The Baptists, the Bureau, and the Case of the Missing Lines

Abstract

OME important matters are not in dispute. Often outspokenly anticlerS ical, Jefferson was not himself a godless man. He attended church services in Washington and Charlottesville and contributed money frequently to Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches. He talked and wrote about his personal religious beliefs and was far from being the impious atheist and infidel depicted by his detractors. He believed fervently in the one God who had created all men equal. Like his friend the Reverend Joseph Priestley, he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and usually identified himself as a Unitarian. What always tied him to Christianity was his conviction that the moral teachings of Jesus had never been surpassed. However, although James H. Hutson is correct in saying that Jefferson was a friend of religion, his article is seriously misleading. The Danbury letter was directed at Jefferson's Federalist opponents, but that fact scarcely turns the document into a hasty testament conceived in the heat of a political moment.1 Jefferson's quarrel with the Federalist ministers of New England and their political allies extended back to the drafting of the Constitution. What bothered the Federalist ministers was the Constitution's deliberate omission of any reference to God. Their viewpoint took on political implications and certainly fueled Federalists' attacks on Jefferson, who held very different ideas about the meaning of the secular state. Nonetheless, their position was rooted in sincerely held fears about the viability of a republic that had not placed itself under divine aegis. Jefferson's contrary views were just as carefully considered. To say that the position of either party was merely political distorts what had been on both sides of the issue the subject of reflection over many years. Jefferson had not used the phrase of separation before the Danbury letter, but it captured well enough what he had believed long before his election to the presidency. Jefferson was, of course, not the first person to use the metaphor of a wall in discussing questions about churches and the political order. Rather than speculating about why Jefferson made changes in the text of the Danbury letter, we might more profitably consider the possible meaning of