The Jefferson Lies (26 page)

A third leader was the Reverend Elias Smith of New Hampshire, who left the Baptist denomination and began a new group that “agreed to consider ourselves Christians, without the addition of any unscriptural name.”
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A fourth leader was Jefferson's good friend, the Reverend James O'Kelly of Virginia, who had actually started this trend well before any of the other three changing the name of his group from “Republican Methodists” to simply “Christians.”

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The followers of Stone, Smith, and O'Kelly came together in 1810, calling themselves “Christian Connection” (sometimes “Christian Connexion”). Campbell's group, while philosophically aligned with the other three, did not combine with them until years later, but in 1811 it did take the name “Christian Association.”

Ministers of these four groups became leaders in the Charlottesville area, having great spiritual influence, and their followers increased rapidly for the next decade. But regrettably, in their fervor to restore primitive Christianity and return to the Bible as the only model, they ended up rejecting several long-standing doctrines of orthodox Christianity, including the concept of the Trinity. As bluntly explained by the Reverend Barton Stone, “The word Trinity is not found in the Bible.”
²⁷

The Reverend Elias Smith agreed:

In all the glorious things said of Christ, there is no mention of his Divinity, his being God-man, his incarnation, the human and the Divine nature, the human soul of Christ, his being God the Creator and yet the son of the Creator; these things are inventions of men and ought to be rejected.
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Of the four major leaders, only O'Kelly openly embraced Trinitarianism.
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Smith and Stone did not embrace the doctrine, and since Thomas Campbell took no position on the doctrine,
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his followers included those from both Trinitarian and Anti-Trinitarian positions. It is interesting to note that none of the four groups rejected Jesus as the son of God, but only as a part of the Trinity. Sadly, this was the doctrinal position widely expounded by leading Christian ministers across Charlottesville for the last fifteen years of Jefferson's life.

Because Restorationists (Primitivists) claimed that the Bible was their only guidebook, they also rejected several other “traditions” of Christianity. For example, Smith thundered:

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I am a Christian . . . holding as abominable in the sight of God, everything . . . such as Calvinism, Arminianism, Freewillism, Universalism, Reverends, Parsons, Chaplains, Doctors of Divinity, Clergy, Bands, Surplices, Notes, Creeds, Covenants, and Platforms.
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While the Primitivists rejected many church practices, there were many that they still continued to embrace. Holt recounted the Reverend O'Kelly's description of what was preserved by the movement.

He says, “That there has sprung up in the country a sect under the general name of ‘Christians,' who administer adult baptism only to please the Baptists; who hold Arminian sentiments to catch the Methodists; and yet will not allow a man to be a Calvinist if he chooses; that they prove Socinian tenets [that Jesus was a man inspired by God but not Divine Himself] and make that profession the only bond of union. . . . He states too, that they are increasing rapidly.
³²

The distinct religious tenets, that characterized the Restoration Movement included:

• A rejection of denominationalism and all denominational titles except that of Christian

• A stress on Christian unity

• An emphasis on the Gospels rather than the Epistles—on getting back to the teachings of Jesus, and therefore a de-emphasis on the Epistles and the Old Testament

• A rejection of church hierarchal structure: each church was local, and locally controlled

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• Anti-Trinitarianism, with an emphasis on using only Bible language and Bible terms

• Anti-Calvinic almost to the point of loathing it

Interestingly, the movement's hatred for Calvinism was so strong that part of the reason Restorationists rejected the Trinity was simply because Calvin had embraced it. For example, Alexander Campbell declared, “I object to the Calvinistic doctrine of the Trinity.”
³³
He thereafter attempted to defend his own concept of the Trinity, but his effort was so convoluted that the Reverend Stone rebuked him, claiming that by his attempt to defend Trinitarianism, he was actually embracing the Calvinism that they all claimed to deplore.
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Restorationist leaders reached the point that if
any
doctrine had been espoused by Calvin, then they believed it must be wrong. In fact, the Reverend Elias Smith even characterized Calvinism as part of ungodliness, declaring, “[M]y mind was delivered from Calvinism, universalism, and deism—three doctrines of men, which people love who do not love holiness.”
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The Restoration and Christian Primitivist Movement came to be the dominant religious force in Charlottesville, and Jefferson openly embraced and promoted it. Not surprisingly, then, Jefferson's writings during his latter years reflect all the major tenets of Christian Primitivism and Restorationism, using almost the exact tenor and words as the Restoration minsters surrounding him. Consider some of Jefferson's declarations about each of the major beliefs of the Movement.

On Primitivism and Restoration

In his latter years Jefferson repeatedly wrote of the need to return to primitive Christianity and restore it to the time of Jesus and the Apostles.

