Thomas Jefferson and the Origins of American Religious Nationalism

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(Getty/Raymond Boyd)

By Sam Haselby | October 20, 2015

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.

The political content of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was not unique. In the War of Independence, which was also a civil war between Anglo-Protestants who had for generations lived together as British subjects, patriots from South Carolina to Massachusetts issued dozens of declarations of independence. American towns and counties in fact issued over 90 different declarations of independence, many of which preceded Jefferson’s. It was Jefferson’s eloquence, and the authorization of Congress, not the singularity of his political ideas, that made his effort “the” Declaration of Independence. The Declaration drafted by Jefferson, and revised by a congressional committee, contains a turn of phrase that captures a bit of the mysticism, and a trace of theology, that nationalism requires. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaims the Declaration. The peculiar act of declaring as “self-evident” matters that were anything but such had a history. Readers of Locke knew the tactic from Locke’s defense of Christianity, which relied upon the doctrine of self-evidence. Locke argued that Jesus was Christ because of his miracles, and that the truth of the Christian religion and its obligations and rights was therefore “self-evident.”

To proclaim truths “self-evident” (or “sacred and undeniable,” as Jefferson’s first draft read) is to announce that one is not willing to debate the matter. This “proof” was not intended to convince skeptics, much less opponents, but to strengthen the bonds among believers. Benedict Andersen has called nations “imagined communities,” but “communities of faith” may be as accurate a description of the material with which nationalists work. Because nations are impossible to experience in any direct, tangible way, they depend on faith, in the scriptural sense. Patriots must believe in the “evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for,” as the scriptures define faith. The bonds of belief among nationalists are vital, especially early in nationalist movements. This mystical quality inherent within “We hold these truths to be self-evident” helps account for its status as a patriot proverb. It does not represent an argument, or even an idea, but a statement of belonging to what the French scholar Ernest Renan called the “spiritual family” of the nation.

Importantly, the problem of slavery brought forth perhaps the most notable appearance of religion in Jefferson’s writing. This instance, in Notes on the State of Virginia, differs from the playful pirating of theological concepts and mystical invocations of nationalist bonds of the Declaration. It comes in Query 18, on “Manners,” and it is also a bizarre moment (the historian Lewis P. Simpson called it “chilling”) in the only book Jefferson published: inconsistent, angst-ridden, and fantastic. Consideration of the manners, or character, of Virginians brings Jefferson to the influence of slavery. The subject propels him into imagining supernatural interference, a just God reaching down and turning slaves into masters and masters into slaves. One can see Jefferson losing, regaining, and again losing his Enlightenment bearings. In a deistic work, meant to foster the authority of natural science over that of religion, the specter of divine intervention in human affairs hits an odd note:

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situations, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.

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