Nearly everyone knows that Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase “wall of separation between church and state,” but far fewer have examined why he believed such a wall was essential in the first place. Yet when we turn to Jefferson’s own words across his letters and writings, what emerges is a revolutionary political and religious philosophy—one that directly challenges the foundations of Christian nationalism and still carries profound relevance for the modern world.
At a time when church-state separation is increasingly under threat—from those who believe the country was founded by and for orthodox Christians—Thomas Jefferson can set the record straight. Drawing from his various writings—including his personal letters, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the Declaration of Independence, and his own heretical take on the Bible, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth—we’ll come to appreciate why keeping religion out of politics—and politics out of religion—was so important to him (and should be to us).
We’ll also uncover, through Jefferson, a more palatable version of Christianity for those open-minded enough to listen—a version unrecognizable to most, yet far superior in the eyes of humanists. Jeffersonian Christianity, as we might call it—as laid out in the Jefferson Bible—may be due for a modern resurgence.
So let’s get started by examining Jefferson’s own personal religious views, irrelevant though he thought they were to his politics.
Thomas Jefferson: Epicurean, Deist, or Christian?
Thomas Jefferson was intensely intellectual, resistant to orthodoxy and labels, and notoriously difficult to categorize. In a letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, Jefferson writes of himself, “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” Scholars ever since have been trying to decipher what that sect entails, exactly. Luckily, this can be pieced together from his various writings.
A reasonable place to start is with what Jefferson labeled himself. While he generally avoided labels, he did, at one point, rather openly express his philosophical loyalties, and it might surprise you. He called himself…an Epicurean.
In a letter to William Short on October 31, 1819, Jefferson wrote, “As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.”
Epicurus, in addition to emphasizing moderate pleasure, friendship, and philosophical contemplation, was a fierce opponent of superstition. And although he believed in the existence of gods, he also believed that “the blessed and indestructible being of the divine has no concerns of its own, nor does it make trouble for others. It is not affected by feelings of anger or benevolence, because these are found where there is lack of strength.” The god of Epicurus is therefore perfectly tranquil—and perfectly uninvolved in human affairs. The same is true of the god of Deism, who set the universe in motion, but then moved on to better things than the adjudication of petty human disputes.
“The irreligious man,” Epicurus wrote, “is not the person who destroys the gods of the masses but the person who imposes the ideas of the masses on the gods.” Jefferson surely agreed. He was very familiar with the ideas of the masses—and rejected them as vociferously as Epicurus did.
Both Epicureans and Deists believe in a nonanthropomorphic, non-interventionist deity, but only Deists believe this monotheistic God created the universe. Because Jefferson also believed this, his views were better aligned with Deism, despite his claiming to be an Epicurean (for moral reasons, presumably). There is also the possibility that Jefferson was a Unitarian, but this is complicated by the fact that Unitarian views vary so widely, and that they include Deists within their ranks. Jefferson therefore could have been both—a “theistic rationalist” who fused both belief systems together.
In a letter to Benjamin Waterhouse on June 26, 1822, Jefferson expresses his fondness for Unitarianism:
I rejoice that in this blessed country of free enquiry & belief, which has surrendered it’s creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the US. who will not die an Unitarian.
Unitarians, of course, deny the Trinity, and view Jesus as subordinate to God. And although they admire Jesus as a moral and spiritual teacher of the highest order, they do not consider him equal to God himself. This matches Jefferson’s beliefs to a tee—to the irritation and annoyance of Christian nationalists everywhere. Jefferson believed that the Trinity and related doctrines were perverse theological corruptions of the true and simple moral teachings of Jesus.
But Jefferson venerated Jesus nonetheless. In this matter, there can be no doubt. In a letter to Joseph Priestly, Jefferson referred to Jesus’s “system of morality” as “the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the ancient philosophers.” He also wrote to William Short that Jesus taught “the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man.” His admiration for Jesus is therefore plainly evident—almost as evident as his utter disdain for orthodox Christianity.
Jefferson noted, in the same letter to Joseph Priestly, the “disadvantages [Jesus’s] doctrines had to encounter, not having been committed to writing by himself, but by the most unlettered of men, by memory, long after they had heard from him; when much was forgotten, much misunderstood, and presented in every paradoxical shape.” He then elaborates on this point in a letter to John Adams on April 11, 1823:
The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. and the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. but we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.
