This course provides an overview of Thomas Jefferson's work and perspectives presented by the University of Virginia in partnership with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Together, UVA and Monticello are recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Situation in Old Regime Virginia
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Age of Jefferson
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Jefferson and Religion
The role of religion in public life continues to be a topic of debate today in both the United States and around the world. Thomas Jefferson was never happier than when his Bill for Religious Freedom was finally enacted in Virginia in 1786. In this module, we’ll try to understand why Jefferson believed freedom of religion to be so essential to the future of the United States. To do this, we’ll explore the historical context in which Jefferson developed his ideas about the proper relationship between religious denominations and the state. We’ll also investigate Jefferson’s own faith—a subject of much controversy from his own day through the present. Considering Jefferson’s serious engagement with questions of religion will help us understand the kinds of communities and society he hoped would take hold and flourish in the new nation.
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Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Corcoran Department of History
Let's talk about the situation in Virginia.
Virginia had an established church, an important thing to keep in mind.
It was the Anglican Church.
It was one of the several colonies that had Anglican establishment.
That is the church of England.
It's a problematic church at the time of a revolution against England.
You'd think it would be a propitious moment to simply destroy it and
eliminate it.
Think about it for a minute.
What do Anglican preacher do?
I can't speak from experience, I don't know really.
But I have a suspicion in Jefferson's day there
would be prayers for King George the III.
Long life to our Beloved king.
And think about this too.
The church of England in Virginia depends on and
is part of, the Diocese of London.
There is no bishop in America, you don't even have the hierarchy.
That would enable the church to ordain its own priests.
And to spread across the colonies.
Instead, it requires a constant circulation across the Atlantic.
This is a church that's closely tied to Britain.
It depends on that British connection.
Furthermore, and this is the key thing for Jefferson.
In the years leading up to independence there had been
a great awakening in Virginia, a revival.
And here's an important thing to keep in mind.
Many Evangelical Christians today question Jefferson's credentials as a Christian.
But here's the striking thing.
In Jefferson's day, his real supporters were Evangelical Christians.
It was the Baptists, to a lesser extent, the Methodists.
Methodists are as you may know, an offshoot of the Anglicans.
And technically also a kind of Church of England at this point.
And so their loyalty to the new republican regime is in question.
But the evangelicals who swept across Virginia in the 1760s and
mostly in the 1770s, making converts.
Even among the planting class delete,
it was a great revival that shook the establishment to it's foundations.
And how do establishments respond.
Well, Jefferson would say, looking back at world history, or
European history, which is the world, of course, for Jefferson.
He would say, you know what religious establishments do.
They make war.
They are the engine of conflict.
All the great wars of Europe, until the very recent modern period,
have been wars of religion.
And even after the peace of Westphalia in 1648.
Which supposedly inaugurates a new era in international relations.
It's the Protestant British against the Papist French.
Wars of religion.
We can't imagine that.
Or can we, now?
Wars of religion.
Unleash rivers of blood.
A favorite phrase of Jefferson.
When he thinks about organized, established religion.
He thinks about two things.
One is violent sectarian conflict, authorized by states.
Because every state has a religion and
supports it, unfortunately it's not the same religion.
This is why we have so much bloodshed.
In Europe violence, rivers of blood,
but we also have an onerous establishment.
Step back and think about what that means.
Jefferson's thinking about how priests conspire with each other.
And with their sponsors in the state,
to support the state, and to limit the freedom of your mind.
You must, as you pray
to God in the ways I prescribe to you, and you, and everyone of you.
You must be praying for the long life of your king.
You must be praying for your own subjection to superior authority.
A subjection to kings
which is mirrored in your subjection to superior ecclesiastical authorities.
All the way up To that great antichrist, from the Protestant perspective, the Pope.
The Anglican church has high tendencies, Catholic tendencies.
Both in the comprehensive notion of Catholic, and
the notion of regressing to Rome.
The Anglican church in opposition to the great dissenter majority
in British North America, represents a threat to liberty.
There are two things involved then, it's the way states behave.
When they are corrupted and supported by religious establishments.
And the thing that matters most for Thomas Jefferson.
Are the limits that state religion imposes on freedom of thought.
This is what the bill for religious freedom Is all about.
It's an argument that anticipates John Stewart Mills' famous on liberty.
