Last
night I watched the Republican Convention and I thought back to two
figures that the conservative Right rave about. The truth is had they
ever read any of the works of Ayn Rand or Thomas Jefferson they would
know that neither have any real similarity to the modern Republican
party. I would like to concentrate and expalin both Ayn Rands
aetheism and Thomas Jefferson`s deism. The truth is the sheer
ignorance of the Republican activists. So for them I give them a
history lesson. I When you comsider the Republican party it makes you
appreciate how well read Nigel Fargae is..eh Gareth
Hanford?
spoils
of the people,” and established churches, in Jefferson’s view,
demanded the unreasoning submission of credulous flocks,
faith against reason.
Republican governments, however, could not survive without the
informed, ongoing consent of reasoning citizens that the complete
separation of church and state could alone assure. Freeing itself
from its corruptions, Christianity’s appeal to reasonable citizens
would be irresistible.
Jefferson
read the Bible carefully and repeatedly, seeking to sift Jesus’s
pure teachings from the conflicting accounts of his brief career as a
great reformer in the New Testament. Under the spell of the Greek
philosopher Plato and his conception of transcendent, ideal “forms,”
theologians, Jefferson believed, had discovered meanings between and
beyond the lines of Scripture that defied reason and justified
spiritual tyranny. Jefferson’s biblical hermeneutic—his
common-sense, rationalist mode of interpretation—led him to extract
his own version of the Christian Scripture from the corrupted texts
preserved in the Gospels. The “Jefferson Bible” was not meant for
publication and broad distribution, but instead modeled for his own
and his family’s edification how a reasonable republican citizen
might engage with Scripture.
Jefferson’s
countrymen might be less willing to jettison the accounts of miracles
and legends that made the historical Jesus divine and gave his
teachings the kind of authority that former American subjects imputed
to their British king, but self-governing Americans would follow
Jefferson’s lead in questioning authority. The bill Jefferson
proposed in 1779 for “the diffusion of knowledge” through
state-supported public schools was thus the perfect complement to his
Bill for Religious Freedom. Education was the surest “foundation”
that “can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and
happiness,” Jefferson told his mentor George Wythe in 1786: “if
any body thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators
of the public happiness, send them here . . . They will see
here with their own eyes that these descriptions of men are an
abandoned confederacy against the happiness of the mass of the
people.”[5]
Jefferson
did not believe unaided human reason could answer all metaphysical
questions. He would rather “sleep on the pillow of ignorance”
than speculate pointlessly about the presence of sea fossils in the
high Andes or—more profoundly—about the original implementation
of God’s design in his Creation. Priests and philosophers conjured
up comforting myths and fables to explain the inexplicable, but their
pretense to knowledge and authority disempowered the people. “Your
own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven,” Jefferson wrote
his nephew Peter Carr in 1787, “and you are answerable not for the
rightness but uprightness of the decision.” At this early date,
when he still could be accurately described as a “deist,”
Jefferson recognized both the limits of reason and the popular appeal
of the preachers’ myths and mysteries. It was crucially important,
however, for Jefferson to preach the republican gospel of equality:
“state a moral case to a ploughman & a professor,” Jefferson
told Carr,” the former will decide it as well, & often better
than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial
rules.” After all, Jefferson had exalted the common sense of the
people, their capacity to grasp “self-evident” truths, in the
Declaration of Independence. Republican citizens must learn to reason
for themselves and not defer to superior authorities who claimed a
monopoly on truth.[6]
Jefferson
repeatedly excoriated the unholy alliance of “kings, nobles, and
priests,” a this-worldly caricature of the Christian trinity. But
disestablishment defanged priestly power and led Jefferson to a more
positive and conciliatory attitude toward religious leaders. Early in
his career, his concern with separation of church and state led him
to proscribe clergymen from political office: if priests could lead
their own flocks astray, they were bound to exercise a deleterious
influence in the public councils: they would seek to gain special
favors and privileges from the state, and ultimately some sort of new
establishment. But by the time of Jefferson’s ascendancy to the
presidency in 1801, the “dominion of the clergy” was shattered
and the remaining establishments—in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and
New Hampshire—were on the defensive. As he famously wrote the
Danbury (Connecticut) Baptists in 1802, the American people had come
to see, with Jefferson, “that religion is a matter which lies
solely between man and his God.” Jefferson now tended to think of
preachers as ethical teachers, building congregations of “ploughmen”
by speaking the new republican language of common sense. Jefferson
knew that many preachers in the expanding evangelical sects had
little or no formal theological training: they were not the
sophisticated “professors” who had exploited popular credulity to
sustain hierarchy and church establishments. There was no reason,
Jefferson ultimately concluded, to exclude these preachers—many of
whom were his fervent supporters—from holding political office.[7]
Jefferson’s
early deism increasingly took on a self-consciously Christian cast.
