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[This was Jeffrson's Response to the Delaware Baptist Association in 1801 - ed]
Jefferson's letter reads:
I join you, fellow citizens, in rendering the tribute of thankfulness to the Almighty ruler, who, in the order of his providence, hath willed that the human mind shall be free in this portion of the globe: that society shall here know that the limit of its rightful power is the enforcement of social conduct; while the right to question the religious principles producing that conduct is beyond their cognisance.
I rejoice too with you in the happy consequences of our revolution, namely our separation from the bloody horrors which are depopulating the other quarters of the earth, the establishment here of liberty, equality of social rights, exclusion of unequal privileges civil & religious, & of the usurping domination of one sect over another.
The obedience you profess to those who rule under such an order of things, is rational & right: and we hope the day is far off when evils beyond the reach of constitutional correction, & more intolerable than their remedies in the judgment of the nation, may fix a just term to that duty.
I thank you, fellow-citizens, for your congratulations on my appointment to the chief magistracy, and for your affectionate supplications on my behalf, to that being, whose counsels are the best guide, & his favor the best protection under all our difficulties, and in whose holy keeping may our country ever remain. Accept, I pray you, my salutations and respect.
Jefferson, as one recent scholar writes, "was a remarkably consistent and zealous defender of religious freedom" (David N. Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville, Univ. of Va. Press, 1994, p.158). His enduring and very public commitment to religious liberty may be traced back at least as far as his proposed Constitution for Virginia, drafted in 1776, stating that
"all persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain [subsidize] any religious institution" (Papers, ed. Boyd, 1:363).
"had in mind the widest possible latitude for religious freedom, extending it not only to all Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, but also to Jews, 'Mohamedans,' 'pagans,' and atheists" (Mayer, p.159).
Those principles are powerfully embodied in Jefferson's draft of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1777), eventually adopted by the state legislature largely through the efforts of James Madison in 1785, while Jefferson was in France. The statute has been termed "the supreme expression of the eighteenth-century enlightenment in the life and works of Thomas Jefferson" (M. D. Peterson, "Jefferson and Religious Freedom," Atlantic, December 1994).
Authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was, in fact, one of only three accomplishments Jefferson listed in a famous epitaph he composed for himself (the other two being the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia). In its preamble, (Section 1) Jefferson categorically states that freedom of religion is an inherent, natural right, and in a passage that strikingly parallels one used in Jefferson's letter to the Delaware Baptist Association, the statute asserts that "Almighty God hath created the mind free." Farther on, it proclaims, in terms quite similar to those of the present letter, that "the opinions of men are not the object of civil government nor under its jurisdiction."
Another passage, from Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, also parallels the phraseology of the present letter. There, in a famous passage, he states the principle that religion must remain a wholly private affair between each individual and his God and that conscience, and religious belief, cannot be coerced:
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg."
Historically, he adds (in a passage widely interpreted as anti-Christian),
"millions of innocent men, women, and children since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites."
No religion, he argued, should need to ally itself to the existing civil government, for,
"it is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand for itself."
Religious pluralism, in which each and every sect existed freely and without either endorsement or persecution by the state, was, he believed, the natural concomitant of true religious freedom.
THE BAPTISTS IN DELAWAREThe Baptist Church played a particularly significant role in the development of religious freedoms in the United States, progressing--during the course of the 17th to late 18th century-- from outright persecution in certain colonies to a grudging tolerance in the wake of the Revolution and, subsequently, to explicit guarantees of the right to worship embodied in the constitutions of certain states and, finally, by the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution.
The Baptists encountered quite different treatment in the various colonies: in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and the Three Lower Counties (Delaware) they were guaranteed full freedom of religion, but in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia especially, Baptists were energetically persecuted, taxed or tithed by the civil government, while Baptist ministers were frequently subject to arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and expulsion. Taxes levied on Baptists and other dissenters were usually assigned to the established Congregationalist or Anglican church.
Despite these formidable difficulties, the Baptists attracted converts and established a network of congregations. According to one early chronicler, in 1780 "there were not less than two thousand persons baptized in the New England States only," and from 1780 to 1789, some 200 new churches "were organized in different parts of the United States" (Benedict, General History of the Baptist Denomination in America and Elsewhere, London, 1813).
"was peculiarly auspicious to the cause of religious liberty in Massachusetts, and the other Colonies, where religious establishments were enforced with rigor. All denominations unitedly engaged in resisting the demands of Great Britain," he states, from which it became apparent that Britain's tyranny was "no more unreasonable nor unjust" than that of the predominant sect, "whether Congregational or Episcopalian" towards dissenters. "The Baptists and other dissenters did not fail to make a proper use of this argument."
In Delaware, Baptists had first established a settlement and congregation at Iron Hill in 1703, on a tract of land obtained from William Penn, and known as the Welsh Tract since it was founded by emigrants from Wales who had been severely persecuted. From this initial settlement, the congregation spread rapidly. The Wilmington Baptist Church, according to Benedict, dated from 1769. The Bryn-sion Baptist congregation was founded about 1755 at Duck Creek, some 70 miles southwest of Philadelphia, and its brick meeting house (from which the Delaware Baptist Association wrote to President Jefferson) was built in 1771. According to Jeffrey Mask, Professor of Religion at Wesley College, the Delaware Baptist Association was probably founded in 1795; such associations of small congregations for fellowship and mutual assistance were not uncommon.
