April 13 was the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, to whom everyone who values human equality and liberty owes everlasting thanks. The Declaration of Independence is the most influential secular affirmation of lawful liberty and human rights in the history of humanity. Even in the hay day of communism, it’s doubtful any of the hundreds of millions who were its slaves ever memorized any of Karl Marx’s turgid prose to the extent Jefferson’s words are globally recalled.
Jefferson has critics of course. Supposedly he’s a hypocrite because he never freed more than a few of his slaves, which was indeed a moral and financial failure (by life’s end Jefferson’s creditors controlled most of his estate). Yet Jefferson’s declaration helped ensure that slavery, so clearly at odds with American founding principles as he articulated them, was doomed. Jefferson, when signing the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (“violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe”), was the last president in office publicly to condemn slavery until Abraham Lincoln.
There is a segment of evangelical Christian opinion that is dismissive of Jefferson, who privately rejected the Trinity and Christ’s deity, although still professing Christianity and attending churches. He was essentially Unitarian. Peter Marshall, in his 1970s popular religious history of early America, villainizes Jefferson as a backstabbing apostate who undermines a pious George Washington. This superficial critique overlooks that Jefferson, perhaps more than any other secular leader, providentially universalized a political theology of human dignity and equality drawn from Judaism and Christianity. He arguably is the chief apostle and evangelist for translating Christian anthropology into global political discourse.
Nearly every political system in the world directly or indirectly pays at least lip service to Jefferson’s principles of human equality and intrinsic human rights. There’s almost no area on earth that’s not been touched by his influence.
Besides the Declaration, Jefferson’s greatest exertion was his 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom, whose approval by the Virginia legislature forbade a state church and guaranteed religious freedom to all. Here is the core of his spiritual insight. The consciences and souls of all humanity belong to God, not the state. Hence, the state is the servant of the people, not vice versa, and must be limited to its prescribed civil functions. No civil government has transcendant authority over any people.
This singular insight makes Jefferson forever the foe of every tyrant and friend of lawful liberty for all people everywhere. So thank you Thomas Jefferson. You were, like us all, flawed and sinful, but the God of goodness and mercy and justice used you mightily.
Below is Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, which he instructed, along with the Declaration, be noted on his tombstone, while his presidency is unmentioned:
An Act for establishing religious Freedom.
Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;
That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,
That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;
That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;
That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;
That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,
That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,
That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;
That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;
That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;
And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:
Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.
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