Wednesday, May 18, 2022

God, Jefferson, and the Declaration

Thomas Kidd​, Jefferson biographer, Christian historian, on religious influence on the Declaration of Independence:
.... For secularists, the American founding was a pure Enlightenment and non-religious affair driven by deists (or perhaps closet atheists) such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Christian America partisans counter that the Founding Fathers were mostly devout believers. ....

...[T]he declaration’s author was already skeptical in 1776 about basic Christian doctrines such as the trinity, and the divinity and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus, he was not writing [the declaration’s lines about the creator God] because he was some kind of born-again predecessor to the Christian right.

Throughout his career, Jefferson tried to keep his doubts about biblical revelation quiet. His opponents made a great ruckus about even the slightest hints of his heterodox beliefs. An 1800 Federalist editorial proclaimed that a vote for Jefferson was a vote for “NO GOD!” ....

And yet, the declaration’s argument utterly depended on God himself. Jefferson and Congress fundamentally based the document on the concept of God’s common creation of humankind. Without a creator God, there is no Declaration of Independence. Why would a skeptic like Jefferson make such a profoundly theological statement? Jefferson was a bundle of contradictions on many issues. Most obviously, he was a slaveowner who declared that all men were created equal. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that his uses of religion were complicated, too.

But we can start to unpack the enigma of Jefferson, the declaration, and religion by remembering that the declaration was, first and foremost, a political document….

Calling on people to sacrifice lives and treasure in war almost always generates God-talk. Such civil-religious rhetoric might be sincere or cynical, depending on the occasion. Jefferson’s religious sentiments definitely appeared to be heartfelt. Appealing to the “Supreme Judge of the world,” Congress defended the rightness of their cause, pledging to defend independence on their sacred honor. Jefferson understood that independence could not be justified only as a matter of the colonists’ self-interest, or their disinclination to pay taxes. He undoubtedly believed it was a struggle in which the patriots needed God’s blessing, or they would lose.

We may also forget that Jefferson, for all his doubts about basic Christianity, did believe in a creator God. Unlike more rigid deists, he also believed that God sometimes acted in human history, by God’s providence. Jefferson lived in a pre-Darwinian world in which few could imagine human life as anything but the pinnacle of a divinely created order. Perhaps, to Jefferson, humans were not created exactly like the book of Genesis said. But where else could life have come from, aside from God? Naturalistic evolution was barely on the horizon in 1776. If God created people, then God also endowed people with rights, ones which were not justly alienable by any human authority.

In this sense, Jefferson was no traditional Christian, but he was a traditional theist. .... (more)
Thomas Kidd, "Is the Declaration of Independence a Christian Document?" TGC, May 18, 2022.

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