It’s not that I don’t think it’s important that Thomas Jefferson started the Declaration of Independence off by saying that “Nature’s God” entitles us to “equal station” and that our rights have been “endowed” to us by our “Creator.” But it seems a bit overplayed by congressional candidates like Diane Black. The first thing to note is that the term “Nature’s God” is, and was, associated with Deism, not Christianity. And, without getting bogged down in the theological differences between the two religions, we can just focus on one: the Trinity. In Christianity, the Trinity is one of the most important beliefs. The author of the Declaration of Independence displayed an amazingly strong contempt for the concept.
“No historical fact is better established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity . . .
Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the will of the Athanasius. The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands of martyrs . . .
The Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such person, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.” — Thomas Jefferson: Letter to James Smith, Dec. 8, 1822
In a 1822 letter to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, Jefferson wrote, “I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.” It’s not that Jefferson didn’t venerate Jesus of Nazareth. But he considered Christianity to be a perversion of his teachings. Now, without taking sides for or against Jefferson’s world view, it’s odd to see Diane Black make the following points:
First and foremost, America’s founders believed that our freedom was a gift from God to all people. This very simple assertion at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence has been the foundation on which everything great about our country was built. As a nation and a culture, we must continue to affirm that primacy of our Creator.
Just a few words later in the Declaration of Independence, the first rights of all people are spelled out: “…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That first word – “life” – indicates the touchstone right that guarantees all the others. As Middle Tennessee’s representative, I will defend the Right to Life with every fiber of my being. I was proud to be named “Legislator of the Year” in our state by Tennessee Right to Life and I will not ever waiver from my commitment to this most fundamental principal of freedom.
I don’t think it’s parsing to say that Ms. Black is suggesting that Thomas Jefferson was a Christian and that he was against abortion. I don’t know what Jefferson felt about reproductive rights, but he wasn’t a Christian and he wasn’t going around telling people the following:
I will also defend the enumerated rights in U.S. Constitutions’ Bill of Rights – as they are written in the document. The right to religious expression must be protected – which in today’s world usually means protection from government censorship. Freedom of religion does not mean the government-mandated absence of religion and I will fight the left-wing to defend our right to religious expression.
In 1808, Jefferson wrote this in a letter to the Virginia Baptists.
Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person’s life, freedom of religion affects every individual. Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the “wall of separation between church and state,” therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries
So, Thomas Jefferson emphatically supported the complete separation of Church and State, which logically dictates that no particular religion should be subsidized by the government nor advocated for in federally-funded schools. If there were some religious text justifying opposition to abortion, Jefferson probably would not have supported a law banning it on those grounds alone.
But all of this is part of a larger phenomenon on the political right. They’ve concocted a cockeyed version of history where the Founding Fathers were devout Christians who founded the United States of America on Christian principles. This is flat-out wrong. If you accept the premise that a Christian is someone who believes in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, then Andrew Jackson was our first Christian president. The first six presidents did not take communion and held a unitarian (not trinitarian) point of view. And Andrew Jackson didn’t get baptized until after he served as president, so really the first president who was a Christian while serving in office was Martin Van Buren. That’s almost a fifth of the history of our country before we had a president who was a communion-taking Trinitarian. (I am aware of the dispute about George Washington, but whether he ever took communion or not, he was not a Trinitarian).
Now, none of this stuff would be all that important if it wasn’t for the fact that these members of the New Right are trying to take the beliefs of people like Thomas Jefferson, who fervently hoped that, by now, Trinitarians would not exist in this country, and use them to erode the wall separating Church and State.
The truth is, if the Founding Fathers were to wake up and look around at the politics of the day, they’d never stop throwing up.
