Jefferson, Thomas

A Deceptive Paradox

Arguably, the majority of the people living in the colonies were Calvinist Christians of one kind or another, as demonstrated by their respective state constitutions by the time of the American Revolution. However, some of the Founding Fathers, including Jefferson, were not Christians. They were Deists or Unitarians influenced by the European Enlightenment, who rejected as unreasonable the primary doctrines of the Christian faith. Jefferson rejected the Anglican Christian faith in which he [Page 560]had been raised and declared himself to be a “freethinker” and essentially in a religious category of his own making. He denounced the traditional theology of Anglicanism as blasphemous and rejected the historic Christian doctrine of the Trinity as an absurd impossibility that no rational man could accept. Even though Jefferson held Jesus in high regard as a moral teacher, he rejected him as the Savior God, which is the platform of Christianity. However, his rejection of the traditional Christian faith was not overtly antagonistic or public, which created a deceptive and persuasive paradox. Jefferson often identified himself as a Christian, which some historians, especially Evangelicals, point to today as proof that he was a Christian. Jefferson could comfortably refer to himself as a Christian as long as that self-identification was understood according to his own definition of what constituted the “real” Christian faith.

Consistent with his own personal dialectic involving faith and in concert with the majority of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson moved to the forefront in the movement that eliminated officially established ties between the newly formed government and all religious denominations. This tension was written into the First Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibited Congress from passing any law that establishes a certain religion, while at the same time allowing the free exercise of any and all religions. Later, in 1802, in a letter to the Connecticut Baptists, Jefferson famously explained the First Amendment as erecting “a wall of separation between church and state,” clarifying the intent that it was not to be understood as being hostile to religion but as guaranteeing the freedom of all religions by not favoring any particular one. The paradox of Jefferson's personal faith finds a direct correlation in the debate over whether the intent of the Founding Fathers was to create a distinctly Christian nation—or not.

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