Religious Freedom: Jefferson's Legacy, America's Creed

7. JEFFERSON’S ENDURING LEGACY

7 JEFFERSON’S ENDURING LEGACY           son ’s views in the midst of modern controversy.After all, Jefferson was adamant that the world is for the living; he was so insistent upon this that he would have had each generation draft its own constitution. Jefferson would advise that a fixation on the Founders’ views is fundamentally misguided. Religious liberty, though, was different for Jefferson; protecting religious freedom was essential to both reason and republicanism. It was a natural right. Understanding its source, and the Founders’ passion for its protection, speaks to that fundamental nature.This must explain, in part, the remarkable consensus at the Supreme Court that our understanding of the First Amendment’s religion clauses should be particularly driven by history, making Jefferson’s legacy all the more important. Others have objected that fair-sounding Jeffersonian principles mask a social and legal reality in which religious liberty is a “myth.” This, though, is to miss the significant changes that those principles have compelled and the attention that they continue to compel. More troubling, that legacy has been twisted by modern efforts, on both right and left, to define a strict dichotomy between a wholly secular nation and a “Christian nation,” a dichotomy that Jefferson certainly would have rejected. Efforts to confuse our secular government with a secular citizenry have distorted more than they have informed. Jefferson’s legacy is a fundamentally secular government and a vibrant private religious realm bounded only by an expansive voluntary principle. The result has been a remarkably active U.S. religious community, an increasingly    rich and diverse polity, and an international intellectual debt to the United States, and Jefferson, for freedom of religion. Arguments about the meaning of religious freedom for Jefferson, and how Jeffersonian liberty can be applied today will certainly continue. That legacy, though, provides an exceptionally rich intellectual, political, and religious heritage. It is ironic that Jefferson, more than any other Founder, seems a ready participant in modern policy and constitutional debates. After all, it was Jefferson, more than any of the other Founding Fathers,who was deeply suspicious of the power of historical legacy in defining laws or status. Beyond his well-known assault on primogeniture and entail, it was Jefferson who suggested that laws should last only nineteen years, for one generation (dissuaded only in part when the ever-practical Madison explained the insurmountable problems with such an approach). It was Jefferson who warned: Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the proceeding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. . . . But . . . laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. Jefferson’s commitment to reason, empiricism, and the Enlightenment fed his suspicion of overreliance on sclerotic historic precedent. In one of the reports on UVA, he worried that excessive deference to the past fed“the preposterous idea that they [students] are to look backward for better things, and not forward .” He reminded even devotees who came seeking the sage’s wisdom that the past“was very like the present, but without the experience of the present.” Jack Rakove spoke for Jefferson when he pointed out that the Founders, generally empiricists, “would not have denied themselves the benefits of testing their original ideas and hopes against the intervening experience that we have accrued since .”¹ For Jefferson, though, religious liberty was different; it was foundational for a republic. Government was not safe, religion was not safe, . . . the mind ’    was not safe, without religious freedom. History demonstrated that an alliance between church and state would inevitably create a domineering priesthood (aided by the sanction of government) and an aristocracy (aided by the sanction of priestcraft), both an anathema to the free inquiry and rational debate that he revered and that were essential for a republic. Paradoxically, the whole idea of republican majoritarianism would be at risk without careful protection of religious freedom and free inquiry, including...