The historical Jefferson
Perhaps we need a Jefferson Seminar to unravel who the real Thomas Jefferson was, and what he said, did, and thought. Meanwhile, Caleb McDaniel does a service by tackling one part of the question “Was Jefferson a Christian?”
The third president said he was, but McDaniel notes that the Virginian also rejected the Nicene Creed. Instead, Jefferson viewed Jesus of Nazareth as being a great ethical teacher (a proposition that very few have debated). His redacted version of the New Testament, then, was meant to bring back the debate to the “ethical germ” of Jesus’ teachings.
How does this relate to the Christianity and democracy argument being conducted below? It’s complicated! Although Souder’s blunt characterization of Christianity as a necessary foundation for democratic rule is unsophisticated, it’s also a standard formulation of a popular idea. (Popular, that is, in the United States.) That Christian ethics, divorced from any consideration of Christ as divine and God as an active player in human events, can play a role in the perpetuation of democracy is a more sophisticated version of this hypothesis; but even this requires the believer to say that there can be a Christian ethics without a belief in the metaphysical requirements of Christian theology, which cuts against the equally standard assertion that a belief in (the Christian) God is necessary for a moral life.
And we have to again consider that for two thousand years, most Christian countries were not democratic, nor did they attempt to be, nor did Christian thinkers think of democracy as something desirable.
9 Responses to “The historical Jefferson”
A Jefferson Seminar! Cool! We could all vote by putting colored beads into a box, just like the Jesus Seminar folks. A red bead for something TJ actually said, a pink one for something he probably said …
Your last paragraph is far too timid, Paul. For much of that two thousand years, Christian thinkers believed that monarchy was the only proper form of Christian government.
Bossuet’s Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’écriture sainte (Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture) is a typical example of this type of thinking:
http://homepage.smc.edu/soldatenko_michael/history2/extracts%20from%20bossuet.htm
It is, if anything, a good deal more intuitive than the proposition that Christianity implies liberal democracy, a form of government that appears nowhere in the Bible, whether on earth or in heaven.
(The Book of Judges, you say? That’s more like anarchism. No, really. I’ve spoken with some very serious Christian anarchists who take it as their signal text…)
There is also, of course, the vast corpus of English-language writing on monarchy; “pro dei et patria” has long-ish routes. But the question of temporal authority versus the spiritual kind in Christian thought is sufficiently problematic that I’ll leave it to my better-informed colleagues to discuss how republican Venice, the independent monastic settlements of the Holy Lands, the Papal States, and post-1492 Spain all managed to be “Christian.” There were a number of accomodations reached with local princes by theologians; the Catholic Church was explicit about this when Napoleon forced the issue. (Perhaps this is why Arendt thought, with others, that leaving the res publicae in the hands of people who thought the world was about to end was a bad idea.)
“The third president said he was, but McDaniel notes that the Virginian also rejected the Nicene Creed. Instead, Jefferson viewed Jesus of Nazareth as being a great ethical teacher (a proposition that very few have debated). His redacted version of the New Testament, then, was meant to bring back the debate to the “ethical germ” of Jesus’ teachings.”
And, of course, therefore completely consistent with the main “claims” of a number of the Gnostic Gospels, including the Gospel of Thomas, said by Pagels and Ehrman (among others) to have predated the canonical gospels. It seems that Jefferson, in rejecting the Nicene Creed and therefore the canonical gospels, was giving a boost to the losing side, politically speaking.
I assume it’s not a shock to know that there are probably quite a few Christian ministers out there who don’t disagree with Jefferson. I imagine they number more than just my own minister, who doesn’t believe in the Virgin Birth and doesn’t believe in the Resurrection, but believes fervently in the meaning of Christ. I guess that’s off-topic.
Hate to just post quotes, but I’ll have to here. In the latest issue of FirstThings there is an interesting article on this topic, The Deist Minimum, by Avery Cardinal Dulles. I’ll give a quick summary for y’all:
Jefferson’s public statements “expressed what he considered to belong to the common and public core of religion.” In both his inaugural addresses he makes mention of “divine Providence” as protecting the country, as “the Being in whose hands we are.”
He was not “purely philosophical” when it came to his religion “for a living religion, he knew, scope must given to the inclinations of the heart.” He is reported to have dearly loved the Psalms and attended & encouraged attendance in worship services regardless of demonination. “In matters of religion…Divided we stand, he said, but united we fall.”
“In summary, then, Jefferson was a deist because he believed in one God, in divine Providence, in the divine moral law, and in rewards and punishments after death, but did not believe in supernatural revelation. He was a Christian deist because he saw Christianity as the highest expression of natural religion and Jesus as an incomparably great moral teacher. He was not an orthodox Christian because he rejected, among other things, the doctrines that Jesus was the promised Messiah and the incarnate Son of God. Jefferson’s religion is fairly typical of the American form of deism in his day.”
And to provoke some more discussion, maybe, here’s some more from that article:
“The civil religion of this country has been expressed in our national institutions and in the great pronouncements of our national heroes, most notably Abraham Lincoln. The dominance of civil religion produced a favorable climate in which the various forms of biblical religion could and did thrive…Deism by itself was too dry and abstract to elicit warm adherence, but the American concensus always surrounded the positive teachings of deism with the flesh and bones of specific faiths.
“The American civil religion can still be heard in the pronouncements of recent Presidents, but it is now being eroded or at least threatened by the increasingly pluralist shape of American society and by a judiciary that is reluctant to support or encourage any form of religion, however generic.
“If pluralism goes unchecked, will the nation still have a corporate vision sufficient to sustain the sense of mission and collective purpose that have characterized it at its best?”
While concensus ultimately depends on you and I, the author notes that “Jefferson would probably have insisted on the positive articles of deism as a required minimum.”
As much as I applaud the modern trend toward ecumenicism, I find it unconvincing to say that the typical American, eighteenth-century or latter-day, would be satisfied with equating “Christianity” and “Jesus as teacher.” The people who say that they’ve been born again really can’t accept that at a theological level, else they omit the whole point of being born again.
There remain thinkers who support Monarchs. For all of the so-called horrors, (Inquisiton, 100 years wars, religious persecutions, star chambers, etc. etc.) nothing compares to the horrors since abandoning Monarchies. Try Black Book of Communism for recent carnages or begin with Burke.
Absolute monarchy was on balance less intrusive than the totalitarian state…