The success of the republican experiment depended on a moral, even
spiritual revolution, something very much like the revivals of the
Second Great Awakening of the early decades of the nineteenth
century. Most historians argue that Jefferson—the stereotypical
deist of Federalist caricature—was hopelessly out of step with the
American people. They cite his absurd prediction (to Benjamin
Waterhouse in 1822), “that there is not a young
man now
living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.” But
Jefferson was not particularly
interested in sectarian labels or doctrinal differences. The key
thing was that “in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief,
which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor
priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving.”
Unitarians did not prove to be great revivalists—though Jefferson
did think “missionaries from Cambridge . . . would be
attended in the fields [of Virginia] by whole acres of hearers and
thinkers”—but other sects rose to the challenge, preaching up
democratic church organization, downplaying thorny theological
distinctions, and promoting an evangelical and ecumenical religion of
the people. Like Jefferson, evangelicals also often fashioned
themselves “primitive Christians,” returning with him to the pure
font of Christ’s teachings. Of course, they found different truths
in the Bible and their faith in the miraculous did not wane. But
their self-renovation in the “new birth”—the most compelling
“miracle” of all—bore striking similarities to Jefferson’s
fundamental faith in the capacity of former British subjects to be
born again as republican citizens.[8]
The
young Jefferson’s deism did not lead down the supposedly slippery
slope toward atheism and relativism. His republican faith instead
converged with a broad democratization of American Christianity and
was most eloquently expressed in his conception of his countrymen as
a “chosen people” with a providential role to play in world
history. Jefferson did not hesitate to invoke a God who acted through
history, unlike that distant and indifferent clockmaker of
Enlightenment deism. Jefferson’s democratic faith was not a product
of the Enlightenment: he was not a deist relic in a Christian age. To
the contrary, Jefferson’s conception of democracy and nationhood
drew himtoward Christianity:
by encouraging him to identify with the (overwhelmingly Christian)
American people, by underscoring the need for common values and
beliefs to sustain republicanism, and by countering the cosmopolitan
and universalistic tendencies of the Enlightenment. Jefferson
fervently believed that Americans constituted a unique and
exceptional people with a providential role to play in the
progressive transformation of the modern world.
[1] From
the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.
[2] Thomas
Jefferson, Notes
on the State of Virginia in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings (New
York: Library of America, 1984), 285.
[3] Thomas
Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803, in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings,
1124; Thomas Jefferson to Rev. Jared Sparks, November 4, 1820,
in The
Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
20 vols., Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds.
(Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–1904),
15:288; Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Whittemore, June 5, 1822,
in Jefferson’s
Extracts from the Gospels. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,
2nd series, Dickinson W. Adams, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1983), 404; Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson,
March 23, 1801, in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings,
1087–88.
[4] Thomas
Jefferson to Francis A. van der Kemp, July 30, 1816, in Extracts
from the Gospels,
375; Thomas Jefferson to Margaret Bayard Smith, August 6, 1816,
in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings,
1404.
[7] Thomas
Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802,
in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings,
510.
[8] Thomas
Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822, in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings,
1459; Jefferson to Waterhouse, July 19, 1822, in Dickinson W. Adams,
ed., Extracts
from the Gospels,
406–07.
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