It's an argument for the impossibility of imposing
authority over the human mind.
What you can do, of course, is you can't tell people how to think.
And people like Jefferson will think for themselves.
But you can coerce and punish them.
You can tax them in the case of an establishment.
You can say in Virginia, well we might tolerate you Baptists.
Because there is a law for toleration in the British Empire.
It's not quite clear how it applies in the colonies.
It's a mixed population that's hardly English in any meaningful sense.
You might call it largely British including Irish and Scottish and Welsh.
But you couldn't call it a single population.
Therefore it doesn't have a single religious persuasion.
So it's impossible to have establishment.
But establishments do operate locally.
That's the important thing in America and
early America, is that when the First Amendment is enacted.
It has nothing to do with state establishments.
It's all about preempting and precluding establishment at the federal level.
That's what the First Amendment in James Madison's Bill of Rights is all about.
There will be no establishment.
Think of what that signifies.
Why do you need to say that?
In the constitution, or add that to the constitution.
You need to do so, because many Americans,
not just Thomas Jefferson, are fearful of what will happen next.
That religious establishments or
would be establishments will try to capture the state.
That will never happen.
We're writing it down here.
In the Constitution.
This is a warning to all of you who would attempt to seize the state.
At least at the federal level we won't have an establishment.
But the facts on the ground are, that the state level establishment
survive in places like Massachusetts until 1833.
Why does Jefferson hate New England, my native region, so much?
It's, of course, all those high federalists.
It's all those monarchists.
It's all those people who are secretly, or not so secretly, supporting the British.
In foreign policy.
That's the English party.
What bothers him most about New Hampshire, Connecticut and
Massachusetts, is they have established churches.
Will that cancer spread across the county?
Well, Jefferson has faith in the future.
We'll talk more about his faith.
It's not gonna happen.
But you know, these people are most dangerous now.
As they recognize the tide is moving against them.
They will try to seize the moment and capture the State.
As they seem to have done in Connecticut with a standing order,
Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
It could happen here.
That's why it is so compelling for
us to get rid of the Virginia establishment when we can.
And there is a popular Democratic constituency for disestablishment.
Because of the rising tide of evangelicalism.
Jefferson's allies are convinced Christians.
Who chafe at the domination of a church that seems to them spiritually hollow.
To be merely an agency of the ruling class, which is what it is.
Because in Virginia, not only do you not have bishops, no bishop in Virginia.
But you have local vestry control of the Parrish.
And every clergymen is the puppet of the local planters
who serve on the county court.
Who are not elected, whose
oligarchical rule will be perpetuated to the end of time if they have their way.
Because what do elites want to do?
What did they want to do then?
What do they want to do now?
They want to perpetuate themselves forever.
This is the great challenge in Virginia, my fellow Virginians.
We must destroy aristocratic, oligarchic power.
We must democratize the constitution.
That's why Jefferson wanted to be in Virginia.
To write a real constitution that would establish the ground work for liberty and
freedom of thought.
And disestablish the church.
For Jefferson it was a holy crusade.
To overcome the forces of darkness and ignorance.
And the local version of darkness and tyranny and
ignorance was his own class of planters.
And their comfortable control of all the institutions of governance
in the new state of Virginia.
And the Virginia Constitution of 1776,
written without the benefit of Jefferson's ideas.
Jefferson would complain about this for the rest of his life.
Was simply the old provincial constitution,
republicanized in a very superficial way.
We haven't gotten to the central problems, in 1776 in that constitution.
The central problems for Virginia, which is equal representation.
It's an anti democratic regime that favors the tide water counties.
Over Jefferson's own piedmont and certainly the valley and beyond.
And so not only is there oligarchy on the local level.
There's oligarchy on the province and
new state level as one part of the state gives rule to the other.
And we still haven't established church.
Now it doesn't make much sense to give your Baptist fellow citizens a hard time.
When you're simultaneously asking them to give their lives for the revolution.
This gives the Baptists and Jefferson a lot of leverage.
But what is impressive, and what we need to keep in mind is, how hard it was.
To achieve this great good end for Jefferson.
He didn't think that the door was swinging open, he says.
Oh, everybody says, yeah Freedom of thought, that is so Republican.
We've just got to dis establish.
No, people did not think that.
The forces of inertia are tremendous.
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