Was Not a Christian
We have copies of 18,000 letters that Jefferson wrote during his lifetime (that's an average of 1.68 letters per day, every day of his life, beginning with the day he was born). In fact, he himself made an index of the letters, and the index runs 656 pages. We also have the first 120 pages of an autobiography that he was working on at the time of his death.
In other words, we know a great deal about Jefferson's beliefs and ideas and thoughts ... straight from the horse's mouth.
Jefferson rejected Christian beliefs such as the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, biblical miracles, resurrection, and original sin. He believed in reason over revelation. However, he believed in a benevolent, rational creator god who established natural laws and moral order -- what some call "natural religion."
This is the kind of god who creates everything and then just walks away. There are no miracles or answered prayers.
In other words ... Thomas Jefferson wasn't a Christian.
Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"The whole history of these books (i.e., the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law."
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
"Those who live by mystery & charlatanerie, fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy — the most sublime and benevolent, but most perverted system that ever shone on man - endeavored to crush your well-earned & well-deserved fame [emphasis added]."
"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
"It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e., the Book of Revelations [sic]), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams."
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
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