Ye Will Say I Am No Christian: The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, And Values

by Bruce Braden (Editor)

The "Culture Wars" have produced a lot of talk about religion, morals, and values, with both sides often hearkening back to our Founding Fathers. Here is your chance to learn firsthand what two of the most influential pillars of the American Republic thought about these perennial topics. From 1812 to July 4, 1826 ― when ironically death claimed both men ― Thomas Jefferson and John Adams exchanged letters touching on these still controversial issues.These little-known letters contain many surprising revelations. In the 1800 presidential election, in which the Republican Jefferson opposed the Federalist Adams, religion was a topic of hot debate, as reflected in this correspondence written many years after. What was it about Jefferson's religious beliefs that provoked such vitriol against him in the campaign? And what was there in Adams's theology that prompted certain Calvinists and Trinitarians to label him "no Christian"? Though they expressed different opinions, Jefferson and Adams agreed on what they called the "corruptions of Christianity." Despite their criticisms and their critics, both men considered themselves Christians, in different senses of the term.Hearing these champions of liberty and freedom of religion speak out frankly on church and state, the Bible, Jesus, Christianity, morality, and virtue, modern readers may well ask themselves whether either of these Founding Fathers could today be elected president. Editor Bruce Braden has done us all a service by collecting this revealing and intimate historical correspondence on topics that continue to stir emotions and debate in the 21st century.

Genres: History, American History, Christianity, Nonfiction

258 pages, Hardcover

First published November 7, 2005

Reviews

[John Martindale]

It was a delight to read through this correspondence, Adams definitely was far more forthright and prolific on these matters than Jefferson was, and I think he was the better writer too.

I was able to gather a better sense of what they believed, they both clearly believed themselves Christians, confident that God was the creator, designer and sustainer of the universe and that there was a hereafter. They did strongly were opposed to what they believed corruptions of Christianity and the many abuses of religion.
From a modern Evangelical viewpoint, they would be labeled "liberal Christians" for from these letters it is clear they didn't believe in the inerrancy of the bible, the trinity or the virgin birth. They were opposed to the dogmatism, superstition, "enthusiasm" and bigotry expressed in the many denominations. Of course, in their passionate condemnation of dogmatism and bigotry, they conveyed that they may have been just as dogmatic with their enlightened views.

Here are a handful of quotes from the book.

Jefferson on Calvinism:
“I can never join Calvin in addressing his God. He was indeed an atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God, he did. The Being described in his five points, is not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore, the Creator and benevolent Governor of the world; but a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme Him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. Indeed, I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to atheism by their general dogma that without a revelation”

Here is Adam's on a Hereafter:
“In fine, without the supposition of a future state, mankind and this globe appear to me the most sublime and beautiful bubble and bauble that imagination can conceive. Let us then wish for immortality at all hazards, and trust the Ruler with His skies. I do; and earnestly wish for His commands, which to the utmost of my power shall be implicitly and piously obeyed.” -Adams

“I believe in God and his wisdom and benevolence. I cannot conceive that such a Being could make such a species as the human merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe a future state, I should believe in no God. This universe, this all, this totality, would appear with all its swelling pomp, a boyish firework. And, if there be a future state, why should the Almighty dissolve forever all tender ties which unite us so delightfully in this world and forbid us to see each other in the next? -Adams

Adams and Jefferson on whether the world would be better with no religion in it:

“Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it!" But, in this exclamation I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society. I mean hell. So far from believing in the total and universal depravity of human nature, I believe there is no individual totally depraved. The most abandoned scoundrel that ever existed never yet wholly extinguished his conscience. And while conscience remains there is some religion. Popes, Jesuits, and Sorbonists, and Inquisitors, have some conscience and some religion. So had Marius and Sylla, Caesar, Catiline and Anthony. Augustus had not much more, let Virgil and Horace say what they will.” - Adams

“If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, "that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." But if the moral precepts, innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution, as necessary for a social being, if the sublime doctrines of philanthropism and deism taught us by Jesus of Nazareth, in which all agree, constitute true religion, then, without it, this would be, as you again say, "something not fit to be named even, indeed, a hell." -Jefferson

Jefferson On Materialism:
“When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences, is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by the Lockes, the Tracys and the Stewarts....At what age of the Christian Church this heresy of immaterialism, or masked atheism, crept in, I do not exactly know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it. He told us, indeed, that "God is a Spirit," but He has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not matter. The ancient fathers generally, of the three first centuries, held it to be matter, light and thin indeed, an ethereal gas; but still matter....Origen says, "God is in very fact corporeal, but, by reason of so much heavier bodies, incorporeal." Tertullian, "For what is God except body?" And again, "Who will deny that God is body? Although God is spirit, yet spirit is body, of his own nature, in his own image." St. Justin Martyr says, "We say that the divinity is without body, not because it is bodiless, but since the state of not being bounded by anything is a more honorable one than that of being bounded. For this reason, we call him bodiless." And St. Macarius, speaking of angels, says, "For although their bodies are of light texture, nevertheless in substance, form, and figure, their bodies are rare, according to the rarity of nature." And, St. Austin, St. Basil, Lactantius, Tatian, Athenagoras and others, with whose writings I pretend not a familiarity, are said by those who are better acquainted with them, to deliver the same doctrine.” -Jefferson