John Boggs (1741-1802), one of the writers of the Association's 1801 letter to Jefferson, became a Baptist in 1771, was ordained in 1781 and, according to Benedict, "was much inclined to itinerate" as a preacher. The other signer of the letter to Jefferson, Joseph Flood, appears quite controversial. Minister of the Wilmington Baptist congregation in 1797, he was "excluded for immoral conduct, and afterwards went to Norfolk, in Virginia, and was the cause of much evil and confusion."
JEFFERSON'S 1801 RELIGIOUS DILEMMA
At the time when he received the letter from the Delaware Baptists, the subject of religion, the place of religious freedom, and even the nature of his own personal religious convictions were very much on Jefferson's mind. For years Jefferson had studiously kept his own religious convictions private, except in a handful of private letters to close friends, in spite of his powerful efforts on behalf of religious freedom, as noted above. Partly due to his personal reticence, he had become the target of charges of infidelity or indifference to religion as early as the election of 1796. But it was not until the bitterly partisan election of 1800 that his Federalist enemies and the partisan newspapers they controlled "unleashed a frenzied barrage of vituperative attacks upon his personal character and public record" (Sheridan, p.21).
Voters were exhorted to choose "God and a religious President" in preference to "Jefferson...and no God;" if he became President, they asserted hysterically, "murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced" (M. D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson, and the New Nation, pp.637-638).
Even Jefferson's widely read Notes on the State of Virginia, composed in 1781-1783 and originally intended only for private distribution, was meticulously sifted by zealous critics seeking ammunition against Jefferson. They seized upon his speculations about marine fossils and his suggestion that blacks might have once formed a separate and distinct race as evidence that he denied the divine inspiration of scripture and the biblical accounts of the deluge and creation (Eugene R. Sheridan, Jefferson, and Religion, 1983/1998, p.23). And his critics took great offense at Jefferson's offhand remark in the Notes regarding the religious establishments in New York and Pennsylvania:
"Religion is well supported; of various kinds, indeed, but all good enough; all sufficient to preserve peace and good order." And Jefferson unwittingly opened a Pandora's box when he generously offered passage to America on an American naval vessel to that notorious revolutionary and critic of organized religion, author of The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine.
On this and other evidence, "Jefferson's opponents triumphantly proclaimed, the conclusion was clear: Jefferson was an atheist, an infidel, or at best a deist who was hostile to Christianity and therefore unworthy to serve in the highest office" (Sheridan, p.22). To them, Jefferson studiously made no direct reply "believing as a matter of principle that he was accountable to God alone for his religious convictions and realizing as a practical matter that nothing he could say would silence his detractors. As a result, charges that he was an irreligious enemy of Christianity plagued Jefferson...especially during his first term" (Sheridan, p. 23).
In hindsight, we now know, Jefferson was anything but an enemy to organized religion, as his enemies insisted, nor was he hostile to Christianity. During his term as President, in fact, he was a frequent contributor to different churches, and frequently attended services, usually those held in the House of Representatives, where different ministers preached (for pertinent details, see Hutner, pp.84-91). These public acts, though, represent neither cynical political image-building, as some have argued, nor dutiful and devout traditional Christianity. Jefferson appears to have experienced, as a young man, a profound crisis of faith that resulted in his abandonment of the Anglican faith, and, very much a product of the Enlightenment, he gravitated towards a rather undefined "natural religion." But beginning in the latter years of the 1790s, though, under the influence of his readings of Joseph Priestley and an important private correspondence in 1800 with Benjamin Rush, who attempted to convince his friend that republicanism and Christianity were organically connected, Jefferson's convictions underwent a significant transformation (on this remarkable shift, see Sheridan and Dumas Malone's chapter "The Religion of a Reasonable Man," in Jefferson The President: First Term, pp.190-205).
As a result, at the beginning of Jefferson's first term, "public criticism of his alleged atheism and infidelity had caused him to reexamine his attitude toward Christianity. The fierce party conflict of the 1790s had disrupted the social harmony he valued as one of the main pillars of republicanism and made him sensitive to the need for a more effective system of ethical principles to inform the moral sense of the new nation...." (Sheridan, p.32). Therefore, by the date of this letter and the related letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson's private religious beliefs and his pragmatic political needs came into unexpected convergence. While he remained unable, as before, to accept the divinity of Christ, and found the concept of the Trinity unacceptable, he nevertheless came to view the ethical teachings of Jesus--if "demystified," or reduced to their innate simplicity and purity--as the "outlines of a system of the most divine morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man." In 1804, while still President, he began the compilation of a series of extracts from the New Testament that he entitled "The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth" for his own edification (ms. now in the Alderman Library, Univ. of Virginia). Sheridan comments that this study was "in response to his personal religious needs and his concern with the problem of maintaining social harmony in a republican nation." Perhaps it is in such a light--without imputations of cynicism or political expediency--that we should also view Jefferson's regular attendance at services in the House of Representatives during his Presidency, his extensive financial contributions to a number of churches, and, in addition, his public letters to the Delaware Baptist Association and the Danbury Baptists. Both of those letters, he certainly knew or suspected, would almost immediately be published in the local press. And, in fact, his letter to the Delaware Baptists was published not long afterward in the Wilmington Mirror of the Times and subsequently in several other papers.
A "SECT OF ONE"
Late in life, years after leaving the Presidency, Jefferson confessed to an old friend, Ezra Stiles, that his personal beliefs had never accorded comfortably with those of any particular church or denomination: "I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know," he wrote. While much has been written on the complex subject of Jefferson's evolving religious faith, its impact upon his political and social philosophy, and his ideas of the degree of separation appropriate to church and state in a republican society, there is little doubt that letters such as this, which contribute substantially to our knowledge of his faith and his philosophy, will continue to be widely and carefully studied, analyzed, debated and appreciated
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