Thomas Jefferson's Religious Views: Deism, Freedom, and the Jefferson Bible

Thomas Jefferson was one of the most prominent American exponents of deism and one of the most important American defenders of religious freedom. His religious views were controversial in his own time, and they continue to provoke debate. This article examines the central features of Jefferson’s religious position, including his deism, his commitment to religious freedom, his views on Jesus, and his famous Jefferson Bible.

The Deist Position

Jefferson was a deist, a position that held that God had created the universe and established its laws, but did not intervene in history through miracles, prophecy, or special revelation. Jefferson believed in a God who was the creator of the natural world and the source of the moral order, but he rejected the supernatural claims of orthodox Christianity.

The deist position is evident in many of Jefferson’s writings. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson argues that the natural world provides evidence of a divine creator, but he rejects the miracles, the prophecies, and the other supernatural claims of the Bible. In his letters to various correspondents, he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of reason as the proper guide in matters of religious belief, and he criticizes the attempts of organized religion to impose its doctrines on the minds of the faithful.

The Defence of Religious Freedom

Jefferson was one of the most important American defenders of religious freedom. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Jefferson in 1777 and enacted by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786, was one of the great American contributions to the modern theory of religious liberty.

The statute declared that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,” and that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.” The statute was a major step in the development of the American principle of the separation of church and state, and it was eventually incorporated into the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The defense of religious freedom was grounded, for Jefferson, in the deist conviction that the proper use of reason is the only legitimate guide in matters of religious belief. The attempt to use force in matters of religious belief was, in his view, both unjust and ineffective. It was unjust because the state had no authority to coerce the conscience; and it was ineffective because the attempt to compel belief could not actually produce belief, but only hypocrisy.

The Views on Jesus

Jefferson had a high regard for Jesus as a moral teacher, but he rejected the orthodox Christian doctrines of the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the incarnation, and the miracles. He believed that Jesus was a great moral teacher whose ethical teachings were an important part of the moral inheritance of humanity, but he did not believe that Jesus was divine in any supernatural sense.

This view is most fully expressed in the Jefferson Bible, a work that Jefferson compiled in his later years by cutting and pasting the relevant sections from the four Gospels. The work, which was not published in his lifetime, presented Jesus as a great moral teacher, stripped of the supernatural claims that Jefferson found so objectionable. The Jefferson Bible is sometimes called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth; it is a small, octavo-sized volume that contains the ethical teachings of Jesus in chronological order, in parallel columns of English, French, Greek, and Latin, with the miraculous and supernatural passages excised.

The compilation process was laborious. Jefferson used a razor to cut the relevant passages from six printed copies of the New Testament (two in English, two in French, one in Greek, and one in Latin), and he pasted the cut passages into a blank album. The original manuscript, which is now in the Smithsonian, bears the marks of the razor cuts and the paste. The work was not published in Jefferson’s lifetime, and the original manuscript was discovered in the Jefferson family papers only in 1895, by Cyrus Adler.

The Jefferson Bible was controversial from the moment of its publication in the late nineteenth century, and it remains controversial today. Some readers have seen in it a profound respect for the ethical teachings of Jesus, and an important contribution to the development of modern religious liberalism. Other readers have seen in it a rejection of the central claims of orthodox Christianity, and an expression of the radical religious individualism of the Enlightenment. The contemporary debate about the proper relationship between reason and revelation, between natural religion and revealed religion, and between the ethical teachings of Jesus and the supernatural claims of orthodox Christianity continues to draw on the Jefferson Bible as a touchstone.

The Reception of Jefferson’s Religious Views

The reception of Jefferson’s religious views in his own time and in the subsequent tradition has been mixed. In his own time, Jefferson was attacked by the established churches of Virginia and by the orthodox Christian press throughout the country. The attacks were often personal, and they were sometimes vicious. The 1800 presidential campaign saw Jefferson accused of atheism, of immorality, and of every variety of heterodoxy. The accusations were, in significant part, politically motivated, but they were also a reflection of the genuine alarm that Jefferson’s religious views produced among the orthodox.

In the subsequent tradition, Jefferson’s religious views have been read in various ways. The defenders of the tradition have seen in Jefferson a defender of religious freedom and a champion of the separation of church and state. The critics have seen in Jefferson a destroyer of the Christian foundations of the American republic, and they have argued that the secularism of the contemporary United States is, in significant part, the legacy of Jefferson’s religious views. The contemporary debate about the role of religion in American public life is, in significant part, a debate about the proper interpretation of Jefferson’s legacy.

The Influence of Jefferson’s Religious Views

Jefferson’s religious views had a profound influence on the development of the American political tradition. The American Constitution, with its First Amendment prohibition of the establishment of religion and its protection of the free exercise of religion, was a direct expression of the principles that Jefferson had championed.

The American commitment to the separation of church and state, to the freedom of religious belief and practice, and to the proper limits of government in matters of religion draw on the central arguments of Jefferson’s religious views. The contemporary debate about the proper relationship between religion and politics in America is, a continuation of the debate that Jefferson helped to launch.

The Deist Position

The Defence of Religious Freedom

The Views on Jesus

The Reception of Jefferson’s Religious Views

The Influence of Jefferson’s Religious Views

Further Reading