The Jefferson Lies (10 page)

Jefferson abolished the School of Divinity because it was solely an arm of the state-established Anglican Church, and he wanted to open the college to greater involvement by those from other Christian denominations. Further evidence that his reorganization of the college was not secular was his stipulation that “[T]he said professors shall likewise appoint from time to time a missionary of approved veracity to the several tribes of Indians.”
⁶⁸
Jefferson took steps to ensure that the Gospel was promoted at William and Mary but not just according to the thirty-nine Anglican articles and that church's denominational catechism.

48

In the same manner Jefferson sought to ensure that the University of Virginia would also reflect denominational nonpreferentialism. He therefore invited the seminaries of many denominations to establish themselves on the campus, explaining:

We suggest the expediency of encouraging the different religious sects [denominations] to establish, each for itself, a professorship of their own tenets on the confines of the university so near as that their students may attend the lectures there and have the free use of our library and every other accommodation we can give them. . . . [B]y bringing the sects [denominations] together and mixing them with the mass of other students, we shall soften their asperities [harshness], liberalize and neutralize their prejudices [prejudgment without an examination of the facts], and make the general religion a religion of peace, reason, and morality.
⁶⁹

Jefferson observed that a positive benefit of this approach was that it would “give to the sectarian schools of divinity the full benefit of the public [university] provisions made for instruction”
⁷⁰
and “leave every sect to provide as they think fittest the means of further instruction in their own peculiar tenets.”
⁷¹
Jefferson pointed out that another benefit of this arrangement was that students could “attend religious exercises with the professor of their particular sect,”
⁷²
and he made clear that students would be fully
expected
to actively participate in some denominational school.
⁷³

Jefferson and the Visitors (regents) also decided that there should be no clergyman as president and no Professor of Divinity because it might give the impression that the university favored the denomination with which the university president or professor of divinity was affiliated.
⁷⁴
But the fact that the school did not have a specific professor of divinity did not mean that it was secular.

49

In fact, Jefferson had actually increased the number of Professorships of divinity by encouraging each denomination to have “a professorship of their own tenets” at the school.
⁷⁵
And the decision not to have just one exclusive professor of divinity also did not mean that the university would have no religious instruction. To the contrary, Jefferson personally directed that the teaching of “the proofs of the being of a God, the Creator, Preserver, and Supreme Ruler of the Universe, the Author of all the relations of morality and of the laws and obligations these infer, will be within the province of the Professor of Ethics.”
⁷⁶

As he explained:

[T]he relations which exist between man and his Maker, and the duties resulting from those relations, are the most interesting and important to every human being, and the most incumbent on his study and investigation.
⁷⁷

Jefferson simply transferred the responsibility of religious teaching from the traditional professor of divinity to the professor of ethics. All students would be given general Biblical teaching about man's obligations to God and the injunctions to observe Biblical morality. Jefferson also made clear that religious instruction would encompass the many religious beliefs on which Christian denominations agreed rather than just the few specific theological doctrines that distinguished each particular one.
⁷⁸
Any instruction about specific narrow doctrines would occur in the various denominational schools attached to the university.

This nondenominational approach caused Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and others to give the university the friendship and cooperative support necessary to make it a success. Consider Presbyterian minister John Holt Rice as an example.

50

Holt was a nationally known evangelical leader with extensive credentials. He founded the Virginia Bible Society,
⁷⁹
started the
Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine
to report on revivals across the country, was elected national leader of the Presbyterian Church, and offered the presidency of Princeton (but instead accepted the chair of theology at Hampden-Sydney College). Rice fully supported and promoted the University of Virginia,
⁸⁰
but this would not have been the case had the university been perceived to have been affiliated with just one denomination. As Rice explained:

The plan humbly suggested is to allow Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, any and all sects, if they shall choose to exercise the privilege, to endow professorships, and nominate their respective professors. . . . [T]he students shall regularly attend Divine worship, but in what form should be left to the direction of parents; or in failure of this, to the choice of the students. In addition to this, the professors in every case must be men of the utmost purity of moral principle and strictness of moral conduct.
⁸¹

Furthermore, when construction of the university began, the special ceremony at the laying of its cornerstone included both the reading of Scripture and a prayer—activities specifically arranged by Jefferson and the Board of Visitors. Notice the desires expressed in the university's founding prayer:

May Almighty God, without invocation to Whom no work of importance should be begun, bless this undertaking and enable us to carry it on with success. Protect this college, the object of which institution is to instill into the minds of youth principles of sound knowledge
, to inspire them with the love of religion and virtue
, and prepare them for filling the various situations in society with credit to themselves and benefit to their country.
⁸²
(emphasis added)

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Clearly, then, Jefferson's own writings and the records of the university, along with the explanations given by ministers who supported the school, all absolutely refute any notion that the University of Virginia was a secular institution. Instead, it was the nation's first prominent transdenominational school.

