In one of my recent videos, a viewer from Abbeville asked whether Thomas Jefferson was a deist or a theist. This essay answers that question.
There has been and continues to be overwhelming confusion apropos of Jefferson’s religiosity. That is, in large part, due to Jefferson, whose behavior invites contradictory assessments of it.
- He attended worship and participated in prayers and hymns at churches of various denominations, though he objected loudly to the empleomania of religious clerics.
- He wrote of God as privileging humans—“When the measure of [slaves] tears shall be full, … a God of justice will awaken to their distress … by His exterminating thunder” (TJ to Jean Nicholas Démeunier, ca. 26 June 1786)—though he commonplaced Lord Bolingbroke concerning the cosmos or even the planet not being made for the sake of humans.
- He had amicable relationships with many local ministers, many of whom were Calvinists, though he generally spoke illy of Calvinism—its trinitarianism being a “hocus-pocus phantasm of a god like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads” (e.g., TJ to James Smith, 8 Dec. 1822).
Here, once again, his numerous critics grouse, there are clear instances of Jefferson’s hypocrisy—his capacity to say anything to anyone to suit his purposes. Was Jefferson such a chameleon?
The confusion concerning Jefferson’s conception of religion exists in large measure because of widespread confusion concerning his conception of deity.
Jefferson employed often “deity” and “god” in writings. “I pray to God” and “god bless you” occur with great frequency in writings, and he frequently ignored capitalizing the latter, when doing so would not prove offensive to a correspondent. That is not inconsequential.
Yet Jefferson seemed never to have had much to say on the nature of deity, and he habitually refused to speak of his religiosity. To John Adams (11 Jan. 1817), he gave his customary reply to anyone who would press him on religion: “Say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone.” He was true to that sentiment, as even members of his family knew nothing of his religiosity when he died.
Jefferson, however, wrote enough on deity to enable us to piece together, with a great degree of accuracy, the nature of his god. One must appeal especially to his letters to intimates, his Literary Commonplace Book, and his version of the bible.
In his Literary Commonplace Book, Jefferson abundantly commonplaces Lord Bolingbroke’s religious views from the latter’s Philosophical Works. Bolingbroke’s deity is “sovereignly good, … almighty and alwise” (§14), and has no difficulty enabling certain types of matter to think (§§11–13). Bolingbroke’s god does not intervene in foreordained cosmic events—e.g., Christ’s miracles (§22 and §26), punishment for the fall of man (§15 and §42), or divine superintendency—but establishes once and for all cosmic harmony, as “nothing can be less reconcileable [sic] to the notion of an all-perfect being, than the imagination that he undoes by his power in particular cases what his wisdom … once thought sufficient to be established for all case” (§49)—thus, deism, not theism. Moreover, Bolingbroke’s deity has not made “man the final cause of the whole creation” (§16 and §46). Bolingbroke’s deity does not communicate his existence through revelation or inspiration, or only to one type of people (§16, §§20–22, §24, §32). Bolingbroke’s deity does not punish or reward humans in an eternal afterlife, for “justice requires that punishments … and rewards … [ought to] be measured [o]ut in various degrees and manners, according to the various [c]ircumstances of particular cases, and in due proportion to them” (§52)—i.e., justice ought to be meted out in this life. The religious law of Bolingbroke’s deity—“the law of nature is the law of god” (§36)—is to be found in nature. “Natural religion represents an allperfect being to our adoration and to our lives,” and requires humans to “love the lord thy god with all thy heart” (§56).
That Jefferson commonplaced Bolingbroke’s deistic conception of deity is evidence of a commitment to deism.
What is “deism” and how does it differ from “theism”? I offer suitable definitions as they pertain to Jefferson.
Deism=df the view that God created the cosmos as first cause but neither inheres in it nor intervenes in cosmic affairs thereafter.
Theism-df the view that God created the cosmos as first cause and inheres or intervenes in cosmic affairs thereafter.
Deism as I have defined it can be grasp analogically by two sorts of carpenters. The first builds a Palmer-styled house (Palmer House, Ann Arbor, MI; Frank Lloyd Wright) in a rural area and, once it is completed, he leaves, never to return, to build another house. The second builds a Palmer-styled house in a rural area and thereafter resided in it to effect needed periodic repairs.
Why did Jefferson prefer deism to theism?
Following §49 of his Commonplace Book, Jefferson merely believed that a deity of indescribably large intelligence and capacities would “get it right” the first time and thereafter would never have to intervene in cosmic (including human) affairs. That is comparable to the first builder crafting his house to perfectly that he would thereafter never have to fret vis-à-vis repairs.
Like Bolingbroke and others (e.g., Lord Kames, David Hume, Adam Smith, and A.L.C. Destutt de Tracy) whom Jefferson read and assimilated, Jefferson thought deity was visible in the cosmos. He writes to John Adams (11 Apr. 1823): “When we take a view of the Universe, in it’s parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to be percieve [sic] and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it’s composition.” Use of “see” and “feel” indicate appropriation of the epistemology of Destutt de Tracy and Lord Kames, each of whom stated deity was immediately visible or felt in the cosmos. Neither invoked analogically an argument from design, for instance:
- The cosmos is like a watch.
- Watches upon inspection show unmistakable signs of creative intelligence.
