Thomas Jefferson - Button

Thomas Jefferson’s New Testament: Partial ABSTRACT: E.M. Halliday, American Heritage. Thomas Jefferson had an intense interest in religion’s relation to government. In his second term as President (1805-09) he composed for his own satisfaction a version of the New Testament called “The Life and Morals of Jesus.” He left out the Last Supper. He said he wrote it to rescue the moral teachings of Jesus from “the crazy speculations of crazy theologists, abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried.” Jefferson called himself Christian, but rejected “the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc.” He thought Christ was a great reformer, author of a “system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man” – but human not divine. To be Christian one had only to follow Christ’s system of ethics, uncontaminated by additions, adulterations, and distortions of those who came after. The “free exercise of reason” was all one needed to tell Jesus’ original teaching from the dross. Natural morality was the rock of Jefferson’s democratic faith. The doctrine of original sin was anathema; human nature could be trusted: all normal men were endowed by their Creator not only with unalienable rights, but also unalienable instincts, including a natural moral sense. Except in conditions of ignorance, poor education, poverty and bad social conditions, the mass would gravitate towards what was right on fundamental issues, if allowed complete freedom of conscience. Majority rule – a sacred principle to Jefferson – depended on a well-informed public, each member of which could choose among moral or political alternatives with absolute freedom from mental coercion. An organised church was unlikely to leave men’s minds completely free. Each sect claimed special revelation of God’s will directly to its prophets or priests, or recorded in a “bible”. Religions were unwilling to give up moral (and, political) choices to the untrammeled conscience of the individual citizen. The Declaration of Independence envisaged a free society ruled by consent of the governed. Informed decision and consent needed good public education based on complete freedom of mind. Religion made the first fundamental challenge to the republic’s freedom of mind. He would oppose them with all his power, he said, “for I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” It was “Nature’s God” that he was thinking of; and for that vow above all others the altar was not to be found, he believed, within the limits of any dogmatic creed. ABSTRACT: E.M. Halliday, American Heritage.