2. Was Jefferson's Faculty Composed of Unitarians?

Jefferson established ten teaching positions at the university,
⁸³
and
none
of the professors filling them was a Unitarian. In fact, when two of the original professors (George Tucker, professor of moral philosophy, and Robley Dunglison, professor of anatomy and medicine) were later asked whether Jefferson had sought to fill the faculty with Deists or Unitarians, Professor Dunglison succinctly answered:

I have not the slightest reason for believing that Mr. Jefferson was in any respect guided in his selection of professors of the University of Virginia by religious considerations. . . . In all my conversations with Mr. Jefferson, no reference was made to the subject. I was an Episcopalian, so was Mr. Tucker, Mr. Long, Mr. Key, Mr. Bonnycastle, and Dr. Emmet. Dr. Blaetterman, I think, was a Lutheran, but I do not know so much about his religion as I do about that of the rest. There certainly was
not
a Unitarian among us.
⁸⁴
(emphasis added)

52

Professor Tucker agreed, declaring:

I believe that all the first professors belonged to the Episcopal Church, except Dr. Blaetterman, who, I believe, was a German Lutheran. . . . I don't remember that I ever heard the religious creeds of either professors or Visitors [Regents] discussed or inquired into by Mr. Jefferson, or anyone else.
⁸⁵

Jefferson simply did not delve into the denominational affiliations or specific religious beliefs of his faculty; what he sought was professors who were competent and qualified in knowledge and deportment. As he once told his close friend and fellow educator Dr. Benjamin Rush:

For thus I estimate the qualities of the mind: 1. good humor; 2. integrity; 3. industry; 4. science. The preference of the first to the second quality may not at first be acquiesced in [given up], but certainly we had all rather associate with a good-humored, light-principled man than with an ill-tempered rigorist in morality.
⁸⁶

It was by applying such standards that Jefferson once invited Thomas Cooper to be professor of chemistry and law,
⁸⁷
but when it became known that Cooper was a Unitarian, a public outcry arose against him and Jefferson and the university withdrew its offer to him.
⁸⁸

Obviously, this type of original primary-source evidence concerning Jefferson and the religious views of his faculty is ignored by many of today's writers. But Professor Roy Honeywell of Eastern Michigan University was a professor from a much earlier period who actually
did
review the original historical evidence. He correctly concluded:

53

In general, Jefferson seems to have ignored the religious affiliations of the professors. His objection to ministers was because of their active association with sectarian groups, in his day, a fruitful source of social friction. The charge that he intended the University to be a center of Unitarian influence is totally groundless.
⁸⁹

3. Did Jefferson Bar Religious Instruction from the Academic Program?

In 1818 Jefferson and the university Visitors publicly released their plan for the new school. In addition to announcing that it would be transdenominational and that religious instruction would be provided to all students, Jefferson took further intentional steps to ensure that religious training would occur.

For example, he directed the professor of ancient languages to teach Biblical Greek, Hebrew, and Latin to students so that they would be equipped to read and study the “earliest and most respected authorities of the faith of every sect [denomination].”
⁹⁰
Jefferson also wanted the writings of prominent Christian authorities to be placed in the university library. In August 1824 he asked Visitor (or regent) James Madison to prepare a list of Christian theological writings to be included on its shelves.
⁹¹

Madison returned his recommendations to Jefferson, which included the early works of the Alexandrian Church Fathers, such as Clement, Origen, Pantaenus, Cyril, Athanasius, and Didymus the Blind. He also included Latin authors such as Saint Augustine; the writings of Saint Aquinas and other Christian leaders from the Middle Ages; and the works of Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Socinius, and Bellarmine from the Reformation era. Madison's list also contained more contemporary theologians and religious writers such as Grotius, Tillotson, Hooker, Pascal, Locke, Newton, Butler, Clarke, Wollaston, Edwards, Mather, Penn, Wesley, Leibnitz, Paley, and others.
⁹²

54

In addition to religious instruction given by the professor of ethics and the professor of ancient languages, Jefferson personally ensured that religious study would also be an inseparable part of the study of law and political science. As he explained to a prominent judge:

[I]n my catalogue, considering ethics as well as religion as supplements to law in the government of man, I had placed them in that sequence.
⁹³

Jefferson also approved of worship on campus, acknowledging “that a building . . . in the middle of the grounds may be called for in time in which may be rooms for religious worship.”
⁹⁴
He later ordered that in the university Rotunda, “one of its large elliptical rooms on its middle floor shall be used for . . . religious worship.”
⁹⁵
He further declared that “the students of the university will be free and
expected
to attend religious worship at the establishment of their respective sects”
⁹⁶
(emphasis added).

Jefferson took many deliberate steps to ensure that religious instruction was an integral part of academic studies. Clearly, then, the claim that there was no Christian curriculum or instruction at the University of Virginia is demonstrably false and easily disproved by Jefferson's own writings.

4. Did the University of Virginia Have Chaplains?

The modern claim that the University of Virginia had no chaplains is also easily disproved by original documents, including early newspaper ads that the university ran to recruit students from surrounding areas.

55

In the Washington newspaper the
Globe
, the Reverend Septimus Tuston (identified in the ad as the
chaplain
of the university and who later became the chaplain of the US House of Representatives and then the US Senate) discussed religious life at the school, reporting:

[I]n the original organization of this establishment [i.e., the University of Virginia], the privilege of erecting theological seminaries on the territory [grounds] belonging to the university was cheerfully extended to every Christian denomination within the limits of the state.