Jefferson and the Seperation of Church and State.

    Lately, there has been a great deal of discussion concerning the
seperation of church and state. The christians and other religionists on one
side crying "revisionist history" and quoting Thomas Jefferson and a litany
of other founding fathers, and the atheists and secularists on the other
declaring that freedom of religion is freedom from religion and quoting
Jefferson and the same litany of founding fathers. It goes without saying
that mutual agreement on any part of the subject has been extremely hard to
come by. Not only have there been an appalling number of misquotations and
misrepresentations of various opinions, but lately things have degraded into
out and out lies and namecalling by both sides. The unfortunate consequence
has, of course, been the loss of focus on the issue that started the whole
mess: "what did Thomas Jefferson say about the seperation of church and
state?", and how do his views impact the recent argument concerning the
religious elements in our goverment proposing to reinstate prayer to the
nation's public schools by an act of congress.

    The first thing to do in any study of what Thomas Jefferson said and how
we should interpret these sayings today should begin with a look at his
personal religious beliefs and his opinions on religious issues. Jefferson
not only had experiences and matured beliefs that qualify as religious, but
he also was fascinated with the subject and read widely about various
religions. He was very concerned with the role of organized religion in
America and made important contributions to constitutional protection for
religious freedom. He spent a lifetime searching for the foundations of
morality and he was appreciative of religious institutions, but was leery of
any preisthood almost to the point of paranoia. In short, Jefferson was born
into a largely christian society which had a basic semitic theological
cosmology which remained the basis for his private religious beliefs
throughout his life. However, at the same time Jefferson found most of the
superstructure of the christian belief system unbelievable, including the
divinity of Jesus. It was only later in life that he finally found a
christian belief sytem that he could comfortably affirm and shape to his
personal beliefs on the true nature of God.
    Jefferson grew up as a hardly practicing Anglican and during his early
teens was a casual member of the English church. It is also during this
period that he claimed to have started having doubts about the christian
means of salvation. In his years at the College of William and Mary and
during the period of his law practice Jefferson took a very dimissive view of
the bible and began to more maturely look for a "rational" religion instead
of the revealed and superstitious one of christianity. Jefferson was an
extremely puritanical moralist and expected the same of others and sought a
moral ground for behavior. He felt that morality was a necessity for the new
republic he later helped to create, but found superstitious religions
unbelievable, irrational, and distasteful. Privately and publically, then,
Jefferson began to shape and mold the idea of a universal morality more
consistent with intellectual thought.
    Jefferson can in no way be called a christian. Even though some of his
beliefs were common Jefferson saw christianity as pretentious, self-serving
and viewed the Pauline conception of Jesus's divinity to be a preistly
invention. He expresed privately to his confidants that he viewed
christianity as a religion that just confused people and led to any manner of
historical strife and cruelty. He felt the concept of the Trinity to be
incoherent and inconsitent with the rest of the bible. His personal god
remained single and unified. He believed most of the "history" of the
bible to not be confirmable and thus suspect. He researched the history of
the christian church in great detail, especially the development of canon and
hierarchy. He cited various ideas the church had proclaimed heretical at one
time or another which had later been accepted as dogma to point out the
impossibility of ever settling doctrinal disagreement. When he later
recommended reforms for the curriculum at the College of William&Mary, church
history was the only religious subject he suggested, because he felt that it
would lead students to question their own religious dogmas. 
    We have seen that Jefferson's religious beliefs didn't even qualify him
as a christian, so what exactly was his later "christian faith"?  After 1789,
Jefferson came out with Benjamin Franklin to denounce all forms of religious
dogmatism as being based on unprovable assumptions and composed by
self-serving priests to frighten a fearful and mostly illiterate and
uneducated people. It is during this period, during his overseas travels that
Joeseph Preistly became his religious mentor.
    Preistly had written a huge work on the corruptions of the church and 
was a true Renaissance man. Preistly advocated an early, "purer" form of
christianity that was unpolluted by paganism, Platonic thought, and more
closely associated with the teachings of Jesus. Preistly wrote the first
history of electricity and was the first man to isolate Oxygen as a distinct
component of the atmosphere. Jefferson so admired Preistly for his mind and
his conception of christianity that he read Preistly's works over and over
again. Preistly had openly supported the French revolution and had been
driven from his Birmingham, England home by a mob backed and egged on by
orthodox ministers and the local authorities. They burned his home and office
to the ground and forced Preistly to flee to London in fear of violence. He
eventually emigrated to the United States. 
