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LIE # 7

Thomas Jefferson Was an Atheist and
Not a Christian

Jefferson’s own words and actions have proven many of the allegations against him are lies. But each has tended to exhibit a subtle nuance of one overarching theme: Jefferson was not religious. Or more to the point, he was not a Christian. Is this true? For modern writers the answer is simple:

Jefferson hated religion. . . . [Professor Joseph] Ellis claims that “like Voltaire, Jefferson longed for the day when the last king would be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”¹

Several of our founding fathers were deist and even hated Christianity . . . [including] Thomas Jefferson.²

Jefferson hated organized religion.³

Jefferson. . . . It’s very likely he was an atheist.⁴

[His] writings clearly prove that he was not a Christian, but a Freethinker.⁵

The term Freethinker may be unfamiliar to some, but it is the euphemism for atheist.⁶ Atheists believe that this name improves the public’s view of atheism. By definition, a Freethinker—an atheist—is:

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• one who believes that there is no deity⁷

• anyone who does not believe in the existence of any gods⁸

• a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings⁹

As already demonstrated, Jefferson does not fit any of these definitions—not even remotely. To the contrary, his own writings make clear that many of his endeavors were inspired by a strong belief in God and in His first principles. Jefferson definitely was not an atheist, but was he a Christian?

While Jefferson truly was a complex person, he was not confusing, obfuscating, or disingenuous. He was straightforward and truthful on the topics he addressed. And as with other subjects, Jefferson also spoke honestly about his personal faith and views of Christianity. But because he was so forthright on this topic, it is the most complicated area for historians to analyze.

Across his long life Jefferson went through several phases regarding his own personal beliefs about specific doctrines of Christianity. There are times when he took a firm position on a particular Christian doctrine then perhaps twenty years later changed his view and then again two decades after that reverted back to his original view. For this reason, quotes can be selected to make Jefferson appear to be either a mainstream Christian or a pagan heretic, depending on the period of Jefferson’s life from which the statements are taken. This chapter will present Jefferson’s views on Christianity in each of those phases, identifying times that he slips into and out of traditional orthodoxy in regard to specific Christian doctrines.

While there definitely were periods when Jefferson did challenge some specific doctrines, there never was a time when he questioned the overall value of Christianity to individuals or to a nation. And there never was a time when he was anti-Jesus or when he rejected Christianity. It is only in the nuances of some particular doctrines of Christianity that Jefferson’s personal faith becomes difficult to pin down or to draw a fixed and definite conclusion.

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Jefferson penned at least nineteen thousand letters during his lifetime. Of the scores of his letters that address the subjects of God, Christianity, and religion, only a handful, primarily from late in his life, raise concerns for traditional Christians. These few letters cannot, however, be dismissed out of hand simply because they represent such a tiny fraction of Jefferson’s otherwise positive declarations about Christianity. But neither can they be the only basis on which Jefferson’s faith is judged as many secularists and Jefferson critics do today.

To illustrate what might cause a period of change in Jefferson’s religious views, recall his earlier comments about David Hume. Hume had openly declared, “I expected in entering on my literary course, that all the Christians . . . should be my enemies.”¹⁰ Jefferson acknowledged that there was a time when he had voraciously studied and absorbed Hume’s writings and philosophy before eventually rejecting them:

I remember well the enthusiasm with which I devoured [Hume’s work] when young, and the length of time, the research and reflection which were necessary to eradicate the poison it had instilled into my mind.¹¹

It would, then, not be surprising that during the time of Jefferson’s “enthusiasm” about Hume, one might find him making statements or writing letters on religion and government that would reflect Hume’s philosophy before he was finally able “to eradicate the poison it had instilled into [my] mind.”

A spiritual change is also apparent in the period of Jefferson’s life surrounding his marriage to his wife, Martha. The twenty-nine-year old Jefferson married her in 1772, and those who knew her described her as “saintly.”¹² At the time of their wedding, America was four decades deep into the national revival known as the Great Awakening. This revival dramatically impacted the nation, including both Martha and Thomas. In fact, throughout the time of the Great Revival and for well over a decade after it, Jefferson’s writings and statements on religious faith can be considered as nothing less than orthodox.

