"We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and
interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in
government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as
well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and
openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason
and the serious convictions of his own inquiries." --Thomas Jefferson:
Reply to Virginia Baptists, 1808. ME 16:320
"The constitutional freedom of religion [is] the most inalienable and
sacred of all human rights." --Thomas Jefferson: Virginia Board of
Visitors Minutes, 1819. ME 19:416
"Among the most inestimable of our blessings, also, is that... of
liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will;
a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet
proved by our experience to be its best support." --Thomas Jefferson:
Reply to John Thomas et al., 1807. ME 16:291
"In our early struggles for liberty, religious freedom could not fail
to become a primary object." --Thomas Jefferson to Baltimore Baptists,
1808. ME 16:317
"Religion, as well as reason, confirms the soundness of those
principles on which our government has been founded and its rights
asserted." --Thomas Jefferson to P. H. Wendover, 1815. ME 14:283
"One of the amendments to the Constitution... expressly declares that
'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press,' thereby guarding in the same sentence and under the same words,
the freedom of religion, of speech, and of the press; insomuch that whatever
violates either throws down the sanctuary which covers the others."
--Thomas Jefferson: Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798. ME 17:382
"The rights [to religious freedom] are of the natural rights of
mankind, and... if any act shall be... passed to repeal [an act granting those
rights] or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of
natural right." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779.
(*) ME 2:303, Papers 2:546
The Private Nature of Religion
"I have ever thought religion a concern purely between our God and our
consciences, for which we were accountable to Him, and not to the
priests." --Thomas Jefferson to Mrs. M. Harrison Smith, 1816. ME 15:60
"From the dissensions among Sects themselves arise necessarily a right
of choosing and necessity of deliberating to which we will conform. But if we
choose for ourselves, we must allow others to choose also, and so
reciprocally, this establishes religious liberty." --Thomas Jefferson:
Notes on Religion, 1776. Papers 1:545
"Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously
reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in
which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle."
--Thomas Jefferson to Richard Rush, 1813.
"I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or
admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others." --Thomas
Jefferson to Edward Dowse, 1803. ME 10:378
"Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability
to God alone. I inquire after no man's, and trouble none with mine."
--Thomas Jefferson to Miles King, 1814. ME 14:198
Government Intermeddling in Religion
"I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the
Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines,
discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law
shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but
from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the
United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to
assume authority in religious discipline has been delegated to the General
Government. It must then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any
human authority." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Miller, 1808. ME 11:428
"In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is
placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the general
government. I have therefore undertaken on no occasion to prescribe the
religious exercises suited to it; but have left them as the Constitution found
them, under the direction and discipline of State or Church authorities
acknowledged by the several religious societies." --Thomas Jefferson: 2nd
Inaugural Address, 1805. ME 3:378
"Our Constitution... has not left the religion of its citizens under
the power of its public functionaries, were it possible that any of these
should consider a conquest over the consciences of men either attainable or
applicable to any desirable purpose." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to New
London Methodists, 1809. ME 16:332
"I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the
civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines;
nor of the religious societies, that the General Government should be invested
with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them.
Fasting and prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them, an act of
discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the
times for these exercises and the objects proper for them according to their
own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own
hands where the Constitution has deposited it... Everyone must act according
to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone
have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to
direct the religious exercises of his constituents." --Thomas Jefferson
to Samuel Miller, 1808. ME 11:429
"To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field
of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on
supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once
destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that
tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn
the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his
own." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302,
Papers 2: 546
"It is... proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe, a
day of fasting and prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to
the United States an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution
has directly precluded them from. It must be meant, too, that this
recommendation is to carry some authority and to be sanctioned by some penalty
on those who disregard it; not indeed of fine and imprisonment, but of some
degree of proscription, perhaps in public opinion. And does the change in the
nature of the penalty make the recommendation less a law of conduct for
those to whom it is directed?... Civil powers alone have been given to the
President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious
exercises of his constituents." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Miller,
1808. ME 11:428
Religion Intermeddling in Government
"Whenever... preachers, instead of a lesson in religion, put [their
congregation] off with a discourse on the Copernican system, on chemical
affinities, on the construction of government, or the characters or conduct of
those administering it, it is a breach of contract, depriving their audience
of the kind of service for which they are salaried, and giving them, instead
of it, what they did not want, or, if wanted, would rather seek from better
sources in that particular art of science." --Thomas Jefferson to P. H.
Wendover, 1815. ME 14:281
"Ministers of the Gospel are excluded [from serving as Visitors of the
county Elementary Schools] to avoid jealousy from the other sects, were the
public education committed to the ministers of a particular one; and with more
reason than in the case of their exclusion from the legislative and executive
functions." --Thomas Jefferson: Note to Elementary School Act, 1817. ME
17:419
"No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or
practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any
religious sect or denomination." --Thomas Jefferson: Elementary School
Act, 1817. ME 17:425
"I do not know that it is a duty to disturb by missionaries the
religion and peace of other countries, who may think themselves bound to
extinguish by fire and fagot the heresies to which we give the name of
conversions, and quote our own example for it. Were the Pope, or his holy
allies, to send in mission to us some thousands of Jesuit priests to convert
us to their orthodoxy, I suspect that we should deem and treat it as a
national aggression on our peace and faith." --Thomas Jefferson to
Michael Megear, 1823. ME 15:434
Establishments of Religion Undermine Rights
"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted
into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the
civil and religious rights of man." --Thomas Jefferson to Jeremiah Moor,
1800.
