Positive Liberty

The Jefferson Seminar: A number of my blog neighbors have lately held interesting discussions on Jefferson and Christianity. Was Jefferson a Christian? And does it matter? In both cases, it depends very much on what you mean. Paul Musgrave assesses the complexities of the issue:

Jefferson viewed Jesus of Nazareth as being a great ethical teacher (a proposition that very few have debated). His redacted version of the New Testament, then, was meant to bring back the debate to the “ethical germ” of Jesus’ teachings.

[The] blunt characterization of Christianity as a necessary foundation for democratic rule is unsophisticated, [but] it’s also a standard formulation of a popular idea. (Popular, that is, in the United States.) That Christian ethics, divorced from any consideration of Christ as divine and God as an active player in human events, can play a role in the perpetuation of democracy is a more sophisticated version of this hypothesis; but even this requires the believer to say that there can be a Christian ethics without a belief in the metaphysical requirements of Christian theology, which cuts against the equally standard assertion that a belief in (the Christian) God is necessary for a moral life.

Caleb McDaniel offers a few helpful analogies, plus a lot of other good material. Note especially the first parenthesis; it recalls Jesus himself, who declared that “my kingdom is not of this world:”

I’ve already said in an earlier post that even if a nation could be Christian (and personally, I do not believe that particular noun can be modified by that particular adjective), profiling the religious beliefs of Founding Fathers would be more or less irrelevant to determining whether this one is. Many members of the Religious Right would bristle at the following arguments: Jefferson was a racist, therefore this is a racist nation; Jefferson was a man, therefore this is a masculine nation. But many participants in the debate on church-state separation accept arguments of the same basic form: Jefferson was a Christian, therefore this is a Christian nation; or Jefferson was not a believer, so this is a secular nation. Suffice it to say that I think settling the issue of how religion fits in the public sphere of a liberal democracy is too complex to be settled by a tug-of-war over individual Founding Fathers.

I agree entirely. I think the main value of pointing out Jefferson’s freethinking tendencies is to serve as a counterweight to those who claim that the United States is only a Christian nation, and that it cannot be a nation for those whose beliefs are unconventional. Pointing to Jefferson, who rejected the supernatural aspects of Jesus, helps to show that several of our very greatest Americans were freethinkers, and that the United States ought to be a nation for all of us.

Finally, Timothy Sandefur serves up a number of helpful quotes (and non-quotes) from our third president. Specifically, he has searched in vain for the source of the following passage sometimes attributed to Jefferson:

The reason that Christianity is the best friend of Government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.

Sandefur has studied Jefferson extensively, and he does not recognize this quote from any of his readings. He has also digitally searched for the phrase “changes the heart” in the Jefferson corpus, and it does not appear. Readers are invited to help source this quote if they can, but it won’t be easy.

To my ear, the quote sounds much more like Rousseau than anyone else in the eighteenth century. Yet among French intellectuals, Montesquieu held far greater influence over Jefferson’s thought than Rousseau. (Montesquieu incidentally deserves more attention in the American academy than he currently gets. But this is the subject of a future post.)

Sandefur also notes the following passage, in which Jefferson seems to answer many of our questions for us:

I…am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece & Rome have left us…. Plato…has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention…. [T]he greatest of all the Reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dung hill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man’s outlines which it is lamentable he had not live to fill up. Epictetus & Epricurus give us laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties & charities we owe to others.

Was Jefferson a Christian? If it really matters–which we may legitimately doubt–then yes, Jefferson was a Christian. But he was a Christian in the same manner that I consider myself a devotee of Adam Smith. I don’t believe that Adam Smith performed miracles, nor do I think he rose from the dead, nor do I believe that he will bring us all eternal life with his Father in heaven. If someone told me these stories about Adam Smith, I would regard them as vulgar, pernicious distractions. And this is what Jefferson thought about the supernatural elements of Christianity.

No, I just think that Smith did a better job of social philosophy than anyone else, and that most good social philosophy since then has been in his footsteps. As to individual philosophy, I incline strongly toward Aristotle. Much like Jefferson believed that the philosophy of Jesus was a useful “supplement” to Epicurus and Epictetus, so too, I view Smith as a useful supplement to Aristotle, whom I regard as the best exponent of individual ethics.

Of course, if someone claimed that Adam Smith multiplied the loaves and fishes, I might not be inclined to argue.

Sci-Fi for the New Intellectual: In other news, Tim Sandefur also laments the decline of televised science fiction:

One of the highlights of this weekend was the Science Fiction Channel’s revival of Battlestar Gallactica, which premiered Saturday. It was wonderful! I don’t know if it’s just me or if TV has been getting worse, but I’ve been finding myself less and less interested in science fiction of late, and it was delightful to finally find a show I can care about and enjoy again.

Battlestar? Eh, I could take it or leave it. This weekend, though, Scott and I discovered Firefly, a remarkable science fiction series that was unjustly canceled after only one season, but that is rapidly becoming a cult classic. We absolutely loved it; we talked about the show until sometime after midnight yesterday, when I finally rolled over in bed and said, “look, we’ve got to get some sleep sometime tonight.” Yes, it was really that good. It’s got clever, well-constructed plots, action, suspense, symbolism, and a vision of the future that evokes, for me at least, some of the best in Victor Hugo’s fiction. Episode three, “Bushwhacked,” is actually quite similar to the major plot line in Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize, which is still my favorite novel of all time.

Scott and I have only seen the first three episodes, though, so please don’t e-mail me with spoilers. The rest of the series is on the way from Netflix, and we will watch it as soon as we possibly can. Any spoilers on my part will be given only with advance warning. When something this good comes along, you really don’t want it to be ruined.

Interestingly, the show’s appeal seems to have spread largely by favorable recommendations on weblogs. Admirers of Ayn Rand have especially liked it, so I suspect that Mr. Sandefur will want to have a look if he has not already.

Kilts Here and There: This weekend, a group of mostly heterosexual kilt enthusiasts discovered my snarky, offhanded, oversexed musings on gay men in kilts. Unbeknownst to my regular readers, these kilted warriors started visiting Positive Liberty by the dozens, mostly to read what I wrote about kilts from several months ago. Back on their forum, some uncomfortable words were exchanged. But all’s well that ends well.

I encourage you all to don your kilts and go read it yourself.