Thomas Jefferson's American Religion

Scholars have variously depicted Thomas Jefferson as everything from a crypto-Unitarian with a deep love of Jesus to a priest-baiting infidel. My own view is that the latter comes closer to the truth, but, more important, he was helping to invent something new: American nationalism. His contributions to American nationalism are unique. In the two-party system, the two long-established political parties have both taken their names from Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. No one wrote more eloquently about freedom, nor did anyone do more to expand slavery and authorize racism. No American president was more closely associated with Europe, yet none did more to foster American exceptionalism. In the Declaration of Independence, he authored the Revolution’s most important contribution to world political literature. He knew both the state of scientific and religious learning of his time better than any subsequent president has known either one. Despite the fact that it has never been an accurate description of the relationship between American religious and civil authority, his phrase “wall of separation between church and state” continues to serve, for many in and outside the United States, as an ideal. In the story of religion and the development of early American nationalism, Jefferson was a kind of nationalist mystic. In terms of intellectual history, at a time when the Enlightenment was replacing angels with geniuses, Jefferson may be best understood as an angel of the Enlightenment. The contradiction of the phrase makes it more, not less, fitting.