"The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the
clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity
of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to
liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind." --Thomas
Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801. ME 10:237
"But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the
Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who
professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for
enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and
State." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1810. ME 12:345
"[If] the nature of... government [were] a subordination of the civil
to the ecclesiastical power, I [would] consider it as desperate for long years
to come. Their steady habits [will] exclude the advances of information, and
they [will] seem exactly where they [have always been]. And there [the] clergy
will always keep them if they can. [They] will follow the bark of liberty only
by the help of a tow-rope." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierrepont Edwards,
July 1801. (*)
"This doctrine ['that the condition of man cannot be ameliorated, that
what has been must ever be, and that to secure ourselves where we are we must
tread with awful reverence in the footsteps of our fathers'] is the genuine
fruit of the alliance between Church and State, the tenants of which finding
themselves but too well in their present condition, oppose all advances which
might unmask their usurpations and monopolies of honors, wealth and power, and
fear every change as endangering the comforts they now hold." --Thomas
Jefferson: Report for University of Virginia, 1818.
"I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring
about a legal ascendency of one sect over another." --Thomas Jefferson to
Elbridge Gerry, 1799. ME 10:78
"The advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor
forgiveness from [the clergy]." --Thomas Jefferson to Levi Lincoln, 1802.
ME 10:305
"The clergy...believe that any portion of power confided to me [as
President] will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe
rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against
every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear
from me: and enough, too, in their opinion." --Thomas Jefferson to
Benjamin Rush, 1800. ME 10:173
"Believing... that religion is a matter which lies solely between man
and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship,
that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions,
I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people
which declared that their Legislature should 'make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus
building a wall of separation between Church and State." --Thomas
Jefferson to Danbury Baptists, 1802. ME 16:281
"I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of
America, a fact like this [i.e., the purchase of an apparent geological or
astronomical work] can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry
too, as an offense against religion; that a question about the sale of a book
can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of
religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books
may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious
opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are
all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a
layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to
read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question
whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to
suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason. If [this] book be false
in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for
God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose." --Thomas
Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:127
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people
maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance
of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves
for their own purposes." --Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt,
1813. ME 14:21
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to
liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in
return for protection to his own." --Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G.
Spafford, 1814. ME 14:119
"I have been just reading the new constitution of Spain. One of its
fundamental bases is expressed in these words: 'The Roman Catholic
religion, the only true one, is, and always shall be, that of the Spanish
nation. The government protects it by wise and just laws, and prohibits the
exercise of any other whatever.' Now I wish this presented to those who
question what [a bookseller] may sell or we may buy, with a request to strike
out the words, 'Roman Catholic,' and to insert the denomination of their own
religion. This would ascertain the code of dogmas which each wishes should
domineer over the opinions of all others, and be taken, like the Spanish
religion, under the 'protection of wise and just laws.' It would show to what
they wish to reduce the liberty for which one generation has sacrificed life
and happiness. It would present our boasted freedom of religion as a thing of
theory only, and not of practice, as what would be a poor exchange for the
theoretic thraldom, but practical freedom of Europe." --Thomas Jefferson
to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:128
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation
of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical."
--Thomas Jefferson: Bill for Religious Freedom, 1779. Papers 2:545
The Benefits of Religious Freedom
"The law for religious freedom... [has] put down the aristocracy of
the clergy and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind." --Thomas
Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:400
"[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom... was
finally passed,... a singular proposition proved that its protection of
opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion
is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment
was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it
should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author
of our religion." The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in
proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the
Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of
every denomination." --Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:67
"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious
worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained,
molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor... otherwise suffer on
account of his religious opinions or belief... All men shall be free to
profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion,
and... the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil
capacities." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME
2:302, Papers 2:546
"Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more
than our opinions in physics or geometry." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute
for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301, Papers 2:545
"We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments
because he is of another church." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Religion,
1776. Papers 1:546
"The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by
laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and
emolument unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is
depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in
common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right." --Thomas
Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301, Papers 2:546
"A recollection of our former vassalage in religion and civil
government will unite the zeal of every heart, and the energy of every hand,
to preserve that independence in both which, under the favor of Heaven, a
disinterested devotion to the public cause first achieved, and a disinterested
sacrifice of private interests will now maintain." --Thomas Jefferson to
Baltimore Baptists, 1808. ME 16:318
"The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not
give immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error." --Thomas
Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:98
"If a sect arises whose tenets would subvert morals, good sense has
fair play and reasons and laughs it out of doors without suffering the State
to be troubled with it." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVII,
1782. ME 2:224
"If anything pass in a religious meeting seditiously and contrary to
the public peace, let it be punished in the same manner and no otherwise than
as if it had happened in a fair or market." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on
Religion, 1776. Papers 1:548
"It is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for
its officers to interfere [in the propagation of religious teachings] when
principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order."
--Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302, Papers
2:546
"Whatsoever is lawful in the Commonwealth or permitted to the subject
in the ordinary way cannot be forbidden to him for religious uses; and
whatsoever is prejudicial to the Commonwealth in their ordinary uses and,
therefore, prohibited by the laws, ought not to be permitted to churches in
their sacred rites. For instance, it is unlawful in the ordinary course of
things or in a private house to murder a child; it should not be permitted any
sect then to sacrifice children. It is ordinarily lawful (or temporarily
lawful) to kill calves or lambs; they may, therefore, be religiously
sacrificed. But if the good of the State required a temporary suspension of
killing lambs, as during a siege, sacrifices of them may then be rightfully
suspended also. This is the true extent of toleration." --Thomas
Jefferson: Notes on Religion, 1776. Papers 1:547