Jefferson was dead wrong in his prediction; orthodox Christianity—“artificial scaffolding” and all—permeates the US government. Most Christians today, in fact, don’t really follow Jesus at all; they follow the theology of the man Jefferson referred to as “the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus”—St. Paul. In a letter to William Short on April 13, 1820, Jefferson wrote:
Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate therefore the gold from the dross; restore to him the former, & leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples. of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus. these palpable interpolations and falsifications of his doctrines led me to try to sift them apart.
This was the same year, 1820, that Jefferson completed his book, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, carving out of the Gospels with a razor blade “the gold from the dross.” In a letter to John Adams on October 12, 1813, Jefferson described the process of creating his “Jefferson Bible”:
We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off…their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. there will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently, his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. the result is an 8 vo of 46. pages of pure and unsophisticated doctrines, such as were professed & acted on by the unlettered apostles, the Apostolic fathers, and the Christians of the 1st century.
What exactly did Jefferson remove from the Gospels? Precisely what you would expect from an Epicurean and Deist with Unitarian leanings: all the miracles (walking on water, turning water to wine, healings, and exorcisms), the divinity of Jesus (including the Holy Trinity), the Resurrection, and all mentions of angels and supernatural beings. Jefferson kept only the moral teachings and parables that came directly from the mouth of Jesus.
It’s unsurprising that Jefferson failed to include any of the letters of Paul, despite these letters accounting for nearly half of the entire New Testament (13 out of 27 books). Paul, after all, taught the exact opposite message: that salvation is not attained through works—the kinds of things that attracted Jefferson to Jesus in the first place—but by believing in Christ’s divinity alone, which Jefferson outright rejected. You would therefore be hard-pressed to find a historical figure more antithetical to Jefferson’s vision of Christianity than Paul.
For this reason, and understandably, Jefferson rarely called himself a Christian—and always with major qualifications. This is because orthodox Christianity demands, at a minimum, that you believe in Christ’s Resurrection. Even St. Paul said, “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (Corinthians 15:14). It’s hard to imagine, then, that any orthodox Christian church during Jefferson’s time (or today) would openly embrace a congregationist who violently took a blade to the Bible to “improve it”—especially by cutting out, among other things, the Resurrection itself.
The irony is that Thomas Jefferson did, in a sense, consider himself to be a Christian, but only by defining “Christian” in a way that virtually no practicing Christian today would recognize. As he wrote in a letter to Benjamin Rush:
To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.
Jefferson’s version of Christianity is compelling. It has a deeper human side. It doesn’t require believing in fairy tales. And it prioritizes individual spiritual growth through goodwill to others. One wonders how history could have gone had only more Christians abandoned the theological window dressing of the Church, and paid more attention to the actual moral teachings of Jesus the man.
Jefferson’s Impenetrable Wall of Separation
We’ve seen that Thomas Jefferson’s religious views were quite unorthodox—and he knew it. He would have never expected, nor wanted, government endorsement of his “sect of one.” Yet he vehemently believed in his right to hold whatever beliefs his conscience dictated, so long as they caused no harm to others. And he wished the same for everyone else. “It does me no injury,” Jefferson writes in Notes on the State of Virginia, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Jefferson had no more desire to convert to orthodox Christianity than he had to convert others to his. “For I have sworn upon the altar of god,” Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Rush, “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Freedom of thought, Jefferson believed, was the bedrock upon which all other freedoms were built.
So he sought to immortalize it. In his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists, he described the doctrine that would seek to forever prevent governmental tyranny over the minds of men:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
As with all of his writings, the wording here was intentional and well-considered. A wall is built to be impermeable from either side. Governments are not to meddle in religion; religion is not to interfere in politics. This protects religion as much as the government and the people.
Individuals, of course, are free to use religion to guide and inform their personal decisions. In fact, Jefferson thought that Jesus the man provided just such guidance. But democratic debate was to be held exclusively on secular grounds, and this was a consistent theme across all of Jefferson’s writings.
