The left don't like their version of history being challenged.
You wrote: “The left don’t like their version of history being challenged.”
True.
“Thomas Jefferson, religious freak” by James Freeman - USA Today July 10, 2000
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/columnists/freeman/ncjf81.htm
On July Fourth, we celebrated the 224th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. This great document, of course, is not the law of the land. The Constitution, created in 1787, gives us the rules we live by. But it’s hard to overstate the importance of Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant work, which was adopted by the Continental Congress in 1776. The Declaration created the United States of America. It also explained why we were free to abandon British rule and articulated many of the basic principles that would later be expressed in our Constitution, such as government by the people and the right of trial by jury.
So what gave us the right to start our own country? Where did we get off saying that the people should rule instead of a king or a parliament representing the richest men of the country? How could we claim a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Where did our rights come from? Well, according to TJ and the guys who voted to start a new nation in 1776, they came from the man upstairs. That was the whole justification for the rebellion: Our rights came from God, not from the British crown, so it was up to us what kind of government we wanted to recognize. If you could sum up Jefferson’s political views in one sentence, you would say: He believed that God and reason allow people to rule themselves.
As we reflect on the Fourth of July and recent cases in which the Supreme Court has tried to decide how much religion to allow in our public institutions, it’s worth considering the opinions of the man who, as much as anyone, is responsible for the creation of the USA. And based on the standards of our time, I think you have to say that Thomas Jefferson was a religious nut. I’m not just talking about the first two paragraphs of the Declaration, although they do make the point:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. …”
Jefferson was a big believer in religious liberty, but he certainly wasn’t shy about mentioning God in official proceedings. In the final paragraph of the Declaration (available at http://www.constitution.org/usdeclar.htm), Jefferson asks twice for God’s help in creating the country. And the Declaration was not the only work of Jefferson’s in which he gave credit to a higher power.
Appropriately enough, the University of Virginia maintains several excellent Web sites about its “father” and chief architect. One of my favorites (http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/) includes this quotation from 1774: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” In his Notes on Virginia of 1782, Jefferson writes: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?”
So, by modern standards, this guy sure seems as if he’s a Bible-thumping fruitcake. And one great thing about the USA is that you’re free to call him a Bible-thumping fruitcake. Jefferson would definitely approve. On his tombstone he wanted it recorded that he wrote the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom.
Still, if you toss out his religious faith, that does leave a pretty big hole in his philosophy and a difficult question for us: Where do our rights come from? Jefferson’s crazy religious ideas, shared by crazy representatives from 13 crazy colonies, are the reason we have a United States and the reason that We the People are in charge.