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“Most Christians would consider Jefferson an enemy if he were alive today.”

Non-Christians love to claim Jefferson was a Deist often in naked attempts to deemphasize our national Judaeo/Christian heritage. And Christians often overstate Jefferson’s standing among their own. In reality, he would not well fit the strict definition of either in my opinion while acknowledging the myriad definitions particularly on the Christian side.

He was unquestionably a man who possessed a rare measure of reason. This gift allowed him to reject clearly unreasonable aspects of his contemporaries’ religious traditions, practices and especially authorities. His historically prolific life provides enough writings and recorded actions to arm each side in this argument with affirmations of membership and evidence of heresy.

I’m no expert on Deism and certainly not one of its members. As I understand it, Deism involves acknowledging a sort of hands-off “universal creative force” but relies solely on nature and man’s reason to understand it while rejecting all “revealed” wisdom. If that is accurate, I doubt many pure Deists would, as Tom did, study the Bible, attend public worship (on government property no less), marry in a church, donate cash to Christian causes, send their kids to Christian school, authorize clergy on the federal payroll, date a letter “in the year of our Lord Christ...”, distribute the Gospel to Indians or produce the numerous and often orthodox quotes regarding “heaven”, “the Father” and His gifts which “are to be violated but with His wrath”.

On the other hand most Christians likely would not feel comfortable personally redacting parts of the Gospel before distributing it, rejecting the last book of the Bible (The Revelation of Jesus Christ) or later in life rejecting the deity of Christ (though not His philosophy).

I personally would classify Jefferson as a Christian with a very Deist-like tendency to opt for reason where tenants of faith seemed to him unreasonable - especially those tenants which had evolved with time and which had been corrupted by interpretations of and enforcement by unreasonable men. It was in this analogous sense that he opposed denominational tyranny with the same fervor as he opposed judicial despotism.

Regardless what anybody wants to label ‘ole Jeff’, the main point is that he made it quite clear that it was NOT the Framers’ intention to have the federal Bill of Rights prohibit lower units of governments and various faiths from making what he personally would consider the bad decision of ‘intermeddling’.

And he very certainly did not see the First Amendment as prohibiting such innocuous actions as some pimple-faced high school kid honoring God in a commencement speech, for example.