Religious views of Thomas Jefferson
Based on Wikipedia: Religious views of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson created his own Bible. He took a razor to the New Testament, physically cutting out every miracle, every supernatural claim, every hint of divinity—and kept only the moral teachings of Jesus. What remained was a slim volume he called "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," a book he never published, that sat in his private library at Monticello, a secret testament to one of the most radical religious minds in American history.
This was a man who attended church regularly, contributed generously to clergy salaries, and consistently called himself a Christian. He was also a man who refused to serve as a godfather because he couldn't accept the Trinity, who compared the Bible to a dunghill containing scattered diamonds, and who was attacked during his presidential campaign as a "howling atheist" whose election would mean "the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion."
The contradiction only appears on the surface. Jefferson's religious vision was coherent, deeply considered, and revolutionary. He wanted to rescue what he saw as the pure moral genius of Jesus from centuries of theological corruption. And in doing so, he helped construct the wall between church and state that still defines American religious freedom today.
The Education of a Skeptic
Jefferson grew up inside the religious establishment. Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century was Anglican territory—the Church of England was the official state church, funded by tax money, and holding public office required not just membership but a commitment never to express dissent from church doctrine. Jefferson was baptized Anglican, served as a vestryman (a lay administrator in his local parish), and was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 under these religious requirements.
Then he went to college.
At sixteen, Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. For two years, he studied mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy under Professor William Small, a Scottish intellectual who introduced the young Virginian to the writings of the British Empiricists: John Locke, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton. These were the thinkers who insisted that knowledge came from observation and reason, not from authority or revelation.
Jefferson also encountered the works of Lord Bolingbroke, a prominent Deist philosopher. Deism was the Enlightenment's answer to traditional Christianity—a rational religion that believed in God as the creator and designer of the universe, but rejected miracles, divine intervention, and the supernatural claims of organized religion. Deists saw God as a cosmic watchmaker who had set the universe in motion according to natural laws and then stepped back.
The young man who had grown up accepting Anglican doctrine began asking uncomfortable questions. By his own account, he rejected the Trinity "from a very early part of my life." The doctrine of the Trinity—that God exists as three persons in one being: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—was and remains a cornerstone of mainstream Christianity. To deny it placed Jefferson outside the boundaries of orthodox Christian belief before he was even old enough to vote.
The Rational God
What did Jefferson actually believe? His surviving letters reveal a man who was certain about some things and perpetually searching on others.
He was certain there was a God. In his eighties, corresponding with John Adams in one of the great intellectual friendships of American history, Jefferson wrote that when contemplating the universe—"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"—it was "impossible 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."
This was the God of the Deists: a supreme intelligence revealed through nature rather than scripture, through reason rather than revelation. When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence about "Nature's God" and the rights with which the Creator had endowed humanity, he was using language that any Deist would recognize—though these phrases also had roots in Roman natural law philosophy, particularly Cicero, whom Jefferson had studied closely.
He was certain that morality mattered. Jefferson believed in divine justice, in rewards and punishments after death, and in what he called "an overruling providence" that guided human affairs. In his opposition to slavery, he invoked the notion that divine justice would eventually exact a price for the institution. In his second inaugural address as president, he spoke of gaining "the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old."
But he rejected virtually everything else that traditional Christianity taught about Jesus and salvation.
He did not believe Jesus was divine—the Son of God in any literal sense. He did not believe in miracles, including the resurrection. He did not believe in the virgin birth. He did not believe that Jesus had atoned for human sin through his death on the cross. He did not believe in supernatural revelation—the idea that God had communicated directly with humanity through scripture or prophets.
What he did believe was that Jesus was "an incomparably great moral teacher" whose ethical teachings represented "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."
The Jefferson Bible
The tension between Jefferson's rejection of Christian theology and his admiration for Jesus' ethics led to an extraordinary project. Using a razor and paste, Jefferson literally deconstructed the Gospels.
He cut out the passages he considered authentic—Jesus' moral teachings, his parables, his ethical precepts—and pasted them into a new arrangement. Everything supernatural was excluded: no water into wine, no walking on water, no raising of Lazarus, no resurrection. The book ends with Jesus' burial. The stone is rolled across the tomb, and that is that.
