WAS JEFFERSON AN ATHEIST?

On this President’s Day holiday we ask the question whether our third President, Thomas Jefferson, was an atheist. Noted atheist author, the late Christopher Hitchens, in his book on Jefferson tries to establish Jefferson’s atheism. But his case is unconvincing.

Jefferson surely was critical of religion. He said all sects “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight.” He castigated Presbyterians as “the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical, and ambitious, ready….to put the torch to the pile (to burn at the stake) and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus” (Servetus was accused and condemned and burned at the stake for being a Unitarian in Calvin’s Trinitarian Geneva.)

Congregationalists do not come off much better. When Congregationalism was disestablished in Connecticut in 1818 (i.e. no longer supported by public taxes) Congregationalist John Adams (our 2nd President) welcomed the “resurrection of Connecticut to light and liberty.” Jefferson congratulated Adams that “this den of priesthood is at length broken up, and that a Protestant popedom (which was what he labeled Connecticut Congregationalism) is no longer to disgrace American history and character.”

Jefferson opposed tyranny of any kind, especially the tyranny of ignorance and superstition in religion. He wrote to the Connecticut Baptists in 1800 that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God….” He then added the well-known statement that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And then continued with this famous phrase, “Thus building up a wall of separation between church and state.” (we are to be reminded this phrase does not appear in the Constitution, but in this letter to the Connecticut Baptists).

On the Jefferson Monument in Washington these famous words of Jefferson are engraved: “For I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” And in Jefferson’s Enlightenment mind, the deadliest and bloodiest form of tyranny was that of religion. Jefferson wanted freedom for religion, but perhaps even more he wanted freedom from religion. As Edwin Gaustad observed, in Jefferson’s view, “Almighty God has made the mind free; in the name of God it must be kept free.” Jefferson most surely was not an atheist, but probably an Enlightenment Deist and Unitarian. Jefferson regularly affirmed his belief in the Designer-Creator who gave the gifts of reason and liberty.

And at the end of his life he referred to the benevolence of God. So on this President’s Day it is helpful to remember that President Jefferson was not an atheist but a Deist believing in the Designer God who was also benevolent.