Yesterday I attended an event of the Central Ohio Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. I’m working on transcribing it, and have about twenty minutes of his speech written up so far–you can read it here. What I’m going to share below is just a small portion. It comes right after Rob shares the same poll results Melvin Lipman mentioned here: while Americans claim to be much more willing now than in the past to vote for someone other than a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, they still say they would not be willing to vote for a “nonbeliever”. He asks, what do we lose by rejecting such candidates out of hand…
Probably a lot, when you think about it. Consider again the case of Thomas Jefferson. In 1819 Thomas Jefferson wrote a remarkable letter to William Short, in which he discussed at length the dogma of conventional Christianity. Now it’s a remarkable document because Jefferson speaks very frankly about what he believes and does not believe about religion. Remember, this is in 1819, so Jefferson is not in public life anymore, and he writes this letter. Here are Jefferson’s own words of what he rejects from Christian dogma: “the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection, his ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of hierarchy, etc. Now, it’s the “etc.” that really fascinates me. Here’s Jefferson rejecting pretty much the core tenets of the Christians faith, yet, maybe there’s more out there to turn down later. He wants to keep his options open.
Yet we know that Jefferson admired the teachings of Jesus as a moral philosopher. He took the Bible, the New Testament at least, removed the passages he did not believe in, and made the result a little book called The Life and Morals of Jesus Christ, sometimes called The Jefferson Bible, which you can still buy today. Jefferson also advised his nephew to “question with boldness even the existence of a god, because if there be one, he must approve more of the homage of reason than that of blind-folded fear”.
Now imagine for a moment that you’re a political consultant. It’s the year 2006 and there’s a big election coming up. You’ve got on your hands, a candidate who claims to be a follower and admirer of Jesus Christ, but who has written a letter dismissing a lot of the Christian dogma. Furthermore, this candidate took the New Testament, cut out all the parts he didn’t believe in, pasted what was left, and turned it into a book. And all the stuff he cut out dealt with the miracles of Christ and so forth . Furthermore, this candidate advised his own nephew to not be afraid to doubt the existence of God. I mean, let’s face it, this guy’s not electable, right? There go the “red states” when this gets out. And when this gets on Fox News Channel, he’s history!
So, my point is that some very good people from our own history would not be electable today because of what they believed or didn’t believe about God, yet we know in hindsight that these were some really valuable leaders.