Jefferson worked on this project in private, never publishing it during his lifetime. The full title reveals his intent: "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English." This was scholarship as spiritual practice, an attempt to recover what Jefferson believed was the original, uncorrupted message of a moral genius.
He believed that original message had been buried under centuries of accretion. The Bible, he wrote, contained both "diamonds" and "dung"—the genuine wisdom of Jesus mixed with the theological inventions of his followers and the political agendas of later church authorities. He blamed Plato particularly, arguing that Greek philosophy had corrupted simple Jewish ethical monotheism into the complex metaphysical doctrines of Christianity.
Jefferson admired the English chemist and theologian Joseph Priestley, who had written books arguing that early Christianity had been corrupted by later additions. "I have read his Corruptions of Christianity, & Early opinions of Jesus, over and over again," Jefferson wrote to Adams, "and I rest on them... as the basis of my own faith."
A Sect of One
What do you call someone who believes in God, attends church, admires Jesus, calls himself a Christian—but rejects the Trinity, denies miracles, and creates his own edited scripture?
Jefferson himself struggled with the labels. In his letters, he tried on various identities like garments. In 1819, he described himself as an "Epicurean"—a follower of the ancient Greek philosopher who taught that pleasure (properly understood as tranquility and the absence of pain) was the highest good. In 1820, he called himself a "materialist," believing that everything, including the human mind, was composed of physical matter rather than immaterial soul. In 1825, he wrote that he was "a Unitarian by myself"—aligning with the movement that rejected the Trinity while maintaining Christian ethics.
But his most honest self-description came in 1819: "I am a sect by myself, as far as I know."
Historians have generally classified Jefferson as a Deist, specifically a "Christian Deist"—someone who accepted Deist philosophical premises but considered Christianity, properly understood, as the highest expression of natural religion. The Catholic theologian Avery Dulles summarized it this way: Jefferson "was a deist because he believed in one God, in divine providence, in the divine moral law, and in rewards and punishments after death; but did not believe in supernatural revelation. He was a Christian deist because he saw Christianity as the highest expression of natural religion and Jesus as an incomparably great moral teacher."
Jefferson himself never used the word "Deist" to describe his own beliefs in any surviving writing. But the label fits better than any other, and his frequent references to "Providence" were typical of eighteenth-century Deist language.
The Wall of Separation
Jefferson's religious heterodoxy was not merely personal. It drove one of his most lasting political achievements: the separation of church and state in America.
He had experienced firsthand what establishment meant. In colonial Virginia, being the wrong religion could get you punished. As he noted in his "Notes on Virginia," pre-Revolutionary law held that "if a person brought up a Christian denies the being of a God, or the Trinity... he is punishable on the first offense by incapacity to hold any office." Only Anglicans received tax support; Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists had to fund their own churches while also paying taxes to support a church they didn't attend.
After the Revolution, Jefferson led the fight to change this. In 1779, he proposed "The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom," declaring that "the opinions of men" were "beyond the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate." The bill asserted that the human mind was not subject to coercion, "that our civil rights have no dependence on religious opinions," and that government had no business policing belief.
It took seven years, but in 1786, working with James Madison against Patrick Henry's proposals for general religious taxes, Jefferson saw his bill finally pass. It became one of only three accomplishments he chose to list on his tombstone—ranking it above his presidency:
"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion."
European observers called it "an example of legislative wisdom and liberality never before known."
In 1802, as president, Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut that gave the concept its most famous formulation. The First Amendment, he wrote, had built "a wall of separation between Church and State." The phrase became constitutional shorthand, cited in Supreme Court decisions for the next two centuries.
The Price of Unorthodoxy
Jefferson paid a political price for his religious views. During the 1800 presidential campaign, his opponents attacked him viciously as an enemy of Christianity.
The New England Palladium warned that if "the infidel Jefferson" were elected, "our churches will be prostrated, and some infamous 'prostitute', under the title of goddess of reason, will preside in the sanctuaries now devoted to the worship of the most High." This was a reference to the dechristianization campaign during the French Revolution, when the Cult of Reason briefly replaced Catholicism and a woman personifying Reason was enthroned in Notre-Dame Cathedral. Jefferson's sympathy for the French Revolution made him guilty by association.