Jefferson—an otherwise contradictory character who professed equality for all men while holding slaves—is unwaveringly consistent in his contempt for organized religion. In the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—passed three years before the Bill of Rights—Jefferson writes:
The impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.
What Jefferson is saying is perfectly clear: the state has no authority in matters of religion or over one’s conscience. Those who seek this power, “fallible and uninspired men,” are responsible for the spread of “false religions” throughout history. Secularism in politics, then, is the only reasonable path forward. Jefferson summarizes this in three principles:
- Government compulsion in religion is immoral and tyrannical. “That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”
- Civil rights do not depend on one’s beliefs. “That our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than on our opinions in physics or geometry.”
- Political participation is open to all. “That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.”
Taken together, these principles are foundational for any functioning Republic. The government can’t tell you what to believe, nor can they use your money to promote beliefs you don’t hold. Your religious beliefs, in terms of your civil rights, are about as relevant as your knowledge of geometry. And politicians can never be subjected to any religious tests for public office. All of this would make its way into the US Constitution.
Jefferson even extended his toleration to atheists, going further than other liberal-minded intellectuals like John Locke, who wrote, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God.” Despite considering Locke to be one of the “three greatest men that have ever lived” (Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon being the other two), Jefferson emphatically disagreed.
In addition to noting that “it does me no injury” for “my neighbor” to say there is no God, Jefferson wrote, in a letter to Peter Carr, “Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” Jefferson seems to have held more respect for the questioning atheist than for the unthinking orthodox Christian. But in either case, both individuals were to have the same inalienable political rights.
One Nation Under (the Deist) God
If a Christian had been put in charge of writing the Declaration of Independence, the introduction might have gone something like this:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the station to which Almighty God has entitled them, a decent respect to the will of Heavenly Providence requires that they should declare the sacred causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be sacred and revealed by God, that all Christian men are equal before our savior Jesus Christ, and are endowed by Almighty God with certain divine rights…
If this seems far-fetched, you’re probably unfamiliar with the several constitutions of the colonial era. The Mayflower Compact in 1620, for example, mentioned “God” four times and contained the phrase “advancement of the Christian faith.” The Virginia Charter in 1609 emphasized “the true worship of Almighty God and Christian faith.” And the Massachusetts Bay Charter in 1629 said it would bring to the natives “the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith.” Colonial constitutions, clearly, were not shy about broadcasting their explicit promotion of Christianity, and of Jesus.
Yet this is not the language Jefferson used, and this fact should not be discounted. There is no mention of Christianity or Jesus anywhere in the Declaration. And when the phrase “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” is employed, it’s almost certainly referring to the Deist/Unitarian/Epicurean God we know Jefferson believed in.
And what did Jefferson claim to know about this God? As he explained to John Adams, “Of the nature of this being we know nothing.” That sure doesn’t sound like something an orthodox believer would say. If you took the Bible at its word, you might claim to know quite a lot about God. But we know Jefferson did not make this claim, because the Bible of his own creation takes out all references to the supernatural, including God!
Jefferson spoke only of natural rights, natural law, and a Deistic creator of which we “know nothing” beyond the fact of his creation of the world. He had effectively eliminated orthodox Christianity from the Declaration when there should have been every expectation of its inclusion had the country been founded as a Christian nation. But it most clearly was not.
Also consider the Declaration’s inclusion of the phrase “endowed by their creator.” It’s a telling phrase. As we’ve already seen, Jefferson was passionate about the fact that one’s religious beliefs were deeply personal, “between Man & his God” only. That explains why Jefferson didn’t write that we were endowed with inalienable rights from the creator, but from our creator, whoever or whatever we might think that is.
Thus was born the unprecedented American principle that we should all be most proud of: the constitutional freedom to practice any religion we wish, while remaining free from religious doctrines we do not accept. This principle of church-state separation—and not of Christian nationalism—is the true cornerstone of Patriotism, and of the American experiment itself.
References & Further Reading
- Thomas Jefferson’s writings and letters
- The Bill of Rights
- Return to Eden: Epicurus and the Pursuit of Happiness Without Religion – Jefferson called himself an Epicurean; learn what that belief system entails.
- Key letters from Thomas Jefferson concerning his religious views: