A few summers ago, my wife, Sue, and I were vacationing in Vail, Colorado, and not used to hiking at such an altitude, we found it necessary to rest in order to acclimatize. You know, if you climb up just a few steps you kind of lose your breath. Afternoon naps helped, we found, and, I don’t know about you, but I sleep better when I have the radio on. Now, music doesn’t do it. It doesn’t help me fall asleep, no matter what kind of music it is. I must listen to talk radio. I alternate between NPR and sports talk radio. When I find I know too much about the NFL (it’s just disgusting how much I know), then I go back to NPR. In Vail, in the high mountains, not a whole lot of choice because of the reception of radio frequencies; as I recall, only one station came in clearly, an AM station in the afternoon, and you won’t believe who was the host of this syndicated talk show in the town which Gerald Ford makes his home at least part of the time, good ol’ Ollie North. And, I thought, Well, I know what to expect, and I was correct up until the time the conversation turned to the topic of the religion of our founding fathers. And, I thought, Oh, here we go, Ollie will ditto the Christian nation theme, all the founding fathers were God-fearing Christians, and we are a Christian nation, and it mentions God in the Declaration of Independence. But, you know, when the caller referred to Thomas Jefferson as another orthodox Christian, good ol’ Ollie stopped him dead in his tracks, and he replied, “No, Jefferson was a Unitarian.” I jumped up from the bed and shouted, “Hooray, hooray! Ollie is on our side!” Well, maybe I was stretching the point a bit. If only everybody would be as well-informed as Oliver North on that particular point! But that’s not the case, sadly. Because Jefferson’s early formal connection was with the Episcopal Church in the colony of Virginia, he has been acclaimed by the Episcopalians. And, of course, when Jefferson was born -- this was before we became a nation – the Anglican Church was the officially established tax-supported religion of the colony of Virginia. One’s religion literally went with the territory. And, it was this very system of established religion which Jefferson worked so hard to disestablish, and, by God, he did it, with the passage of the statute for religious freedom by the Virginia legislature in 1786 when he was 43 years old. Now, Jefferson believed in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. He may not have used those precise words, but he did. And, freedom, including the freedom of religion, was important to him, was necessary for the full development of an individual’s potential. One religion didn’t fit all. The importance of religion and the importance of his belief in the necessity of religious freedom can be seen in the instructions he left for the inscription on his monument. The monument on his grave, he wrote, would bear the following inscription and not a word more: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statue of Virginia for Religious Freedom and father of the University of Virginia. By these testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered.”

As Henry Wilder Foote put it, “He had given his country a very great part of that spiritual vision which has created what we know as the American dream, for his vision has molded American ideals more powerfully than of any other single American.”

When William Ellery Channing delivered the first public proclamation of Unitarianism in 1819, a sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity,” which has come to be known as the Baltimore sermon because it was delivered in Baltimore. When he delivered that in 1819, Jefferson, then in his late 70s, had already been a far more radical Unitarian than Channing for many, many years. The American Unitarian Association was organized 6 years later, in 1825, the very same year the university Jefferson founded opened its doors, and the next year, 1826, Jefferson died at age 82 on the fourth of July, in fact, the 50th anniversary of the Fourth of July. And, even though Jefferson’s disbelief in the dogmas of orthodox Christianity was well-known from the time he was a young man, his Unitarianism was largely unknown during his lifetime. He refused to enter into public discussion of the subject, holding that beliefs were a private conviction. For Jefferson, the necessary corollary to religious freedom was John Locke’s maxim, “The care of every man’s soul belongs to him.” As a Unitarian, Jefferson believed in one God, and he was, at least in his later years, very clearly a theist. And, the God in which he believed would be called today the God of intelligent design.

In a letter to John Adams written when Jefferson was nearly 80, he wrote, “I hold without revelation,” and that is a key, he didn’t arrive at his religious views via revelation or the biblical record but by reason. “I hold without revelation that when we take a view of the universe and its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design of consummate skill and a definite power in every atom of its composition. It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is in all this design cause and effect up to an ultimate cause, a Fabricator of all things, from matter and motion, their Preserver and Regulator.”

This may sound pretty orthodox to our ears, yet, because Jefferson rejected the dogmas of orthodox Christianity, he denied the fundamental truths of revealed religion, having a reasoned religion, and because he fought hard to disestablish the church, the state-sponsored religion, his political opponents sough to portray him as godless. And, because he approved of the French revolution, approved of it but not the reign of terror that followed, not only was he godless, he was a Jacobin, hell-bent on overthrowing not only religion but the established order of society. You see, negative campaigning is not a new thing. And, those Frenchies were troubling even back then. The ministers of the day traced the growth of irreligion among the young to French atheism, and Jefferson had been too long in France. Alexander Hamilton labeled Jefferson an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics. Blame it on the French. Bring on those freedom fries.