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For example, when elected as a vestryman in his Anglican Church in 1768, Jefferson promised “to conform to the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England.”¹³ Anglican theological doctrine at that time completely embodied orthodox Christian tenets to which Jefferson swore his allegiance. And in 1776 (four years after his marriage to Martha) he penned his Notes on Religion in which he affirmed that Jesus was the Savior, the Scriptures were inspired, and that the Apostles’ Creed “contain[ed] all things necessary to salvation.”¹⁴

Jefferson loved and adored Martha, and they had six children—five daughters and one son. Martha was his constant companion and closest friend, and they were devoted to each other. In fact, the children clearly recalled and spoke of the sweet and precious relationship between the two, including Martha’s “passionate attachment to him, and her exalted opinion of him.”¹⁵ But the two also shared much loss and grief over their dear children. Of the six, only two lived to adulthood; Martha saw three of her children die, and Thomas saw five of them buried.

Martha’s tragic death occurred after only ten years of blissful marriage. It was a stunning blow to Jefferson, and he was emotionally devastated. As presidential biographer William Stoddard affirms:

[H]e was utterly absorbed in sorrow and took no note of what was going on around him. His dream of life had been shattered, and it seemed as if life itself had lost its claim upon him, for no faith or hope of his reached onward and inward to any other.¹⁶

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Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha, named for her mother, was with him at the time of his wife’s death, and she was her father’s “constant companion” during “the first month of desolation which followed.”¹⁷ She recounted Jefferson’s frame of mind during that tragic period, recalling:

A moment before the closing scene, he was led from the room almost in a state of insensibility by his sister Mrs. Carr, who with great difficulty got him into his library where he fainted and remained so long insensible that they feared he never would revive. The scene that followed I did not witness; but the violence of his emotion when, almost by stealth, I entered his room at night, to this day I dare not trust myself to describe. He kept [never left] his room three weeks, and I was never a moment from his side. He walked almost incessantly night and day, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely exhausted, on a pallet that had been brought in during his long fainting-fit. My aunts remained constantly with him for some weeks—I do not remember how many. When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain in the least frequented roads, and just as often through the woods.¹⁸

Not long after Martha’s death, Jefferson was sent by the Continental Congress as a diplomat to France. During those years, with the deep impact and clear remembrances and grief over Martha still so real to him, many questions remained, unanswered, and his faith was shaken. This is reflected in his writings. But by the time he became president, he had returned to a stronger and more orthodox position.

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This was evident only four years into his presidency when he faced another personal tragedy. In 1804 his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Mary (Polly), was in poor health after giving birth to her third child. Her husband, a congressman, was away in Washington with her father, so Polly moved into Monticello where she could receive constant attention. As soon as the legislative session was over, Jefferson rushed home to help care for her, but only a few short weeks after he returned, his beloved Polly died. This left only his eldest daughter, Martha, and himself remaining from the family of eight. Martha’s daughter (Jefferson’s granddaughter) reported his reaction to the death of Polly:

My mother [Martha] has told me that on the day of her sister’s death, she left her father alone for some hours. He then sent for her, and she found him with the Bible in his hands. He who has been so often and so harshly accused of unbelief, he, in his hour of intense affliction, sought and found consolation in the Sacred Volume.¹⁹

While such events impacted Jefferson’s faith, the greatest influence on his personal religious views was the religious disposition of the community around him. In many ways Jefferson was a mirror that accurately reflected the spiritual condition of his cherished central Virginia region around Charlottesville, the region in which he grew up and lived and to which he retired after his presidency.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.”

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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 with 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:

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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

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• 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.

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[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.

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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 Movement:

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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

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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:

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

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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:

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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

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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.

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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

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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 Jefferson 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.

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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

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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

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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

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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 heterodox 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.”

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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

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The condition of Jefferson’s private personal theology and Christian faith in his last years might be questioned, but what cannot be questioned is the fact that throughout his life, Jefferson was pro-Christian and pro-Jesus in his beliefs, demeanor, and public endeavors.