    Jefferson never accepted all of Preistly's doctrines and selectively
chose which beliefs he would uphold. Jefferson never did believe in the soul
or in the divinity of Jesus. He even escaped the freewill question by
ignoring the issue of the soverignty of God and refused to work out a
theology that would vindicate his ways in the world. Jefferson had no doubt
that the will of God was expressed in the bible, but he rejected the bible as
THE word of God. He felt Paul was the first great corrupter of the teachings
of Jesus and that Jesus had merely been a man. More than that, Jefferson
didn't even believe Jesus was divinely inspired or the agent of God to
provide
human redemption. Jefferson refused to believe in the resurrection of Christ,
much to Preistly's dismay. 
    During the campaign of 1800, Jefferson was to be vilified by his
political enemies for the small amount of his personal beliefs he had openly
professed. Jefferson had always argued that religious beliefs were private
matters. He refused to state his own or to argue about religious beliefs
with anyone in print. He only shared his most private religious beliefs with
his closest friends and always swore them to secrecy afterwards. If these
views were ever presented in writing then he would demand that the original
manuscript later be returned to him. He had engaged in a bitter political
fight to gain complete religious freedom for Virginia and knew religious
persecution and feared it. He lived his entire political life in mortal
terror that his opponents would use his beliefs to turn the public against
him. He held to the principle that each person must have the freedom to
believe what they want in the area of religion. He pushed for the removal of
the subject from public interest and fought to prevent the suppression of any
religious belief, but at the same time advocated that it was only right and
proper for the government to regulate the conduct that flowed from such
beliefs.
    Jefferson read widely on the subject of christianity and held some views
of christianity that would only be held up decades after his death by secular
biblical scholarship. He held to the idea that the book of Daniel had been
written during the Hellenistic period and not during the earlier Babylonian
captivity, as the text claims. Thus Jefferson pointed out that all the
prophecies that Daniel reports to have been proven true are shown to have
been written after the fact. He pointed to the belief in resurrection, not a
jewish belief during the captivity, as his primary evidence for a more modern
dating. Jefferson also held that Paul had virtually created modern
christianity and had tampered with the true message of Jesus. He was not a
true biblical scholar though. He never questioned the integrity of the early
Gospels, nor did he think it strange that the true sayings of Jesus could be
gleaned from the gospels despite the unreliance of the bible.
     Ironically, many American christians assume the friendliness of
Jefferson to christianity when in fact he uttered more scathing remarks and
wrote more sweeping diatribes against all the dominant forms of christianity
than even Thomas Paine. It indeed says something about the quality of
christian scholarship concerning Jefferson that they still profess the myth
that he was a true and pure christian. Jefferson's personal beliefs and
actions all portray a man who believed religion to be a private matter, one
who feared christian and political persecution should his beliefs be made
public, and one who tried to remove religion from the government not only to
protect each individual's right to his own personal belief, but to prevent
organized religion from perverting government as it already had the teachings
of Jesus.
    At war with such beliefs was Jefferson's obsession with morality. He felt
that man had an obligation to make the world the best it could be. He wanted
to make the city of man conform to the city of god and was often zealous
enough to believe it possible. It was his desire to provide his fellow
Americans with such a moral authority that lead him to strive to anchor the
new
republic in those traditions. None of the other founding fathers were so
deeply involved in religious issues either publicly or privately.  In his
age most people were indifferent to religion and yet Jefferson saw in it the
hope of the new republic: the foundation of a common moral code.
    Jefferson felt that second only to the Declaration of Indepence, his work
to gain religious toleration in Virginia was the greatest achievement of his
life. He had a lifelong opposition to the powerful connection between church
and state. He once remarked cynically that the law of Virgina was the law of
God - except where the local statutes went to the contrary. He thus
pointed out that religion had corrupted the authority and impartial ability
of the state to render justice unto her citizens fairly. He felt that the
alliance between church and state to be an unholy one that made civil judges
the accomplices of the clergy. Jefferson felt that the church only wanted the
common man to support it thru taxes, either directly, or thru tax breaks or
exemption for religious institutions that shifted the burden of the taxes to
the common man. He argued that the close association of the church and state
in England had robbed the English of true religious freedom by the
incorporation of canonical dogma into secular law. He feared the same might
happen in the Americas. He felt the church had been given free and complete
power over Virginia and that subsequent laws like the prohibition of Quakers
to assemble, making non-baptism of an infant a punishable offense, and the
neccessity of oaths to participate in many colonial activities showed that
religion had a deleterious effect over government and prevented true
religious freedom. Jefferson was appalled that heresy or atheism was a crime
punishable by being burned at the stake. 
