory on us as part of the common law." (Daniel R. Ernst, "Church-State Issues and the Law: 1607-1870" in John F. Wilson, ed., Church and State in America: A Bibliographic Guide. The Colonial and Early National Periods," New York: Greenwood Press, 1986, p. 337. Ernst gives his source as Thomas Jefferson, "Whether Christianity is Part of the Common Law?")
It was what he did not like in religion that gave impetus to Jefferson's activity in that troublesome and often bloody arena. He did not like dogmatism, obscurantism, blind obedience, or any interference with the free exercise of the mind. Moreover, he did not like the tendency of religion to confuse truth with power, special insight with special privilege, and the duty to maintain with the right to persecute the dissenter. Ecclesiastical despotism was as reprehensible as despotism of the political sort, even when it justified itself, as it often did, in the name of doing good. This had been sufficiently evident in his native Virginia to give Jefferson every stimulus he needed to see that independence must be carried over into the realm of religion. (E. S. Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, p. 279.)
... If this [extending religion's influence on the basis of "reason alone"] is the path chosen by Omnipotence and Infallibility, what sense can there possibly be in "fallible and uninspired men ... setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible"? No sense at all, argued Jefferson, who found compulsion in religion to be irrational, impious, and tyrannical. If such compulsion is bad for the vulnerable citizen, its consequences are no more wholesome for the church: "It tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it." (E. S. Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, p. 280.)
A final example of Jefferson's separationism may be drawn from his founding of the University of Virginia in the last years of his life. Prepared to transform the College of William and Mary into the principal university of the state, Jefferson would do so only if the college divested itself of all ties with sectarian religion--that is, with its old Anglicanism now represented by the Protestant Episcopal Church. The college declined to make that break with its past, and Jefferson proceeded with plans for his own university well to the west of Anglican-dominated tidewater Virginia. In Charlottesville this new school ("broad & liberal & modern," as Jefferson envisioned it in a letter to [Joseph] Priestly of 18 January 1800) opened in 1825 with professorships in languages and law, natural and moral philosophy, history and mathematics, but not in divinity. In Jefferson's view, as reported in Robert Healey's Jefferson on Religion in Public Education, not only did Virginia's laws prohibit such favoritism (for divinity or theology was inevitably sectarian), but high-quality education was not well served by those who preferred mystery to morals and divisive dogma to the unities of science. Too great a devotion to doctrine can drive men mad; if it does not have that tragic effect, it at least guarantees that a man's education will be mediocre. What is really significant in religion, its moral content, would be taught at the University of Virginia, but in philosophy, not divinity. If Almighty God has made the mind free, one of the ways to keep it free is to protect young minds from the clouded convolutions of theologians. Jefferson wanted education separated from religion because of his own conclusions concerning the nature of religion, its strengths and its weaknesses, its dark past and its possibly brighter future. (E. S. Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, pp. 282-283.)
Moving well beyond the traditional deistic triad of God, freedom, and immortality, Jefferson revealed his strongest feelings and convictions with regard to the ecclesiastics. On two counts he found them critically deficient. In the realm of politics and power, they were tyrannical; in the realm of theology and truth, they were perverse. Jefferson's strongest language is reserved for those clergy who, as he said in a letter to Moses Robinson of 23 March 1801, "had got a smell of union between church and state" and would impede the advance of liberty and science. Such clergy, whether in America or abroad, have so adulterated religion that it has become "a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves" and a means of grasping "impious heresies, in order to force them down [men's] throats" (letter to Samuel Kercheval, 19 January 1810). In his old age, Jefferson softened his invective not one whit: "The Presbyterian clergy are the 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 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, because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and one is three." And if they cannot revive the holy inquisition of the Middle Ages, they will seek to mobilize the inquisition of public opinion, "that lord of the Universe" (letter to William Short, 13 April 1820). Jefferson, the enemy of all arbitrary and capricious power, found that which was clothed in the ceremonial garb of religion to be particularly despicable. Even more disturbing to Jefferson was the priestly perversion of simple truths. If "in this virgin hemisphere" it was no longer possible to burn men's bodies, it was still possible to stunt their minds. In the "revolution of 1800" that saw Jefferson's election to the presidency, the candidate wrote to his good friend Rush that while his views would please deists and rational Christians, they would never please that "irritable tribe of priests" who still hoped for government sanction and support. Nor would his election please them, "especially the Episcopalians and the Congregationalists." They fear that I will oppose their schemes of establishment. "And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" (23 September 1800). It was this aspect of establishment that Jefferson most dreaded and most relentlessly opposed--not just the power, profit, and corruption that invariably accompanied state-sanctioned ecclesiasticism but the theological distortion and intellectual absurdity that passed for reason and good sense. We must not be held captive to "the Platonic mysticisms" or to the "gossamer fabrics of factitious religion." Nor must we ever again be required to confess that which mankind did not and could not comprehend, "for I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition" (letter to John Adams, 22 August 1813). (E. S. Gaustad, "Religion," in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986, p. 291.)
I agree in principle but I fail to see your point.
