In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson discusses the famous Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that he helped to draft in the 1770s. He says that some Virginians wanted to include the words “Jesus Christ” to make the law more explicitly Christian. But Jefferson says that inserting “Jesus Christ” was rejected by “a great majority.”
Jefferson saw this rejection as proof that the law was meant to protect non-Christians, and he explicitly mentions Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and “the infidel” (non-believers) of every kind. Religious pluralism was accepted as a fact by the 1770s, at least by most Americans.
He apparently overlooks that early America was full of religious conflict because many people never could agree on what “Christian” meant. We fought a horrific Civil War, in part, over the question of whether “true Christians” could own slaves. Alas, the Bible verses of Leviticus 25:44-46, Exodus 21:20-21, Numbers 31:17-18, Ephesians 6:5, 1 Timothy 6:1-2, Colossians 3:22, and Luke 12:47-48 approve of the evil institution of slavery.
Compared to early America, our nation today is relatively free of bloody religious conflicts precisely because we moved away from insisting on a single Christian identity and because we became more tolerant of our religious pluralism, which was there from the start.
Perhaps the most famous denial appears in the eleventh clause of the Treaty of Tripoli (1797), which begins as follows: “As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…” So, how could President John Adams, who signed it, and the Senate, which ratified it, even accept such language if everyone thought that we were a Christian nation?
Thomas Jefferson was a Deist, not a Christian. He deleted some verses from the Christian Bible and created his own sacrilegious Bible version (Jefferson Bible). Therefore, the USA was not founded as a Christian republic, according to The Godless Constitution book by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore. THE END
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