Federalists called him a "howling atheist." The word "infidel" was thrown around freely—a flexible insult that could mean atheist, Deist, or simply anyone whose Christianity wasn't orthodox enough. Alexander Hamilton reportedly said he preferred Aaron Burr to Jefferson because "at least Burr believes in something."
Jefferson won anyway, but the attacks left scars. He kept his most heterodox views private, sharing them only in letters to trusted friends. The Jefferson Bible remained unpublished until long after his death. His public religious expressions stayed within bounds that most Americans could accept—invoking God, Providence, and divine justice without specifying exactly what he meant by these terms.
The Churchgoing Skeptic
One of the strangest aspects of Jefferson's religious life was his consistent church attendance. This man who rejected the Trinity, denied miracles, and thought much of the Bible was "dung" showed up to services regularly.
During his presidency, he attended worship in the House of Representatives, where preachers of every Christian denomination were invited to speak. Before that, during his first year in office, he attended a small Catholic chapel—the only church available in the new capital city besides a tiny Episcopal congregation. His family biographer recorded that he "attended church with as much regularity as most of the members of the congregation—sometimes going alone on horse-back, when his family remained at home."
He contributed money to build churches, gave to Bible societies, and regularly supported the clergy of his local parish. Letters survive showing him urging pastors to accept extra contributions for expenses like building a house.
Yet there is no evidence he was ever confirmed in the Episcopal Church or took communion. And when asked to serve as godfather—a role requiring affirmation of Trinitarian belief—he refused.
What was going on? Jefferson seems to have distinguished sharply between institutional religion as a social good and theological doctrines as matters of personal conscience. He valued the moral instruction churches provided, the community they fostered, the role they played in maintaining public virtue. He simply didn't believe their supernatural claims.
This was not hypocrisy in his view. He considered himself a genuine Christian—just one who followed Christ's moral teachings rather than the theological doctrines that later Christians had invented. He wrote that he admired "the moral precepts of Jesus" while rejecting the "artificial systems" built on top of them.
The Last Conversation
In the final fourteen years of their lives, Jefferson and John Adams conducted one of history's great epistolary friendships. The two former presidents, once political enemies, now reconciled, wrote to each other about everything: philosophy, politics, memory, mortality. Religion was a recurring theme.
Adams was more orthodox than Jefferson but also a religious questioner in his own right—a Unitarian who had rejected Calvinist doctrines of predestination. The two old men could discuss theology candidly in ways neither could manage in public.
It was to Adams that Jefferson explained his debt to Priestley's writings on early Christianity. It was to Adams that he expressed his belief in a designing God revealed through nature. It was in this correspondence that Jefferson, in his eighties, set down his mature religious philosophy: a conviction that the universe's design pointed to an "ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things," combined with rejection of everything beyond what reason and nature could demonstrate.
Both men died on July 4, 1826—exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence. Adams' last words were reportedly "Thomas Jefferson survives." He was wrong; Jefferson had died a few hours earlier. It was one of history's great coincidences, or—if you believed in Providence, as both men claimed to—something more.
The Legacy of Religious Freedom
Jefferson's religious views matter today less for their specific content than for what they produced. The man who couldn't accept the Trinity also couldn't accept a government that would punish people for not accepting the Trinity.
His Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom became a template for the First Amendment. His phrase about the "wall of separation" became constitutional doctrine. His example showed that a person could reject orthodox Christianity while still maintaining moral seriousness, civic virtue, and genuine religious conviction—just not the kind of conviction that fit neatly into established categories.
The attacks on him during the 1800 election now seem almost quaint. His "infidelity" consisted of beliefs that millions of modern Americans share: that Jesus was a great moral teacher rather than a divine being, that miracles strain credulity, that organized religion has often done harm alongside its good, that the state has no business compelling religious observance.
But in Jefferson's time, these views were radical enough to make him unelectable in the eyes of his opponents. That he won anyway, and that America survived his presidency with its churches unprostrated and its religion flourishing, vindicated his deepest conviction: that freedom of conscience, not enforced orthodoxy, was the path to both public harmony and spiritual truth.
The razor-cut Bible sits today in the Smithsonian Institution. Visitors can see the precise, careful work of a man trying to separate what he considered eternal wisdom from what he considered temporal confusion. It remains a monument to one version of the American religious experiment: the insistence that every person has the right to make that separation for themselves.