Jefferson Speaks

A few months before his death, in 1825, Thomas Jefferson received a request from a friend for a letter to the friend's son, offering him advice. Here is Jefferson's letter to that boy:

"This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead. The writer will be in the grave before you can weigh its counsels. Your affectionate and excellent father has requested that I would address to you something which possibly might have a favorable influence on the course of life you have to run: and I too, as a namesake, feel an interest in that course.

"Few words will be necessary with good dispositions on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard. Farewell."

This short letter is interesting in view of the fact that so many modern anti-religious types have tried to paint some of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson in particular, as agnostics, if not atheists. Clearly, Jefferson shows familiarity with Christian concepts and demonstrates a belief in heaven. These are not the words of an agnostic or of a deist who believed that God created the world and then walked away, leaving it like a clock to run itself.

Part of the problem many Americans have in understanding the Founding Fathers is a general ignorance of America's colonial and revolutionary period. Failed public education is the chief culprit. The other part of the problem is failing to read the words in the context in which they were written.

Jefferson grew up with two institutions with which modern Americans have had no experience — an aristocracy by birth and an official church. The Anglican Church was in his time and is today the official Church of England. In the Virginia colony, people were taxed, and part of those taxes was used to subsidize the Anglican Church. Jefferson believed this wrong, as religion was a matter of conscience, and he did not think government had the right to force a person to support something his conscience did not. Hence, his idea of religious freedom was the absence of an official church or an officially designated religion.

When he wrote in a letter that there was a wall of separation between church and state, he meant just that and only that. He meant that Baptists could not be taxed to support Methodists or vice versa. He did not mean that government must be hostile to religion and ban any display of it from all public places. The same Congress that wrote the Bill of Rights also made provision for chaplains. It was a basic premise of American republicans (little R, having nothing to do with the Republican Party, which was not invented until the 1850s) that only a virtuous people, schooled in virtue by religion, could maintain a free republic.

It is worth noting that the people today who so vehemently wish to sweep religion from all public spaces and institutions are also the same people who consistently oppose freedom. They want only one God — the state, which of course they intend to run.

When Jefferson spoke of people being created equal, he had reference to the class system. He did not mean people were equal in talents or other characteristics. He simply meant that God had not created a class system in which privileges were conferred by birth on one set of people and denied by birth to another set of people.

Disregarding the value of religion and believing in egalitarianism are two misconceptions that cause America much trouble today.