     As we have seen, Jefferson didn't hold christian beliefs, so naturally
the 1705 Act of the House of Burgesses held a great danger to him. The law
held that "any person denying the existence of God, the Trinity, denies the
Christian religion to be the one true religion, or doubts the divinely
inspired authority of the scriptures" could be barred from public office or
employment, had no legal right to sue, to recieve inheritance, or to be
guardian, executor or administator. Furthermore, such offenders could be held
without bail for three years. Fathers could lose custody of their children
under this provision. Jefferson considered Virgina to be a "religious
slave-state"  in which the citizens of Virginia had no religious freedom and
were virtually under the heel of the Anglican church. He insisted upon the
distinction of ecclesiastical law from common law, between the church and the
government. He felt this distinction to be "very clear and important". True
religious freedom meant the seperation of religion from government to prevent
either side from turning such freedom into a sham to hide religious tyranny.
Jefferson wanted a "wall of separation" which would exclude government from
intruding into religion and prevent religion from intruding into government.
The first would mean the loss of religious freedoms and the second the
establishment of a religious dictatorship over the law and man.
    Jefferson believed religion to be a private matter and considered the
freedom
of one to believe whatever to be the most natural right of man. Neither
Jefferson nor his contemporary Madison were content to have anything but the
complete disestablishment of religion from government and absolute,
individual religious freedom. He held that no man had the right to dictate
the faith of another and that for there to be any freedom in the new republic
from tyranny and despotism, religion must be free for all. The state should
neither support nor oppose, directly or indirectly, any religion. Jefferson
asserted that no man "should be compelled to frequent or support religious
worship, places, or ministries, nor shall he be restrained, molested, or
burdened in his body or good, nor shall he suffer on account of his beliefs
concerning religion, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by
argument maintain, their opinions on the matters of religious beliefs, and
that religion will in no way diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil
capacities.". Jefferson thus stated that freedom of religion was more
importantly freedom from religion.
    Jefferson, as we have seen, was a man who held religious beliefs, but
those beliefs in
few ways resembled the christian character of the new republic he helped
create. He asserted that religion was a private matter and had no place in
the public arena of government. He felt that for there to be freedom of
religion, there must be a wall erected between church and state that protects
religion from government and government from religion. He fought his whole
life to set men truly free from dogma and from the restraining yoke of
established religion. He himself was persecuted publicly and politically for
his views on religion. His religious mentor, Joesph Preistly, had fled to
America to escape religious persecution in England. Jefferson wanted more
than anything to prevent such occurrences here in the United States and to
rob
from the mainstream religions the ability to ever mix government and
theology. His quote above opens more possibilities than we have presently
considered. School prayer is possibly the "support of religious worship, and
burdens the human body" by forcing children to pray when their religious
beliefs deny the authority or existence of prayer. Church exemptions and tax
breaks are a direct "suffering of goods" by the citizen as he must pay higher
taxes to make up the difference. It is also the supporting of a religion by
removing from it the obligation to pay taxes. The Pledge of Allegiance is a
perfect example of civil capacities being diminished by the specific
reference to god, implying that a certain religious belief is neccessary to
be an American. Thomas Jefferson wanted men to be free, in every way. Freedom
of religion is guaranteed by man being free from religion. Any portrayal of
Jefferson as a man opposed to religion is unfair, because it ignores his
lifelong struggle to provide his fellow man with a state where one is free to
believe whatever one will and to practice that philosophy freely. Likewise,
any attempt to portray Jefferson as a man who believed christian beliefs were
central to the American way of life is a complete fraud, because as we have
seen, Jefferson himself was not a christian and fought those who sought to
make christianity the American religion tooth and nail. In the end, Jefferson
tells us to believe what we want, leave each other alone, and meet on neutral
ground, in the government, to make America a better and more free place to
live.
Most of the above is practically plagiarized from the following works....
"Jefferson: A Life" by Willard Sterne Randall, University of Vermont.
"The Religious Pilgimage of Thomas Jefferson" by Paul K. Conkin,
Distinguished Professor of History, Vanderbilt University.