Where's TJ when we need him?

Thomas Jefferson directed that his grave marker list the three accomplishments he was most proud of: writing the Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia, and drafting the Virginia law for religious freedom. He thought, and most of his contemporaries agreed, that these were three signal advances for human welfare.

In time they came to be taken for granted, to the degree that in the 21st century the one thing many people know about Jefferson is that he owned slaves, including one who was his concubine and the mother of several of his children. Jefferson's name has been erased from schools around the country and his statue crated and removed from public view. One might have thought the Declaration of Independence wrote itself, UVA  sprang spontaneously from Charlottesville’s soil, and Virginia Episcopalianism surrendered meekly to secular values.

Two-thirds of Jefferson's legacy is reasonably secure. Nobody these days says the United States should never have separated from Britain or should rejoin a revived British empire. Universities are under political fire, but they’re numerous and wealthy enough to withstand the heat.

Yet religious freedom could use a champion in America today.  Christian nationalists assert that America was founded in Christianity and must return to its Christian roots. Louisiana just passed a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom from kindergarten through university. The lieutenant governor of Texas immediately said his state would follow suit. Alabama chief justice Tom Parker cited the Bible in ruling that frozen embryos are children under Alabama law. The “Seven Mountain Mandate” of some Christian nationalists asserts that Christians must seize the high ground of government, business, education, the arts and other areas of life and transform them along the lines of the Christian gospel. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson has said, “The separation of church and state is a misnomer.” Asked his worldview, Johnson answered, “Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

America these days could use an impassioned and articulate champion of religious freedom. No one was more impassioned and articulate on religion and public life than Jefferson. He explained his position to Benjamin Rush amid the presidential election campaign of 1800, when advocates of established religion were damning him as an atheist and the anti-Christ. "They believe that any position of power confided to me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes,” Jefferson said. “And they believe truly, for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." But that was all they had to fear. He wouldn’t impose his beliefs on them. And they mustn’t impose their beliefs on others.

In his draft of the Virginia statute for religious freedom, Jefferson wrote, “Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it all together insusceptible of restraint. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion.”

Writing to Baptists long persecuted for their faith, Jefferson said, “Believing with you 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.”

These are views progressives should be able to endorse. They couldn’t do better than to quote Jefferson in defense of them, since no one ever made the case more eloquently for keeping politics and religion apart. 

But in tossing Jefferson out of the public square over slavery, the progressives deprived themselves of his talents on religion. This is what comes of historical reductionism: of treating one issue as trumping all others. Jefferson himself was an opponent of slavery. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever,” he wrote regarding slavery. He tried to get Virginia to end slavery. But he failed. And he was too deeply in debt to free his own slaves, as they were the collateral required by his creditors. Yet though he couldn’t get to abolition himself, his proclamation that “all men are created equal” guided countless others, including Abraham Lincoln, to that goal.

Anyway, whatever Jefferson did or didn’t do on slavery, his advocacy of religious freedom is something that should be appreciated by all lovers of freedom generally. Go ahead and criticize him for slavery. You won’t be criticizing him more than he criticized himself and his fellow slaveholders. But don’t deny the cause of freedom its most powerful American voice.