"It is Christianity, Jim, but not as we know it."
Sorry, couldn't resist that.
Your point is well taken; my point I did not make clear. I am not offering Mr. Jefferson's approach as a model for emulation, still less an exposition of my own faith, merely noting it as one of many possible. I do not assume that anyone else's experience of God is identical to my own and I therefore endeavour (do not always succeed) in giving the benefit of the doubt. Until someone invents a Soul-o-Scope for peering into another's innermost being, we're stuck with taking people at their word unless there is a good reason not to.
Jefferson's own account I find of interest (in a letter to Benjamin Rush in 1803):
DEAR SIR,
In some of the delightful conversations with you in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you that one day or other I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other. At the short interval since these conversations, when I could justifiably abstract my mind from public affairs, the subject has been under my contemplation. But the more I considered it, the more it expanded beyond the measure of either my time or information. In the moment of my late departure from Monticello, I received from Dr. Priestley his little treatise of "Socrates and Jesus Compared." This being a section of the general view I had taken of the field, it became a subject of reflection while on the road and unoccupied otherwise. The result was, to arrange in my mind a syllabus or outline of such an estimate of the comparative merits of Christianity as I wished to see executed by someone of more leisure and information for the task than myself. This I now send you as the only discharge of my promise I can probably ever execute. And in confiding it to you, I know it will not be exposed to the malignant perversions of those who make every word from me a text for new misrepresentations and calumnies. I am moreover averse to the communication of my religious tenets to the public, because it would countenance the presumption of those who have endeavored to draw them before that tribunal, and to seduce public opinion to erect itself into that inquisition over the rights of conscience which the laws have so justly proscribed. It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own. It behooves him, too, in his own case, to give no example of concession, betraying the common right of independent opinion, by answering questions of faith which the laws have left between God and himself. Accept my affectionate salutations.
Th: Jefferson
Any other information about this Dr. Priestly?
There might be room for a pun about 'sucking all the oxygen phlogiston out of the room'.
I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other. It's that last phrase that contradicts garden variety Christianity...
Whether or not you personally endorse (say) the Nicene creed, or what have you, it still represents a pretty good baseline for most Christians...even if some don't recognize it.
Cheers!