- So, the cosmos upon inspection shows unmistakable signs of creative intelligence.
That sensual epistemic appropriation is also manifest in a letter to John Adams (15 Aug. 1820) to whom Jefferson states paranomastically in the manner of Descartes: “I feel: therefore I exist. … On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.” There is no appeal to reason.
Yet there are snags. Certain letters smack of theism. Jefferson limns the attributes of deity in both letters to Adams. In the 1823 letter, he says that God is the designer and “fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.” God is a “superintending power” that “maintains the Universe in it’s course and order.” Regeneration and superintendency are attributed to deity because of new discoveries in astronomy—“Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view”—and in biology—“certain races of animals are become extinct.” In the 1820 letter, he states that all things—“the human soul, angels, god”—are matter, for if not, “they are nothings.” He cites Locke, Tracy, and Stewart as authorities for his materialism.
And so, was Jefferson a deist, like Bolingbroke, or a theist?
Some writings, especially early ones, offer evidence of deism. He writes to Dr. Benjamin Rush (23 Sept. 1800) concerning the yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia:
When great evils happen, I am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from them as consolations to us, and Providence has in fact so established the order of things, as that most evils are the means of producing some good.
Here the suggestion is that of a pre-established order, implying nonintervention and deism. Yet the 1823 letter to Adams speaks of God as a regenerator or superintendent—implying periodic intervention and theism.
Could it be, as other scholars have claimed, that Jefferson began as a deist and was forced to accept theism because of species extinction, which he was early in life disinclined to accept, and supernovae, like that of 1572?
On settling that bristly issue, Jefferson’s 1820 bible has a bearing. Reconstructing the works of the four evangelists in the New Testament, Jefferson was insistent on removing all thaumaturgy—“things against the course of nature” (TJ to William Short, 4 Aug. 1820). He cites “calves speaking” and “statues sweating blood” as illustrations. Hence, passages in which Jesus feeds a great crowd with two fish and five loaves of bread (Matthew 15: 32–38) or brings back to life a dead young woman (Matthew 9: 18–26) are excised. Insistence that all thaumaturgy be removed from his bible, believed to be the real life and words of Jesus, is another way of Jefferson, following Bolingbroke, saying that God, through Jesus’s miracles, “undoes by his power in particular cases what his wisdom … once thought sufficient to be established for all case”—viz., that he allows for periodic exceptions to the laws of nature—evidence of divine impotency, not divine omnipotency. Thus, divine superintendency is best explained for Jefferson by a deity that is either equivalent to the cosmos (a Stoic deity) or a deity that has built superintendency into the cosmos in the manner of a builder who fashions a thermostat for a house to regulate its temperature. Theism is unneeded. That is Ockham’s Razor. (Hey, did not Aristotle say that well before Ockham???)
Why does any of this matter?
As a Jeffersonian scholar and analytic philosopher/historian, I am chiefly interested in the mind of Thomas Jefferson. I am interested in why Jefferson did what he did—the reasons behind his deeds, included among those are his writings. I want to know why he donated money to churches, why he befriended ministers of various denominations, and why he enjoyed written and spoken sermons. The sort of God in which Jefferson believed also tells us much about the man. Jefferson found God more in study of nature—in study of physics (e.g., reading Galileo, Kepler, and Newton), examination of natural wonders (e.g., Natural Bridge, hot springs, and caves), and study of botany—than in public religious worship, which to me suggests a deeper grasp of the “omniety” of deity than most persons, whose appreciation of God is confined to Sunday worship, have.
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Enjoy the video below!
Why didn’t Jefferson just treat the Bible as a book, like any other book, and simply read it and try to understand what’s going on in it?
Yes, the Bible claims to be God’s word’s; His word’s written down by men. Of course, that’s an extraordinary claim. But, it’s still a book. Did not Jefferson try to simply read it as a book, for himself? See for himself, instead of listening to other’s, or hearing what other’s had to say about it.
If Jefferson didn’t do that, what kind of difference might that have made if he just read it?
TJ had a critical approach to everything. A naturalist, he had Hume’s skepticism about divine intervention, miracles, life after death, &c. The history of how the Bible came to be is complex, as you likely know. TJ focused on New Testament, which he came to believe had some pearls of wisdom. My job is to tell you what TJ thought. You are free to reject what he thought.
For men like Jefferson to try to be figuring out whether this world is under a theistic or deistic God is a one sided approach. Arrogant perhaps. Especially, if one is not trying to learn and take into consideration about what is going on in the Bible. It is, or ends up going, thus:
1 Corinthians 1:21 “…the world by wisdom knew not God…”
This is because men know they are guilty. Men know God is, so it’s everything else but God and the Bible. Everything men need to know about themselves and everybody else is in one chapter, Genesis ch. 3. As far as why, when, and how men devolve, one chapter, Romans ch. 1.
What if men learned and realized that since the stoning of Stephen in Acts ch. 7, that the world has existed as it has only because of the Creator’s grace, mercy, and long-suffering? And, that state has been only temporary? Two thousand some years ago, the wrath of God was ready to explode on the whole world, Jews and Gentiles. Think about that. What might a man do or think if he knew that the Bible might teach this? (It does.)
This is not “religious” talk. It is not from the view of a “religion;” that assertion, which is made out there, is another misunderstanding and slander of true Christianity and the Bible.