Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours

Placing Thomas Jefferson and Religion in Context, Then and Now

Thomas E. Buckley, S.J. Placing Thomas Je√erson and Religion in Context, Then and Now The letter Thomas Je√erson penned to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, in January 1802 ranks among the most important ever composed by any president. The previous October the Baptists had written him a congratulatory letter on his inauguration. In it they expressed their desire that complete religious freedom might one day be achieved in Connecticut. There the Congregational clergy enjoyed a church establishment linked to the Federalist Party. So e√ectively did the Congregationalists dominate the state that the Reverend Timothy Dwight of Yale College was referred to as the pope of Connecticut.∞ The Baptist clergy knew that the First Amendment did not pertain to the states but only to the federal government. However, they expressed their hope that Je√erson’s well-known views in support of religious liberty would so influence the United States and even the world that one day ‘‘Hierarchy and tyranny’’ would be destroyed.≤ Three months later Je√erson replied in memorable language: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & Thomas Jefferson and Religion 127 not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. The spread of this perspective, he asserted, would ‘‘restore’’ to human beings their ‘‘natural rights.’’≥ What has made the letter so significant is, of course, the way in which the concept of ‘‘separation of Church and State’’ has passed into American jurisprudence. The Supreme Court, in its earliest precedent-setting decisions on the First Amendment, turned to Jefferson ’s letter to the Danbury Baptists and the history of the long argument over religious freedom in Virginia during the Revolutionary era. Je√erson was at the center of that fight; and the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which the state approved in 1786, set the stage for the First Amendment’s religion clause a few years later. In Reynolds v. United States in 1878, which upheld a federal ban on Mormon polygamy in Utah territory, Chief Justice Morrison Waite, at the urging of a distinguished historian, George Bancroft, turned to the Virginia story to understand the First Amendment. In the preamble of Je√erson’s statute, Waite found a definition of ‘‘religion ’’ as ‘‘opinion’’ that the government could not touch, though actions were a di√erent matter. The Chief Justice also quoted Je√erson ’s Danbury letter and the ‘‘wall of separation’’ metaphor.∂ Seventy years later, in the Everson and McCollum decisions of 1947 and 1948, the Court applied the Establishment Clause to the states and endorsed a strict separationist interpretation of the First Amendment. Again, as in the Reynolds case, the justices made Je√erson’s perspective normative.∑ Therefore, what Je√erson thought and wrote about religion, particularly in its relationship to civil society, holds enormous importance for church-state jurisprudence and consequently for our lives today. No aspect of his thought so roused his political opponents during his lifetime or has proved more contentious after 128 Thomas E. Buckley, S.J. his death as his views on religion and its association with government . Both friends and foes, then and afterward, too often misunderstand his positions, chiefly because they ignore the complex circumstances within which he formulated his developing perspectives on God, religious freedom, and the place of religion in a republic. No one, however, underestimates the significance of his thought. Just as his Declaration of Independence unleashed the political revolution that established this nation, so his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—as it is commonly known—inaugurated a social revolution that transformed the relationship between church and state first in Virginia and then by example and by law throughout the United States. To understand that transformation and Je√erson’s role in it, we need some sense of the varied contexts that framed his developing thought on religion and its place in society. The religious world into which Je√erson was born in 1743 provided the first setting. Shortly after that event, Peter and Jane Randolph Je√erson brought their firstborn son...