Posted on 04/28/2005 11:23:24 AM PDT by PhilipFreneau
Talk Radio Host Tom Sullivan, sitting in today for Rush Limbaugh, failed to challenge a caller (a self-declared "secularist") who labeled Jefferson a 'Deist'. Thomas Jefferson was no deist.
In the source column, Dr. James Kennedy wrote:
"While Jefferson has been lionized by those who seek to drive religion from public life, the true Thomas Jefferson is anything but their friend. He was anything but irreligious, anything but an enemy to Christian faith. Our nation's third president was, in fact, a student of Scripture who attended church regularly, and was an active member of the Anglican Church, where he served on his local vestry. He was married in church, sent his children and a nephew to a Christian school, and gave his money to support many different congregations and Christian causes."
Further reading of the column reveals this:
"Most intriguing is the manner in which Jefferson dated an official document. Instead of "in the year of our Lord," Jefferson used the phrase "in the year of our Lord Christ." Christian historian David Barton has the proof – the original document signed by Jefferson on the "eighteenth day of October in the year of our Lord Christ, 1804.""
Dr. Kennedy does believe (or he did at the time of this column) that Jefferson had rejected the deism of Christ in 1813, after his public career was over. But that in no way makes Jefferson a Deist, which is defined as one who denies the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe. To the contrary, Jefferson wrote in a June 26, 1822 letter to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse:
"The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man.
1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect.
2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.
3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself, is the sum of religion. These are the great points on which he endeavored to reform the religion of the Jews."
A belief that there is a future state of rewards and punishments (as Jefferson believed) denies the basic premise of Deism -- that the creator does not interfere with the laws of the universe. Jefferson was no deist.
Mentioning Christianity would have been redundant since the nation was already an exclusively Christian nation. The founders did not, however, want to create an exclusively Baptist nation, or an exclusively Methodist nation, etc..
For example, Oliver Ellsworth, a Connecticut delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, in explaining to the people the clause that prohibits a religious test for public office, stated, "A test in favor of any one denomination of Christians would be to the last degree absurd in the United States. If it were in favor of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, or Quakers, it would incapacitate more than three-fourths of the American citizens for any public office and thus degrade them from the rank of freemen."
On swearing to a belief in God at the time of appointment or admission to government office, Ellsworth resolved, "His (an officeholder) making a declaration of such a belief is no security at all. For suppose him to be an unprincipled man who believes neither the Word nor the being of God, and be governed merely by selfish motives; how easy is it for him to dissemble! How easy is it for him to make public declaration of his belief in the creed which the law prescribes and excuse himself by calling it a mere formality."
Ellsworth summarized by arguing that it must be left to the people to ensure the people elected and appointed to public office be of high moral character and not selfishly motivated, rather than via some legislated formality. We, the People, are ultimately responsible for moral leadership.
It is clear the Founding Fathers favored traditional Christian moralities; but they were also concerned with government legislated ideologies of a selective, immoral or oppressive nature. However, they were just as fearful of government legislating religious morality out of our lives.
For example, in his Farewell Address, George Washington warned we should forever be "indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts." He added, "With slight shades of differences, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together."
On the instructions of George Washington I wear an indignant frown, and I wear it like crown.
Actually, Franklin and Jefferson's views on religion are better described as Masonic rather than Christian.....though I agree that they were quite different than many modern secular humanists.
Jefferson's writing reveal a man whose true beliefs may have wavered, changed, and changed back again during his life. So have mine.
However, the only real thoughts that have an impact are those of our Lord Himself. His words, His acts, His love overwhelm even the philosophy of a giant like Jefferson.
1) Jackson had a plan for a national bank to replace the BUS. It was no different in any sense, except it would be controlled by Dems, not Whigs.
2) Jackson advanced a plan for the federal government to prohibit and eliminate all PRIVATE note issues. (That doesn't sound very small government/states rights to me)
3) Jackson overrode a states rights Supreme Court decision on the Cherokee and imposed a racist national removal policy, rather than let the fair Georgia policy stand.
4) The federal budget in real terms, and in per capita terms, grew throughout Jackson's terms. It did flatten under Van Buren---only because there was a bad depression (in a couple of depressions, the federal budget flattened).
5) Several new departments were added under Jackson.
