Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (22 page)

Yet in spite of his reservations about the faith, Jefferson supported Jewish religious and political equality, and would later collaborate and correspond with a few American Jews. One,
David S. Franks, a patriot of the Revolutionary War, would serve as his secretary from 1782 to 1783. They also worked together in France, when Jefferson served as minister and Franks as vice-consul in Marseille.
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In 1820, Jefferson wrote
Joseph Marx, also a Jew, of his “regret … at seeing a sect, the parent and basis of all those of Christendom, singled out by all of them for persecution and oppression.” Six months before his death, the former president would aver that colleges forcing Jewish students to study Christianity were making “a cruel addition to the wrongs which that injured sect have suffered,” excluding them “from the instructions in science afforded to others in our public seminaries by imposing on them a course of theological reading which their consciences do not permit them to pursue.”
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This theological objection to a religion together with support for the rights of its adherents would be replicated in Jefferson’s stance on Islam and Muslims. As with Jews at this early point, there was no personal acquaintance with actual Muslims to inspire his advocacy for their religious and political equality. And although he attempted to study Islam, his learning was limited and often faulty, and sometimes entirely negative. Still, his low opinion of Islam as a religion and a political system had no bearing on his support for the rights of a future population of American Muslims. His principles of toleration and inclusion were universal respecting not only religion but immigration and citizenship, and so implicitly Muslims too had a place in the pluralist society he envisioned for Virginia and the United States.

In his notes on Locke, Jefferson’s first reference to Muslims notes that Locke “denies toleration” to those whose opinions are “contrary to those moral rules necessary for the preservation of society,” including people whose “obedience is due to some foreign prince,” or those “who will not own & teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of religion, or who deny the existence of a god.”
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As mentioned, Locke had been concerned that some Muslims in England would owe fealty to the chief cleric in Istanbul and, by extension, to the Ottoman sultan. He had also refused toleration to atheists, citing their will to “undermine and destroy all Religion,” and considered their oaths untrustworthy, since they recognized no otherworldly consequences for lying.
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Jefferson harbored no such fears, and included atheists as well as Muslims in his vision for a new society.
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Likewise, he rejected Locke’s belief that Catholics should be considered a threat because of their allegiance to the pope. In a footnote, Jefferson affirmed that it was a civil offense for a citizen to acknowledge “a foreign prince,” but refused the idea that any religious devotion would necessarily corrupt civic loyalty.
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Indeed, unlike Locke, Jefferson never specifically attributed any conflict of loyalties to either Muslims or Catholics.
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In 1779, Jefferson drafted A
Bill Prescribing the Oath of Fidelity and the Oaths of Certain Public Officers. The legislation required that anyone “migrating hither to become citizens of the commonwealth shall take the following oath of fidelity before some court of record.” The would-be citizen had to “relinquish and renounce the character of subject or citizen of any Prince, or other state, whatsoever, and abjure all allegiance, which may be claimed by such Prince, or other state.” The oath concluded, “and I do swear to be faithful and true to the said commonwealth of Virginia, so long as I continue a citizen thereof.”
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Most notable in this pledge, which was also to be taken by all would-be holders of government office, is its absence of a religious test. There is nothing to exclude non-Protestants from citizenship, and by implication no religious requirement for any who might seek office. Here then is the first American legislative precedent for the Constitution’s explicit proscription of a religious test in Article VI, section 3, which states that an individual should be bound only “by Oath or Affirmation, to
support this Constitution.” The traditional notion expressed by Locke that the validity of an oath is contingent on one’s faith thus fell away.

In his 1784
Notes on Virginia
, we find Jefferson’s only reflections in print about his legislative struggle from 1776 through 1779 over religious freedom in the Commonwealth. Offering “a summary view of that religious slavery under which people have been willing to remain,” he concludes, “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God.” Despite this evidence of Jefferson’s own belief in a divine being, immediately thereafter comes his famous defense of the freedom to believe—or
not
believe—in anything:

In proposing that government’s only rightful purview was over behavior and explicitly not the metaphysical beliefs of its citizens, Jefferson unintentionally invited his political enemies to question his Christian convictions, an attack that would continue throughout his political life.
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Jefferson agreed with Locke that toleration should be denied those “who will not own & teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of religion,” but where Locke stipulated other exceptions, Jefferson demanded universal toleration beyond the ranks of the intolerant. “[It was a great thing to go so far (as he himself sais of the parl. [parliament] who framed the act of tolern.) [toleration],” he writes of Locke’s effort, “but where he stopped short we may go on.]”
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(The 1689 Toleration Act had granted freedom of worship and political office to certain non-Anglican Protestants, including Baptists and Congregationalists, but explicitly excluded Catholics and Unitarians, and implicitly Jews and Muslims.) The safeguard Jefferson proposed to make his more expansive vision work was the mandatory oath that would stipulate tolerance as a precondition for like treatment: “Perhaps the single thing which may be required of others before toleration to them would be an oath that they would allow toleration to others.”
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Jefferson’s insistence on this expansive vision was not built on
idealism for its own sake but a practical awareness of the terrible legacy of European religious violence, which he determined his own state and country should escape. He had collected several books by
Sebastian Castellio, who in the sixteenth century had proposed an end to religious persecution in the name of Christianity, advocating for Christian heretics as well as Muslims and Jews, even in his preface to his Latin New Testament,
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which Jefferson inscribed with his initials.
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Though he did not possess Castellio’s most important treatise,
Concerning Heretics
, written in response to the 1553 immolation of
Michael Servetus, Jefferson did note Voltaire’s description of
Calvin’s role in Servetus’s fiery death.
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Perhaps it inspired his later, private assessment of Calvin as “an atheist,” whose “religion was daemonism.” His final word on the Protestant reformer could apply equally to all intolerance in the name of faith: “If ever a man worshipped a false God, he did.”
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As much as Jefferson despised Calvin, he venerated John Locke, placing him among “my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced,”
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the other two being Isaac Newton (d. 1727) and Francis Bacon (d. 1626).
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In Locke, Jefferson would find the language he needed to frame a legal abolition of his state’s control over religion. Borrowing from the philosopher, he writes:

A year later, in 1777, Locke’s thought would be echoed by Jefferson in his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which decried not only religious coercion but its material support through taxation: “that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves
and abhors
is sinful and tyrannical.”
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The two words taken directly from Locke—“and abhors”—would be deleted from the legislation as finally passed, no doubt out of political necessity, but surely suggest Jefferson’s unvarnished opinion.

Jefferson further elaborated his own view later in his
Notes on Virginia
, justifying his universalism by setting American Protestantism in a global perspective. The practical futility of the alternative is clear, even if one allowed for evangelical aspirations:

In fact, Jefferson was prepared to acknowledge no religion as uniquely “right,” but even if such existed and “ours [be] that one,” there was still no justification for converting others by “force.”
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On this point, he agrees broadly with Castellio, Locke, and Sale, but goes beyond all of them in envisioning a society in which the rights of non-Christians would not depend on the Christian sentiments of the majority.

Locke, by contrast, maintains an ultimately Christian frame of reference, even as he laments Christianity’s loss of prestige owing to an inclination toward “Factions, Tumults, and Civil Wars,” a history that fostered in some an impression that “the Christian Religion is the worst of all Religions, and ought neither to be embraced by any particular Person, nor tolerated in any Commonwealth.” Locke vehemently rejects this critique, arguing that Christianity is “the most modest and peaceable religion that ever was.”
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He professes a sincere belief in the “genius” of Christianity, even while admitting its presence in “turbulent and destructive” cases of religious intolerance. Indeed, Locke believed that his definition of toleration—rooted in Christian precepts—could itself prevent religious persecution, so long as the majority remained firmly Christian:

Characteristically, Jefferson condenses this sentiment and questions the “genius” of Christianity that Locke so admired:

But not until 1784 would Jefferson explicitly enunciate a radical idea taken from Locke that had motivated his groundbreaking legislation on religious freedom: “Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.”
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It was a notion that would shock many of his contemporaries in the newly formed United States.

Between 1776 and 1779, Jefferson drafted over one hundred pieces of legislation for the state of Virginia, but until his dying day he would remain most proud of number eighty-two: A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which would be called “the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom” on his tombstone.
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It was Jefferson’s will that it be so listed among what he deemed his three major achievements, the other two being his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia. Jefferson drew several points for the statute directly from Locke, including the aforementioned argument against taxes supporting the “abhorred” state religion.
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From Locke’s first letter on toleration, Jefferson had noted that “the magistrate’s jurisdn. [jurisdiction] extends only to civil rights.”
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From Locke’s poetical assessment of the limitations of temporal authority—“the
narrow way which leads to Heaven is not better known to the Magistrate than to other private Persons”
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—Jefferson produced a more lawyerly paraphrase in his notes: “I cannot give up my guidance to the magistrate; because he knows no more the way to heaven than I do & is less concerned to direct me right than I am to go right.”
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But in drafting the bill, he evokes his own powerful voice: