MANN TALK: Thomas Jefferson: Secular Humanist
By Perry Mann
Hinton, WV (Special to HNN) – I read often the Christian Coalition’s claim that America’s Founding Fathers were Christian, that the Constitution is Christian and that American is a Christian nation; but that secular humanism, the anti-Christ, has grown and is seducing the youth, corrupting the nation, and enticing all to slouch to Gomorrah.
It may be that America is nearing the pit of perdition but secular humanism has nothing to do with it. If it did, the nation would have long ago perished from moral decay; for one of the most influential and powerful of the Founding Fathers was a closet humanist; and there were other humanists among the Founders who practiced discretion in revealing their religious beliefs, knowing the wisdom of keeping their consciences to themselves, particularly in those days when Cotton Mather’s kin were still sniffing out heretics and witches.
One learns in school and elsewhere that Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, purchaser of the vast Louisiana territory, advocate of the separation of church and state, father of the University of Virginia, designer of Monticello, and third president, who died on July Fourth, 1826, and whose political adversary, John Adams, died the same day.
But unless one searches he will not learn that Jefferson was a deist, a Unitarian and a secular humanist, a man who was reviled by his opponents as godless, immoral and irreligious, “as an infidel too impious to be president,” and a man, who if he were alive today and made known his religious beliefs, would be pilloried by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, Tom DeLay, and a host of other born-again Christians , all with only a scintilla and tittle of the wit, wisdom and sophistication of the Sage of Monticello.
Jefferson was a child of the Age of Enlightenment, a period dedicated to science and skepticism, whose brightest adherents were, among others, Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Jefferson. These men and others in Europe and America were scholars, having read widely and deeply the works of the Greeks and Romans and of the philosophers and scientists who revered reason and questioned revealed truth .
After the British in 1812 destroyed by fire the Congressional library, Jefferson offered his 6,000 volume library to Congress. Cyrus King, a member of the House, had this to say about the offer on the House floor: “ It might be inferred, from the character of the man who collected it, and France where the collection was made, that the library contained irreligious and immoral books, works of French philosophers, who caused and influenced the volcano of the French Revolution. The bill would put $23,999 into Jefferson’s pocket for about 6,000 books, good, bad, indifferent, old, new, and worthless, in languages which many cannot read and most ought not.”
Undoubtedly, King was a know-nothing theocrat in the image of Tom Delay, Jesse Helms and the current president, George W. Bush, none of whom ever heard of, much less read, the following authors, whose works, among many, were part of Jefferson’s library, to wit: Xenophon, Epictetus, Antoninus, Seneca, Cicero, Plutarch, Livy, and Tacitus. And, of course, the Bible was among his collection.
It was the Bible, however, that Jefferson had mixed reactions to. Here is a pertinent excerpt from Jefferson’s Syllabus of an estimate of the merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, compared with those of others: “They [Christ’s Doctrines] have been still more disfigured by schismatising followers, who have found an interest in sophisticating and perverting the simple doctrines he taught by engrafting on them the mysticisms of a Grecian sophist, frittering them into subtleties, and obscuring them with jargon, until they have caused good men to reject the whole in disgust and to view Jesus himself as an imposter. Notwithstanding, these disadvantages, a system of morals is presented to us, which, if filled up in the true style and spirit of the rich fragments he left us, would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man.”
That is, the fragmentary teachings of Christ, which are interpolated and mixed with the baser teachings of sophists and religious partisans, had they been completed without the interpolations and sophisms, would have been the most perfect and sublime system of morals ever taught by man.
Thus, Jefferson decided to write his own Bible by excising all the interpolations and “paring off the amphiboligisms [ambiguities],” leaving only the actual words and teachings of Christ. Jefferson in describing the method of his editing of the New Testament wrote: “ I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and by arranging the matter which is evidently his [Christ’s], and which is as distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.”
What did Jefferson consider to be scriptural dunghill? Generally, all of the supernatural scripture: The virgin birth, the raising the dead, the walking on water, the rising from the dead and the ascending to heaven. Specifically, he excised, among other verses, as egregiously disharmonious with the character of Jesus, the words attributed to him in Chapter 16 of Mark, Verses 15-18, which are the very words upon which snake-handling and glossolalists acquire their inspiration.
It is interesting to note that Jefferson in correspondence with John Adams made known to him that he was writing what has come to be known as Jefferson’s Bible and that Adams, well aware of Jefferson’s humanistic philosophy, encouraged him to finish his Bible, a book expurgated of the supernatural and political ecclesiastical interpolations accreted during the ages.
This nation owes an incalculable debt to Thomas Jefferson, his Bible being not the least part of it. Yet, it is sad to note that were Jefferson here today and the full spectrum of his secular humanism were uncloseted and made public, Coalition Christians would be appalled, would bar his books from the libraries and denominate him the anti-Christ. It is even sadder to note Jefferson’s stature relative to that of the present presidential incumbent and all those men in his intimate company. They are dwarfs strutting and fretting upon the stage where giants once declaimed and ruled.
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville and Huntington News Network. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton. The portrait accompanying this column is by Robert Shetterley from his book “Americans Who Tell The Truth.”