6) He threatend to crush South Carolina over the tariff "nullification." There was a compromise, but again this hardly marks AJ as an advocate of states rights.
Jackson was for JACKSON. He was the Clinton of his era, and had nothing in common with a real small government Dem, Grover Cleveland, who took stand after stand on principle.
good post thanks
>>I don't find that him going to church and so on is great evidence of him being a believer.<<
Of course. But there are more examples of Jefferson's faith in the WND column (click on the World Net Daily link), and in his letters. On at least three occasions Jefferson wrote explicitly that he was a Christian, the most notable of which I mentioned in the main body of this thread.
LS, thanks for the Jackson info.
Thank you. I'll read immediately.
But since I'm a Christian, I have to go by the Bible which says that you can't get good fruit from a bad tree, or vice versa. I think there is actually a pretty straight line from the Dems of the 1800s to the Dems of today. They've always hated blacks---except now they enslave them with welfare. The GOP, with some zigs and zags around the tariff---has always liberated people and still is.
>> I think there is actually a pretty straight line from the Dems of the 1800s to the Dems of today. They've always hated blacks---except now they enslave them with welfare. The GOP, with some zigs and zags around the tariff---has always liberated people and still is.<<
Good point.
Your quote is deceptive. What you leave out I've put in boldface:
"In some of the delightful conversations with you in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you that one day or other I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. 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 anyone 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.
Letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803
"Every human excellence" that Christ saw in himself or wanted us to see is contrasted with the divine attributes that Jefferson felt that later generations had ascribed to him. It's clear that Jefferson was separating himself from the Trinitarian orthodoxy of the churches, not supporting it.
"I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our Creator." Thomas Jefferson wrote on the front of his Bible.
The big question is what Jefferson meant by the "doctrines of Jesus." His attacks on "priests" and "metaphysicians" are such that some scholars have concluded that for Jefferson the "doctrines of Jesus" were primarily moral, and didn't involve the divinity of Christ, but plenty of people don't want to believe that Jefferson could have consigned their most cherished belief to the errors of the past, so they misread his language. The word "Deist" is a tricky one and hard to apply in Jefferson's case, but his views accorded with those of the Unitarians of his day.
People would prefer to believe that a hero or model in one field of endeavor would have to share their own views in other things, but it's not always the case. We can admire Jefferson's significance in our political history, but don't have to agree with everything he said or did or believed either in politics or in religion, and the same is true of other figures like Washington or Lincoln. Disagreeing with them about this or that doesn't mean that we are wrong or that their contribution is any less than it was.
From historical accounts I have read, Jefferson sounded like a backstabbing, two-faces slimeball.
Figuratively speaking.
>> From historical accounts I have read, Jefferson sounded like a backstabbing, two-faces slimeball. Figuratively speaking.
I guess it depends on whose version of history you read.
What specifically?
In his defense, it was the beginning of the republic and people didn't know if it would last. The Founders had spent years in "attack mode," convinced the revolution was going to fail or go out of control, and it was hard for them to mellow out.
Jefferson was convinced that the Federalists wanted a monarchy or a dictatorship. Sometimes, as during when the Alien and Sedition Acts were proposed, it looked like he could have been right.
It's understandable why the other Founders had so much trouble getting along with Jefferson, though. His specialty was the theory, rhetoric, or music of politics, and as with a lot of poets or philosophers he had trouble with real relations with people. He was emphatically not a "mixer" or a "team player."
This is very true. I was not there. In the last year or so, I have read multiple biographies of each, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Hamilton. The authors portrayals ranged from lukewarm to very poor. Particularly the relationship between Washington and Jefferson. That said, I do take the views somewhat with a grain of salt, knowing the authors often have a predisposition towards certain historical figures that comes out in their writing. So I know, it isn't gospel.
What really struck me was the accounts of his stabbing Washington in the back, working behind the scenes against Washington, and lying to his face near the end of Washington's term.
Washington, who by then had a good grasp on how to collect and deal with intelligence, had, in the words of the author, "impeccable sources" and let Jefferson know in gentlemanly terms that he knew what Jefferson had been up to in his efforts to undermine him, and that their relationship was through. I believe the author said they never spoke to each other again after that, which stunned me (or as they say on FR...stuned me!)
At least that was my interpretation of what I read.
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