Positive Liberty

As an enthusiastic admirer of both Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Hitchens, I’m interested in the question of whether Jefferson was, in fact, an atheist. I must first say that I don’t believe Hitchens explicitly calls Jefferson an atheist. (I listened to the audio version of his Jefferson book, so I may have missed it.) Instead, he argues that Jefferson was what in his day was called a “unitarian,” and expressed the hope that some day all Americans would be unitarians. The term “unitarian” back then isn’t to be confused with the modern Unitarian Universalist Church—instead, the term reflected a much more reasoned, watered-down version of Christianity, and a good case can be made that most Americans are, indeed, what Jefferson’s generation would have called “unitarians.”

Also, it is very true that in Jefferson’s day it was virtual suicide to declare oneself an atheist. Jefferson’s expressions of religious sentiment are usually vague, non-commital, almost secular references. Jefferson wasn’t as silent on the subject as was Washington, but his God is virtually always a poetic reference such as an atheist today might use, even, or a God Whose main attribute seems to be His political effects (as in “rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God”). God to Jefferson is rarely if ever the personal, all-governing Power that a genuine Christian believes Him to be. As Jonathan Rowe has pointed out, Jefferson referred in his communications with Indian tribes to “the Great Spirit”—yet we don’t imagine that Jefferson was a Native American pantheist. We have little more reason to believe that he was a classic monotheist.

I don’t think it is silly to suggest that Jefferson hid his true beliefs. Jefferson often hid his true beliefs, and nowhere was this more the case than when he was writing to Adams in his retirement, and when he was writing one of his gorgeous rhetorical letters about the higher values in life—particularly in a day when atheists or deists were treated with even more hostility than they are today. Jefferson’s God is usually a convenient tool, whether for politics, personal moral analysis, or inspiring prose. And Jefferson’s letters to Adams, while lovely and often profoundly interesting, are never, ever transparent. Adams is as frank as a man could be in these letters; Jefferson almost never addresses Adams without looking over his shoulder at the audience of history, and shaping his words accordingly. And Adams’ well-known religious views would doubtless have made Jefferson reluctant to express his views on the subject with complete candor. Adams in 1823 was definitely not Jefferson’s “trusted friend.”

That said, I don’t believe Jefferson was an atheist. The primary problem for atheism in that day was the question of the origin of species. The argument from design was simply too powerful an argument in the days before Darwin, and Jefferson had no answer for it. The letter Brayton quotes from describes this well:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in it’s parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to percieve and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it’s composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with it’s distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a 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. We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in it’s course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro’ all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe. Surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probable than that of the few in the other hypothesis.

(emphases added).

Of course, evolution and its insights have dealt with these concerns in a marvelous and entirely convincing way. We can never know, truly, what Jefferson believed in religious matters, or whether he would have changed his mind had he lived long enough to learn of evolution. But we do know that Jefferson’s primary objection was not to religion in general, but to supernaturalism and superstition in particular. That reason leads one to reject the idea of a God–well, that’s God’s fault, not Jefferson’s!