- A few months before his death, in 1825, Thomas Jefferson
received a request from a friend for a letter to the friend's son, offering
him advice. Here is Jefferson's letter to that boy:
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- "This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead.
The writer will be in the grave before you can weigh its counsels. Your
affectionate and excellent father has requested that I would address to
you something which possibly might have a favorable influence on the course
of life you have to run: and I too, as a namesake, feel an interest in
that course.
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- "Few words will be necessary with good dispositions
on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your
neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be
true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which
you have entered be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And
if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every
action of your life will be under my regard. Farewell."
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- This short letter is interesting in view of the fact
that so many modern anti-religious types have tried to paint some of the
Founding Fathers, Jefferson in particular, as agnostics, if not atheists.
Clearly, Jefferson shows familiarity with Christian concepts and demonstrates
a belief in heaven. These are not the words of an agnostic or of a deist
who believed that God created the world and then walked away, leaving it
like a clock to run itself.
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- Part of the problem many Americans have in understanding
the Founding Fathers is a general ignorance of America's colonial and revolutionary
period. Failed public education is the chief culprit. The other part of
the problem is failing to read the words in the context in which they were
written.
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- Jefferson grew up with two institutions with which modern
Americans have had no experience - an aristocracy by birth and an official
church. The Anglican Church was in his time and is today the official Church
of England. In the Virginia colony, people were taxed, and part of those
taxes was used to subsidize the Anglican Church. Jefferson believed this
wrong, as religion was a matter of conscience, and he did not think government
had the right to force a person to support something his conscience did
not. Hence, his idea of religious freedom was the absence of an official
church or an officially designated religion.
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- When he wrote in a letter that there was a wall of separation
between church and state, he meant just that and only that. He meant that
Baptists could not be taxed to support Methodists or vice versa. He did
not mean that government must be hostile to religion and ban any display
of it from all public places. The same Congress that wrote the Bill of
Rights also made provision for chaplains. It was a basic premise of American
republicans (little R, having nothing to do with the Republican Party,
which was not invented until the 1850s) that only a virtuous people, schooled
in virtue by religion, could maintain a free republic.
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- It is worth noting that the people today who so vehemently
wish to sweep religion from all public spaces and institutions are also
the same people who consistently oppose freedom. They want only one God
- the state, which of course they intend to run.
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- When Jefferson spoke of people being created equal, he
had reference to the class system. He did not mean people were equal in
talents or other characteristics. He simply meant that God had not created
a class system in which privileges were conferred by birth on one set of
people and denied by birth to another set of people.
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- Disregarding the value of religion and believing in egalitarianism
are two misconceptions that cause America much trouble today.
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- © 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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