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"Whenever... preachers, instead of a lesson in religion, put off with a discourse on the Copernican
system, on chemical affinities, on the construction of government,
or the characters or conduct of those administering it, it is a
breach of contract, depriving their audience of the kind of
service for which they are salaried, and giving them, instead of
it, what they did not want, or, if wanted, would rather seek from
better sources in that particular art of science." --Thomas
Jefferson to P. H. Wendover, 1815. ME 14:281
"Ministers of the Gospel are excluded the county Elementary Schools]
to avoid jealousy from the other
sects, were the public education committed to the ministers of a
particular one; and with more reason than in the case of their
exclusion from the legislative and executive functions." --Thomas
Jefferson: Note to Elementary School Act, 1817. ME 17:419
"No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be
prescribed or practiced inconsistent
with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination." --Thomas
Jefferson: Elementary School Act, 1817. ME 17:425
"I do not know that it is a duty to disturb by missionaries the
religion and peace of other countries, who may think themselves
bound to extinguish by fire and fagot the heresies to which we
give the name of conversions, and quote our own example for it.
Were the Pope, or his holy allies, to send in mission to us some
thousands of Jesuit priests to convert us to their orthodoxy, I
suspect that we should deem and treat it as a national aggression
on our peace and faith." --Thomas Jefferson to Michael Megear,
1823. ME 15:434
Establishments of Religion Undermine Rights
"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and
ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very
formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man."
--Thomas Jefferson to Jeremiah Moor, 1800.
"The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they
have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity
and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all
others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion
of the human mind." --Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801. ME
10:237
"But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of
the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by
those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into
an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors
in Church and State." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval,
1810. ME 12:345
" the nature of... government a subordination of the
civil to the ecclesiastical power, I consider it as
desperate for long years to come. Their steady habits
exclude the advances of information, and they seem exactly
where they . And there clergy will always
keep them if they can. will follow the bark of liberty only
by the help of a tow-rope." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierrepont
Edwards, July 1801. (*)
"This doctrine 'that the condition of man cannot be ameliorated,
that what has been must ever be, and that to secure ourselves
where we are we must tread with awful reverence in the footsteps
of our fathers'] is the genuine fruit of the alliance between
Church and State, the tenants of which finding themselves but too
well in their present condition, oppose all advances which might
unmask their usurpations and monopolies of honors, wealth and
power, and fear every change as endangering the comforts they now
hold." --Thomas Jefferson: Report for University of Virginia,
1818.
"I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring
about a legal ascendency of one sect over another." --Thomas
Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1799. ME 10:78
"The advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor
forgiveness from ." --Thomas Jefferson to Levi
Lincoln, 1802. ME 10:305
"The clergy...believe that any portion of power confided to me as
President will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And
they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God,
eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of
man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too,
in their opinion." --Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1800. ME
10:173
"Believing... that religion is a matter which lies solely between
man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith
or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach
actions only, and 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 and
State." --Thomas Jefferson to Danbury Baptists, 1802. ME 16:281
"I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of
America, a fact like this i.e., the purchase of an apparent
geological or astronomical work] can become a subject of inquiry,
and of criminal inquiry too, as an offense against religion; that
a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the
civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we
to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be
sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious
opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to
which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our
inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his
reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must
believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they
are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to
suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason. If
book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its
reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both
sides, if we choose." --Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME
14:127
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden
people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest
grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious
leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."
--Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 1813. ME 14:21
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to
liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his
abuses in return for protection to his own." --Thomas Jefferson to
Horatio G. Spafford, 1814. ME 14:119
"I have been just reading the new constitution of Spain. One of
its fundamental bases is expressed in these words: 'The Roman
Catholic religion, the only true one, is, and always shall be,
that of the Spanish nation. The government protects it by wise and
just laws, and prohibits the exercise of any other whatever.' Now
I wish this presented to those who question what
may sell or we may buy, with a request to strike out the words,
'Roman Catholic,' and to insert the denomination of their own
religion. This would ascertain the code of dogmas which each
wishes should domineer over the opinions of all others, and be
taken, like the Spanish religion, under the 'protection of wise
and just laws.' It would show to what they wish to reduce the
liberty for which one generation has sacrificed life and
happiness. It would present our boasted freedom of religion as a
thing of theory only, and not of practice, as what would be a poor
exchange for the theoretic thraldom, but practical freedom of
Europe." --Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:128
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the
propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful
and tyrannical." --Thomas Jefferson: Bill for Religious Freedom,
1779. Papers 2:545 |
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