Jefferson’s heresy was that he did not believe Jesus was God, even though he revered Jesus of Nazareth as a great reformer. For Jefferson, the religion of Jesus had become the religion about Jesus, and that missed the mark. And, what we have in the New Testament, the story of Jesus’ life and ministry, to Jefferson was an incorrect method. Fragments have come down to us mutilated and misstated, disfiguring corruptions by schismatizing followers who sophisticated and perverted the simple doctrines Jesus taught. Yet, he reasoned, if we could reconstruct the record, we could set it straight, and the system of morals thereof would be the most perfect and most sublime ever known to humankind.

Jefferson said the philosophers and the Hebrews only went so far. They laid hold of actions only but not the inner realm, the inner thoughts, the inner being, whereas Jesus pushed his scrutinies into the heart of man, erected his tribunal in the reign of his thoughts and purified the waters at the fountainhead. Remember Jimmie Carter in a famous interview. I don’t know if it was in Playboy or what. He talked about lusting in his heart, following of the actions of his lusting, but lusting in his heart. This is what Jefferson meant. The philosophers and the Hebrews judged only human actions, not the feelings or the thoughts inside. Carter thought he had sinned, according to his Baptist precepts, because he had lusted in his heart, not that he had done anything about it.

Well, Jefferson sought to set the record straight through compiling his own version of the New Testament, and so at the beginning of the second term as president, he ordered from Philadelphia two Greek testaments and two English testaments. Of course, he spoke Greek, read Greek, wrote Greek. And he ordered two of each because is always something printed one side of the page may interfere with something you want on the other side. If it’s continued, you don’t want to cut any of it out. So, he ordered two of each. He worked on this in the White House in the late evenings after his company left, and it didn’t take him all that long to complete it. Probably the first items that fell on the cutting room floor were the miracle accounts, the stories, the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection. Jefferson was so far ahead of Channing’s Unitarianism, that it’s amazing, the Unitarians of that day were still accounting the miracles of Jesus as validation of his authority. He was a great spiritual person because he could do these things outside the realm of science and reason and history as we know it. But Jefferson, ever the scientist, said no.

He wrote to John Adams, “The day will come when the account of the birth of Christ, as accepted in Trinitarian churches, will be classed with the fable of Minerva springing from the brain of Jupiter.” Would that it would happen.

The result of his searching for what he labeled “diamonds in a dunghill,” was an octavo of some 46 pages, the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. He called it, “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth,” intending it for a specific audience: Native Americans. He was an evangelist of sorts. This Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth has come to be known as the Jefferson It is still in print, published by our own Beacon Press. In fact, we have given our youngsters in the Coming of Age program Jefferson Bibles.

Well, by the time that he had worked on his own version of the Bible, Jefferson had clearly become a Unitarian in his beliefs, largely through the influence of Dr. Joseph Priestley, who was another amazing individual, an English Unitarian, a rather radical one, an eminent scientist who discovered oxygen, among his other discoveries, a confidential friend of Ben Franklin and a social and religious radical. Priestley had come to this country to escape persecution in England because he was so far ahead of the pack. He escaped to America after being chased by a church-inspired mob that burned his library and his laboratory in Birmingham, England, and he escaped with barely his life.

Jefferson wrote, “I have read Priestley’s books over and over again, and I rest on them as the basis of my own faith.”

And, of course, in that famous epistle to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where there were many, many Unitarian churches, Jefferson bemoaned the fact that there was not a Unitarian house of worship near Monticello and that he would have to be content to be a Unitarian by himself. That doctrine he wrote has not yet been preached to us in his neighborhood, but the breeze begins to be felt. And, of course, Jefferson was extremely optimistic about the future prospects of our free faith. Because he was a man of great reasoning capacity and because our religious approach made sense to him, he quite incorrectly thought that it would make sense to everyone else. Well, his estimate, perhaps, of the reasoning ability of others was too high. I want to share a letter, which I had not read until very recently, that he wrote on November 2, 1822, to a Dr. Thomas Cooper, in which he speaks of the hope he has for Unitarianism and the great role it will play in the further development of our country and in individual lives.

“The atmosphere of our country is unquestionably charged with a threatening cloud of fanaticism, lighter in some parts, denser in others, but too heavy in all. I had no idea, however, that in Pennsylvania, the cradle of toleration and freedom of religion, it could have arisen to the height you describe. This must be owing to the growth of Presbyterianism. The blasphemy and absurdity of the five points of Calvin, and the impossibility of defending them, render their advocates impatient of reasoning, irritable, and prone to denunciation. In Boston, however, and its neighborhood, Unitarianism has advanced to so great strength, as now to humble this haughtiest of all religious sects; insomuch that they condescend to interchange with them and the other sects, the civilities of preaching freely and frequently in each others' meeting-houses. In Rhode Island, on the other hand, no sectarian preacher will permit a Unitarian to pollute his desk …

“The diffusion of instruction, to which there is now so growing an attention, will be the remote remedy to this fever of fanaticism; while the more proximate one will be the progress of Unitarianism. That this will, before long, be the religion of the majority from north to south, I have no doubt.”

Let us be as bold in our faith as Jefferson was in his, and let us carry his vision on into the future.