Let’s get some perspective here:
Jefferson had religious beliefs and practices. He couldn’t help it; no thinking man has ever avoided them.
We sometimes mistake a man with a self-assembled religion for a man with none, as if a man with a kit-car or a custom home were without transportation or shelter.
Jefferson, being a thoughtful man, had a religion; that it was less formal and “off the rack” than the religion of his contemporary Pope Pius VI made it no less of a religion.
For if one insists on using the term “religion” to cover such disparate things as the “faiths” of Confucianists and Christians, of Buddhists and Bahais, of Mithraists and Muslims, of Satanists and Scientologists, then one is necessarily reduced to defining a given man’s “religion” as consisting of some, but not always all, of the following:
1. Opinions regarding the natural (including its origins) and supernatural (including whether it exists);
2. Opinions regarding the nature of man and his relationship to other men, the world, and the supernatural if any;
3. Opinions regarding how man should act and think;
4. Practices and limits for advocating the content of those those opinions to others and for propagating them to the next generation, including roles for tradition, education, authority, and culture.
Now anyone who says that Jefferson had no opinions on the nature of nature, on the existence (or nonexistence) of the supernatural, or on the nature of man and how he ought to behave, is simply ignorant of the record.
And Jefferson (like many Deists and Unitarians) apparently thought a religion with whom his own beliefs disagreed on the first two points was, in practice, the best way to communicate to posterity his opinions on the third point. This therefore made up much of his practice, with regards to the fourth point.
Those who hold I am indulging in tendentious word-bending are mistaken: I am clearing the air of a perversion of language which categorizes such opinions and practices to be of a “religious” character when they include one view of the supernatural, but non-religious when they hold the opposite view or no view at all. By that argument, Confucianism, Buddhism, Scientology, and (some) Satanism are far less “religious” than Jefferson’s DIY faith.
No, the beliefs and practices in the categories I described above served, for Thomas Jefferson, exactly the same role that opposing beliefs and practices in the same categories served for Thomas the Apostle, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas More.
They were functionally his religion. Indeed, some of the most functionally religious thinkers in modern life are those whom we mistakenly think irreligious. Richard Dawkins is, if anything, the chief contemporary evangelist of his belief system: And he pursues his calling with what I think most observers recognize as genuine zeal.
The difference, then, between the thinking Christian and the thinking Deist is not a matter of one having a religion and the other not.
It is a matter of the one having a religion from a single source which has presumably had time to “evolve out” any internal inconsistencies, and the other having a religion collected from disparate sources, and for which he himself must exercise the required insight to reconcile any inconsistencies. (Some build their own computers; some just buy a Dell.)
So Jefferson built his own religion: Going so far as to edit the Holy Writ of another religion until it syncretically fit his own. A bit of a hobbyist myself, I can admire his resourcefulness.
And naturally, as the devotee of another belief system, he predictably accused the majority belief system of his day (Catholicism) of being bunkum. I’m sure the few Catholics then in America returned the compliment.
Though I am sure the Bush Administration’s copy-editors did not think of it that way, their role in Bowdlerizing Jefferson was not so much to edit religious sentiment into it, as to edit it out: Just enough to maximize its appeal to the broadest range of believers, from Atheists to Zoroastrians.
