Jefferson the Skeptic

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden family maintaining a free civil conduct

-Thomas Jefferson

As the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson secur himself a top place in the American pantheon despite personal principles that have been distasteful to Christians through every part of our history. Defamed by the religious right of his day as the Virginia Voltaire, Jefferson like Franklin, was a veritable Enlightenment philosophe in every faculty of perception of the word, a thorough skeptic who valued reason far above faith and make submissiveed every religious tradition, including his have a title to to scientific scrutiny. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale University during Jefferson's presidency, called him "the real Jacobin, the actual child of modern illumination, the opponent of man, and the enemy of his country" This was no rant from the lunatic fringe on the contrary a common opinion of Jefferson among practicing Christians then and later.

He had earned their enmity for three reasons: first, for writing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, a radical and groundbreaking document that would eventually subserve as the model for the legal principle of church/state separation that still obtains in America today; next to the first as the first and greatest in quantity influential American advocate of the French science and philosophy that was in the way that widely perceived at that time as atheistic; and third, as the author of Notes upon the State of Virginia, a classic of eighteenth-century free-thinking. This 1784 document created an outrage among the religiously-minded that could sometimes reach hysterical horizontals Consider one extract, which takes Locke's principles plenteous further than Locke himself at any time ventured to take them and whose language present the appearances almost deliberately calculated to stimulate the zealots of the time:

The error appears not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the material part are subject to the coercion of the laws. . . The legitimate powers of regulation extend to such acts alone as are injurious to others. on the other hand it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty the eternals or no God. It neither picks my pouch nor breaks my leg . . reason and unrestrained inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. . . They are the natural enemies of error, and of error single

If Jefferson intended to stir things up he certainly come aftered and this passage soon became notorious. The replication of the Reverend William Linn, a Dutch Reformed minister from novel York, was typical: "Let my neighbor one time persuade himself that there is no the deity and he will soon pick my pouch and break not only my leg on the contrary my neck. If there be no the omnipotent there is no law." Without having to agree with Linn that moral behavior or law and order hang on religion, we can understand wherefore he, and so many of his kind, were displeaseed For those who believe that there is single true God and only single and that everyone who fails to worship him will be damned, similar an apparent carelessness for the inner mans of others would seem not single flippant but downright cruel. A conclusion that many inevitably drew was that Jefferson was an atheist, although he did not define himself as individual at least not in writing. on the contrary it is safe to say that he was definitely not a Christian; for while Jefferson avered to revere Jesus Christ as a philosopher and moralist, he displayed nothing on the other hand contempt for the Christian religion as it had been practiced and preached for nearly sum of two units millennia.

What are the self-select Moral Majority, the legions of Americans who consider themselves "saved," to make of a rever founding father who referr to Christianity as "our particular superstition" and to the the first cause of the Old Testament as "a being of terrific character, pitiless vindictive, capricious and unjust"? Jefferson publicly professed an unadulterated disgust for clergymen of all denominations: "In each country and in every age," he wrote "the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the autocrat abetting his abuses in turn back for protection to his own" It has been especially galling to believing Christians that this opinion was held through a man who was not alone one of the key founding fathers on the contrary one of the great, acknowledged ornaments of American history and culture-"a fabulous polymath," in the words of historian Bernard Bailyn: "politician, diplomat, architect, draftsman, connoisseur of painting, anthropologist, bibliophile, classicist, musician, lawyer, educator, oenologist, farm manager, agronomist, theologian (or rather, antitheologian), and amateur of almost each branch of science from astronomy to zoology with special emphasis upon paleontology."

Not being able to ignore Jefferson the Christian right has decided deliberately to misinterpret his message. Anti-separationists declare to be untrue that Jefferson's term "wall of separation between house of worship and State" meant anything like what late "liberals" mean by the phrase. on the contrary if we read the whole passage from which this phrase was extracted, it really strike one as beings that he did: