This week a twitter feed for retiring United Methodist bishop
William Willimon exclaimed: “[Thomas] Jefferson created a polity
with religion completely free as long as it was personal and
private… [creating] essentially [an] atheist national polity.”
Earlier this year, Willimon, who’s returning to Duke University,
faulted Jefferson for the “privatization” of God through the
“modern democratic, liberal nation state in order to neutralize
Christianity, to bury God in the confines of the self, to
trivialize the Trinity, and to keep this governmentally troubling
faith from going public.”
As Willimon asserted, the Jeffersonian experiment has created
the “omnipotent state and its capitalist economy.” Of course,
Jeffersonians believed in minimal government. And an omnipotent
state is a contradiction to a free market economy. Although
Methodist, Willimon belongs to the neo-Anabaptist perspective, most
popularized by his popular Duke colleague Stanley Hauerwas, that
demonizes American democracy while not offering any alternatives,
except “the church.” Mainstream Christianity professes that God has
ordained other institutions besides the church, such as the state,
rightly ordered.
Sensibly, Willimon did note that the “government has found that
Christians (well, any believer who thinks that his or her God might
be more important than the state) are easier to manage if they will
confine their faith to something within.” But this modern drive to
privatize religion was launched by secularists and strict
separationists, not Jeffersonians, who believed in a thriving civil
society that included robust religious institutions. Religious
enthusiasts and evangelicals of the early 19th century supported
Jefferson and his party instead of the Federalists and the
established churches of the eastern seaboard.
Debating Jefferson and his impact on religion is a favorite
American pastime. Secularists and strict separationists ardently
quote Jefferson’s opposition to state churches. Religionists with
equal fervor quote Jefferson’s robust defense of religious liberty.
Popular conservative religious activist David Barton has just
released a new book called
The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed
About Thomas Jefferson. It’s a full throttle defense of
Jefferson’s character and specifically of his personal faith.
Barton’s group, Wallbuilders, specializes in spotlighting
America’s Christian history to rebut secularist attempts to
marginalize public faith. Spotlighted in a New York Times
feature last year, and appearing on the Jon Stewart Show
this year, Barton infuriates secularists and liberals with his
chapter and verse citations of early American religious history.
Some conservatives have also challenged his alleged exaggerations
of early American religiosity and virtue. Two Grove City College
professors have published
Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third
President to correct many of Barton’s assertions about
Jefferson’s rectitude.
In his latest book, Barton asserts that Jefferson strayed in and
out of Christian orthodoxy, was influenced by the first and second
Great Awakenings, and later was influenced by the prevalence of
Christian Primitivists and Restorationists in the Charlottesville,
Virginia area. These movements emphasized “primitive” Christianity
based ostensibly only on the Bible while they rejected what they
thought was church tradition, like belief in the Trinity or
Christ’s specific deity. They emphasized the Gospels but not the
Epistles or the Old Testament. They also were interdenominational
and anti-Calvinist. Beyond saying that preachers of these doctrines
were common in Jefferson’s neighborhood, and showing how some of
their themes were similar to Jefferson’s, Barton does not
specifically demonstrate their direct influence on Jefferson.
Barton insists Jefferson was theologically orthodox until middle
aged. But other writers, including conservative Christians, date
Jefferson’s departure from orthodoxy to his early manhood.
Barton readily admits that Jefferson was an enthusiast for
Unitarianism during his final years, even as he continued to attend
and financially support Trinitarian churches, especially the
Episcopal Church, in which he had served as vestryman during his
younger years. Although acknowledging Jefferson’s heterodox
theology, Barton concludes Jefferson was “pro-Christian and
pro-Jesus.” Barton’s critics cite this rhetoric as evidence of
Barton’s crusade to enlist the Founding Fathers as posthumous
friends of the modern Religious Right. Some Religious Right
authors, like the late Peter Marshall (son of the famous U.S.
Senate chaplain of the same name), have demonized Jefferson as an
infidel who contrasted with more devout Founders. But Barton sides
with others like Pat Robertson, who also claims Jefferson as a
friend to religion and to liberty whatever his personal
theology.
As even his critics grant, Barton successfully recalls lots of
forgotten early American religious history, including obscure
clergy, which they complain only makes him more dangerous. Barton’s
linking Jefferson to early 19th century Christian Primitivism and
Restorationism (whose descendants largely became Trinitarian and
are today in the modern Churches of Christ and the Christian
Church-Disciples of Christ) is provocative but, at least in his
book, somewhat lacking in direct evidence. Most religious writers
tie Jefferson’s religious beliefs to European Enlightenment
thinkers.
A definitive book on Jefferson and religion is probably yet to
be written. What is needed is a work like Michael Novak’s recent
Washington’s God or Mary Thompson’s In the Hands of a
Good Providence. Both these books subtly disprove the frequent
charge that George Washington was a deist without exaggerating his
piety or orthodoxy.
Jefferson was a lifelong church goer and supporter who regarded
himself as a Christian, even while privately rejecting its key
doctrines as a distraction from its moral teachings. Like any good
politician, he nurtured friendships with believers in nearly all
religious groups then in America. And he sincerely believed that
religion was essential to national character. For him the free
exercise of religion fully in public life was especially important
to restraining unlimited government.
It’s pointless to claim Jefferson for the modern Religious
Right. But it’s even more absurd to equate him with Norman Lear.
And Bishop Willimon’s implication that Jefferson was a sort of
Robespierre who drove religion into the closet is equally baseless.
Like nearly all the Founding Fathers, Jefferson spoke and acted on
grand themes that transcend most modern American ideological
categories. That the Religious Right and secular Left can both at
times claim Jefferson likely would delight him.