Jefferson on not bothering with that which there is no evidence:
“When I meet with a proposition beyond finite comprehension, I abandon it as I do a weight which human strength cannot lift, and I think ignorance, in these cases, is truly the softest pillow on which I can lay my head. Were it necessary, however, to form an opinion, I confess I should, with Mr. Locke, prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two.” -Jefferson

“I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence. I am sure that I really know many, many things, and none more surely than that I love you with all my heart, and pray for the continuance of your life until you shall be tired of it yourself.” -Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson on the Intellegent Designer:
On the contrary, I hold, (without appeal to revelation), that when we take a view of the universe, in its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere; animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles; insects, mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth; the mineral substances, their generation and uses; it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe, that there is in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a Fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their Preserver and Regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regeneration into new and other forms.” -Jefferson

Jefferson on the virgin birth:
“The truth is, that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in His genuine words. And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason, and freedom of thought in these United States, will do away all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated Reformer of human errors.” -Jefferson

On Jefferson being a Christian
"To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense he wished any one to be, sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others, ascribing to him every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other." -Jefferson

"I, too, have made a wee, little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus. It is a paradigm of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen. It is a document in proof that I AM A REAL CHRISTIAN, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return to earth, would not recognize one feature." -Jefferson

Adams on the reformation
“Luther, and his associates and followers, went less than half way in detecting the corruptions of Christianity, but they acquired reverence and authority among their followers almost as absolute as that of the Popes had been.” -Adams

Oh, there are so many more that I could share, on many other subjects. But yeah, I am glad i read through these letters

[Ben]

As someone interested both in the Revolutionary War-era history of this country and thoughts on philosophy and religion in general, I was excited when I came across this book. While I'm glad to have read it, by the time I had finished it, I was probably even more glad to be done with it.

Correspondence between two people with a 50+ year history is bound to contain its share of idiosyncrasies that can really only be appreciated by the writer and recipient. That much more difficult to penetrate, then, a correspondence that is almost 200 years old. This is not to say that these letters are incomprehensible; far from it! But light reading, even when intended as such, they are not. Also, I think a fair number of these letters could have been removed and the focus of the collection would have been that much stronger for it. Several of them contain relatively little of the thoughts of the writer on any point of religion or philosophy; rather, many were a concatenation of appraisals of various authors on religious or philosophical subjects, most of whom have faded into obscurity. These provide precious little valuable information to the armchair scholar and ultimately serve only to lengthen the book.

Having said that, there are certainly gems contained herein. Reading Adams' exasperation at the philosophical underpinnings of the nature of God expounded by "Christian Theologians" literally made me laugh out loud. Jefferson's sincere appreciation of the teachings of Jesus Christ, stripped of anything supernatural, is like a breath of fresh air.

These men were brilliant thinkers endowed with remarkable energy and intellect. They literally changed the world. Reading what they thought could hardly every be a wasted effort, although in this case, I think a more strenuously culled selection of letters might have led to a clearer expression of their ideas.

[Lee Button]

I was interested in this book because it is the personal correspondence of Adams and Jefferson in the last 20 years of their lives. Here are their testimonies about faith and the Bible. Due to much conjecture and contextual neglect there true religious positions have been blurred. Their letters show that both were classic Deists. Neither believed in the full inspiration of Scripture. In their eyes anyone who believed in a Triune God was either an Atheist (Jefferson uses this term in reference to John Calvin!) or a polytheist. Jefferson believed he was a pure Christian because he followed the pure teachings of Jesus, without the fable and confusion of the Gospel writers. The letters do show the compassionate of 2 American Founders who thoroughly enjoyed their discussions. I liked this book and learned much from it.

[SandiegoSuzanne]

I give this 5 stars because it is a collection of fascinating letters between Adams and Jefferson. In any discussion of the founders of our nation, the subject of their religious beliefs always comes up - were they Christians, Deists, Unitarians, or totally unreligious. In this selection of letters, we have access to the actual beliefs and religious struggles of two of our greatest men.

I find myself reading and rereading this collection every time I despair of the lack of integrity and intelligence in our modern leaders. Reading these letters is like climbing into a big comfy chair.

The commentary and notes by Bruce Braden are very good and provide context for the letters.

[Kate]

I loved this book. Reading the concerns of these men as they consider the religions of their day made me all the more appreciative of significant aspects of my own faith.