"DOUBTING THOMAS? The Religious Life and Legacy of Thomas Jefferson" by MARK A. BELILES and JERRY NEWCOMBE deals with the faith---or the lack thereof---of one of our most important founding fathers. But this volume provides NEW information, some of which has not been in print before. To learn more about the book, see www.americapublications.org DOUBTING THOMAS contains previously unpublished documents including a dozen religious letters by Jefferson and two sermons by his pastor Charles Clay. Jefferson voluntarily joined and donated to Clay’s Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville.
Thomas Jefferson entertained doubts later in life, but he was not a lifelong skeptic. In our book Doubting Thomas, we see that the school Jefferson helped to create (the University of Virginia, which is in Charlottesville) was not so much a secular school as it was a non-sectarian one. Jefferson …
Religious freedom, as Thomas Jefferson understood it, was best served by having states not have any particular state-church—by law established. He helped Virginia disestablish its state-church (Anglican) by writing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (written in 1777, passed when he was in France in 1786). That Statute calls on …
Thomas Jefferson was not a lifelong skeptic. Early in his life, from outward appearances, he seemed to be a Christian in the Anglican tradition. He even helped start an evangelical church with an evangelical minister who had been ordained in the Anglican tradition—Rev. Charles Clay. Jefferson did not believe in …
On May 16, 1816, Charles Thomson replied to Jefferson saying he was glad to hear of his extracts of the Gospels* and proof that he was a “real Christian, that is, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.” Thomson also told him of his habit every morning and sometimes at night of reading …