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by Answers101 on March 4th, 2006

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What were Thomas Jefferson's religious views?

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  • by Alatea on March 4th, 2006

    Alatea

    These facts about Jefferson's religion are known. He was raised as an Anglican and always maintained some affiliation with the Anglican Church. He was also known to contribute financially, in fair proportion, to every denomination in his town. While a student at William and Mary College, he began to read the Scottish moral philosophers and other authors who had made themselves students of church history. These scholars opened the door for Jefferson's informed criticism of prevailing religious institutions and beliefs. But it was the world renowned English Unitarian minister and scientist, Joseph Priestley, who had the most profound impact on his thought. According to Priestley's Corruptions of Christianity, published in 1782, and many other of his books, the teachings of Jesus and his human character were obscured and obfuscated in the early Christian centuries. As the Church Fathers adapted Christianity to Mediterranean-primarily Greek-forms of thought, they contrived doctrines altogether foreign to Biblical thought, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. Jefferson assumed that a thoroughly reformed Christian faith, true to Jesus' teaching, would be purged of all Greek influence and doctrinal absurdity.

    Jefferson never joined a Unitarian church. He did attend Unitarian services while visiting with Joseph Priestley after his immigration to Pennsylvania and spoke highly of those services. He corresponded on religious matters with numerous Unitarians, among them Jared Sparks (Unitarian minister, historian and president of Harvard), Thomas Cooper, Benjamin Waterhouse and John Adams. He was perhaps most open concerning his own beliefs in his long exchange of letters with John Adams during their late years, 1812-26.

    It is probably safe to say that Jefferson first acquired from Joseph Priestley features of his world view and faith which he found confirmed to his satisfaction by further thought and study for the rest of his life. These included a withering a scorn for Platonic and all forms of Neoplatonic metaphysics; a fierce loathing of all "priestcraft" whose practitioners he held guilty of deliberately perpetrating rank superstition for centuries, thus maintaining their own power; a serene conviction that Jesus' moral teaching was entirely compatible with natural law as it may be inferred from the sciences; and a unitarian view of Jesus. These features are all well attested in his voluminous private correspondence.

    Jefferson's earliest writings on religion exhibit a natural theology, a heavy reliance on reason, and the belief that morality comes not from special revelation but from careful attention to the inward moral sense. In a letter to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787, Jefferson advised, "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god."

    He considered Jesus the teacher of a sublime and flawless ethic. Writing in 1803 to the Universalist physician Benjamin Rush, Jefferson wrote, "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; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other."
    http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/thomasjefferson.html

    "A question has been raised as to Thomas Jefferson's religious views. There need be no question, for he has settled that himself. He was an Infidel, or, as he chose to term it, a Materialist. By his own account he was as heterodox as Col. Ingersoll, and in some respects even more so."
    Surely, Christians, your cause must be growing desperate, when, to sustain it, you must needs claim for its support so bitter an enemy as Thomas Jefferson -- a man who affirmed that he was a Materialist; a man who recognized in your religion only "our particular superstition," a superstition without "one redeeming feature;" a man who divided the Christian world into two classes -- hypocrites and fools; a man who asserted that your Bible is a book abounding with "vulgar ignorance;" a man who termed your Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, a "hocus-pocus phantasm;" a man who denounced your God as "cruel, vindictive, and unjust;" a man who intimated that your Savior was "a man of illegitimate birth;" a man who declared his disciples, including your oracle, Paul, to be a "band of dupes and impostors," and who characterized your modern priesthood as "cannibal priests" and an "abandoned confederacy" against public happiness.”
    http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/john_remsburg/six_historic_americans/chapter_2.html

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  • by the Otter on August 31st, 2008

    the Otter

    Alatea’s answer is awesome, but I might also add this statement that Thomas Jefferson was among the early restorationists:

       “I trust with you that the genuine and simple religion of Jesus will one day be
        restored: such as it was preached and practised by himself. very soon after his
        death it became muffled up in mysteries, and has been ever since kept in
        concealment from the vulgar eye. to penetrate and dissipate these clouds of
        darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education. enlightened by
        it’s [sic] torch the disciples of religion will see that, instead of abandoning their
        reason, as the superstition of every country requires, and taking for the [illegible]
        of their god whatever their own hierophants declare it to be (and no two of them
        declaring it alike) that god has confided to them the advent of reason, not to hide
        under a bushel, but to render him a [illegible] of it’s [sic] employment”
        (Thomas Jefferson, personal letter to Francis A. van der Kemp, 9 July 1820).

    HTH!

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Jefferson materialist
To van der kemp 1820 the genuine and simple religion of jesus will one day be restored such as it was preached and practised by himself very soon after his death it became muffled up in mysteries and has been ever since kept in concealment from
To van der kemp 1820 the genuine and simple religion of jesus will one day be restored such as it was preached and practised by himself very soon after his death it became muffled up in mysteries and has been ever since kept in concealment from the vu
A question has been raised as to thomas jefferson s religious views
F a van der kemp july 1820

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