Thomas Jefferson—misunderstood—is the patron saint of the ACLU. They view him as accepting a secular view of the public square. but he didn’t believe in that. History has been rewritten, and truth is the victim. The sermons that Jefferson listened to regularly are an important factor. Did he sleep through them or did they impact him?
Suppose the worst report about Jefferson’s faith were true. What then? Well, then he would have missed heaven. That was his loss. Meanwhile, it’s still a fact that when he was a young man he did apparently believe in the Christian faith; and, as we’ll see, he articulated principles of religious freedom based on Jesus, “the holy author of our religion.” Furthermore, it’s critical to understand that even if he personally did not embrace Christ, His atoning death for sinners, His resurrection, the Trinity, the inspiration of the Bible, etc., a Judeo-Christian worldview provided the overall framework for his well-articulated ideas, which are predicated on a theistic worldview. (For example, we can’t have unalienable rights granted by a Creator, if there is no Creator.) Jefferson’s motto was theistic: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”[1]
We believe that it’s time for the ACLU and People for the American Way and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the like, to stop making Jefferson their patron saint. He would not agree at all with their anti-religious (anti-Christian) crusade of expunging anything religious from the public square. As the Presbyterian minister, the late D. James Kennedy once put it, “The real Thomas Jefferson is the ACLU’s worst nightmare.”[2]
The founders did not want a national denomination—at the federal level. Groups like the ACLU that bring the lawsuits against any Christian expression in the public arena are trying to remake America in the image of the founders of the failed Soviet Union—not the United States of America. To counteract all the secularist misinformation about Thomas Jefferson, we wrote Doubting Thomas.
[1] The Editors of Newsweek Books, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography in His Own Words, Volume 2 (New York: Newsweek, 1974), 238.
[2] D. James Kennedy, “The Real Thomas Jefferson” (Ft. Lauderdale: Coral Ridge Ministries, 2002).