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[T]he genuine and simple religion of Jesus will one day be restored such as it was preached and practiced by Himself. . . . I hope that the day of restoration is to come.
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Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.
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I . . . express my gratification with your efforts for the revival of primitive Christianity in your quarter.
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[I]t is only by . . . getting back to the plain and unsophisticated precepts of Christ that we become real Christians.
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Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from His lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian.
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On Christian Unity and Cooperation

Jefferson had already adopted this precept during the Great Awakening, and it remained with him throughout his life, including during the Restoration Movement. This trait had been apparent in his 1779 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which established denominational nonpreferentialism in the state. Again in 1800, when the church at the Capitol was started, Jefferson demonstrated a sense of unity by helping establish the policy whereby ministers from all denominations were invited to preach and yet again in 1819 when he invited all denominations to establish seminaries at his beloved University of Virginia. Recall, too, that Jefferson had regularly given financially to all types of Christian churches and helped build new ones for many differing denominations.

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Jefferson also openly celebrated those parts of the country wherein the denominations “condescend to interchange with . . . the other sects the civilities of preaching freely and frequently in each other's meetinghouses,”
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and he specifically praised the locations in Charlottesville (such as the “union building” and the county courthouse) where ministers from various denominations would rotate preaching. As he extolled to a friend during the height of the Restoration Movement:

In our village of Charlottesville . . . [w]e have four sects, but without either church or meeting-house. The court house is the common temple, one Sunday in the month to each. Here, Episcopalian and Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist meet together, join in hymning their Maker, listen with attention and devotion to each other's preachers, and all mix in society with perfect harmony.
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Jefferson believed strongly that the teachings of Jesus brought unity but that the teachings of denominations brought disunity and conflict. As he explained to John Adams in 1819:

No doctrines of His lead to schism. It is the speculations of crazy theologists which have made a Babel of a religion the most moral and sublime ever preached to man, and calculated to heal and not to create differences. These religious animosities I impute to those who call themselves His ministers and who engraft their casuistries [personal interpretations] on the stock of His simple precepts. I am sometimes more angry with them than is authorized by the blessed charities which He preached.
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On Emphasizing the Gospels and De-emphasizing the Epistles and Old Testament

Jefferson had always drawn a clear distinction between the teachings found in the Gospels and those found in the rest of the Bible, but during the Restoration Movement that distinction took on a new fervor, leading almost to a wholesale rejection of those things not found in the Gospels. For example, he declared during the Movement:

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In the New Testament, there is internal evidence that parts of it [i.e., the Gospels] have proceeded from an extraordinary man, and that other parts [i.e., the Epistles] are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.
⁴⁴

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him [Jesus] by His biographers [in the Gospels], I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others [in the Epistles], again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus [leader and spokesperson] and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus.
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Another non-Gospel book on which Jefferson held a clear opinion was the book of Revelation. In 1825 General Alexander Smyth, a military officer from the War of 1812 and a longtime Virginia legislator, sought Jefferson's opinion about a work he had prepared on the end times and the book of Revelation. Jefferson responded, telling Smith:

[Y]ou must be so good as to excuse me, because I make it an invariable rule to decline ever giving opinions on new publications in any case whatever. No man on earth has less taste or talent for criticism than myself, and least and last of all should I undertake to criticize works on the Apocalypse. It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it, and I then considered it as merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherencies of our own nightly dreams.
⁴⁶

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But this negative opinion about the book of Revelation did not mean that Jefferson had no opinion on the end times, for he did. Jesus had specifically addressed this subject in the Gospels, so Jefferson had reached a conclusion on it much earlier in life. He therefore instructed his daughter Martha:

I hope you will have good sense enough to disregard these foolish predictions that the world is to be at an end soon. The Almighty has never made known to anybody at what time He created it, nor will He tell anybody when he means to put an end to it—if ever He means to do it. As to preparations for that event, the best way is for you to be always prepared for it. The only way to be so is never to do nor say anything amiss or to do anything wrong. Consider beforehand; you will feel something within you which will tell you it is wrong and ought not to be said or done; this is your conscience, and be sure to obey it. Our Maker has given us all this faithful internal monitor, and if you always obey it you will always be prepared for the end of the world, or for a much more certain event which is death.
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Jefferson also wrote a lengthy letter to William Short, whom he considered an adopted son, extolling what Jesus taught in the Gospels but deriding what had been taught in the Old Testament:

That sect [the Jews] had presented for the object of their worship a Being of terrific character: cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust. Jesus, taking for His type the best qualities of the human head and heart (wisdom, justice, goodness) and adding to them power, ascribed all of these (but in infinite perfection) to the Supreme Being, and formed Him really worthy of their adoration.
⁴⁸

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Jefferson also denounced the Old Testament tendency toward continual fighting between nations, contrasting that practice with what Jesus had taught:

The one [Moses] instilled into his people the most antisocial spirit towards other nations; the other [Jesus] preached philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence.
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Jefferson also noted that the Old Testament position of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was quite different from the system Jesus brought.
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He also disagreed with Old Testament theology “which supposes the God of infinite justice to punish the sins of the fathers upon their children, unto the 3rd and 4th generations.”
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In short, in late life, Jefferson, just like the ministers in Christian Primitivism, focused almost solely on the Gospels, criticizing both the Epistles and the Old Testament.