Thomas Jefferson's Religious Contradiction
THOMAS JEFFERSON'S RELIGIOUS CONTRADICTIONS
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
Thomas Jefferson, the most popular founding father of the United States, learned much and said much about various subjects during the course of his illustrious career, and he naturally contradicted himself from time to time for one reason or another. Perhaps he changed his mind, just as people change or amend their constitutions. Perchance his opinion was unsettled. He might have been unaware of certain contradictions. Or maybe he found it politically expedient to reverse himself for a greater or higher cause. Therefore we are, fortunately for our independence as individuals, given a number of occasions to employ Jefferson's corpus to contradict each other: to cite him, for instance, in support of free trade; yet, on the other hand, or at least for the time being, he says trade must be restrained.
We claim our founding fathers as we do our gods, with all their goods and evils - and we often disagree over which is which. Jefferson was adopted by the recent patriot movement although Andrew Jackson would have been a much better match; Jefferson was used to refute the patriots as well as to support their views. Of course, Jefferson, tutelary founding father of both the Republican and Democratic parties, was not altogether inconsistent in his passions. For example, he was vehemently opposed to an independent judiciary: he tried to use the impeachment process, which he confessed was a political "farce", to smother the Supreme Court in its crib.
Now we may tend to sympathize with Jefferson's antipathy to the federal judiciary, at least to the extent that its decisions discomfit us, particularly at the highest court of appeal except god. Sometimes it seems that the judiciary is a high priesthood chanting a political theology opposed to the people or to the revealed will of mysterious divine god almighty. For example, during a televised appearance on September 5, 2003, Dr. James Dobson, an influential speaker for the religious right and founder of Focus on the Family, congratulated the Bush Administration for its war on Iraq and voiced his displeasure with the judiciary for ruling against his god and in favor of homosexuals - he thanks god that the president is sponsoring a federal law prohibiting same-sex marriage. Dr. Dobson is convinced that homosexual activists are abusing the law to destroy the institution of marriage in the heterosexual, monogamous family, and that homosexuality itself is a great danger to the world, especially the next generation. Therefore the judiciary, hell-bent on taking god out of public institutions, must be reigned in from its godless course and be re-submitted to the Christian god of love, without whom nobody can be saved. And not even the Jews can be saved without Jesus, he told Larry King; then he made the standard claim of the religious right, that the foundation of American common law is Judeo-Christian. To support his position, Dr. Dobson cited our foremost founding father, Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson brought up the subject in a letter to Major John Cartwright dated June 5, 1824, at Monticello. Cartwright had abandoned a promising career in the British Navy to support the American colonists; he became an English reformer, urging the political combination of radical workers and middle-class moderates; he founded the first Hampden Club, and formed the Society for Constitutional Information. Jefferson thanked Cartwright for sending him a copy of his "valuable volume", The English Constitution.
"I was glad to find in your book," wrote Jefferson, "a formal contradiction, at length, of the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced, is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at the time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed."
Jefferson had done some lawyering himself on the issue, and he cited a few cases in his letter to Cartwright, to demonstrate how the Christian judges managed to "stole this law upon us." A certain Chief Justice Prisot had used the phrase ancient scripture in one of his opinions, stating that the written laws of the church, meaning those church laws that were in ancient writing, should be recognized as laws. Thereafter the phrase was taken out of context and misconstrued to mean that holy scripture was part of the law of the land. For example, England's greatest jurist since Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale, declared that "Christianity is parcel of the laws of England." (I Ventr. 293, 3 K.B.. 607). This is the same Hale who personally ordered the execution of two women for witchcraft. In early 1676, it was Hale on the King's Bench, in the case of John Taylor, who rendered the most important decision during that dark part of English history which virtually made Christianity the law of the land, when blasphemy or heresy was called "nonconformity" and deemed seditious under the common law.
Taylor, a yeoman, had uttered what was deemed the most "horrendous blasphemy" to date: he called Christ a "whore master." He explained that he meant Christ was the master of the whore of Babylon - the Catholic Church. He said religion was a "cheat" and Christianity a "cloak", and that no man fears god but a hypocrite. He denied calling Christ a bastard, but he admitted to saying "God damn and confound all your gods." Now that is understandably insulting to believers although infidels might believe there is some truth to it. Taylor was believed to be off his rocker for saying this: "All the earth is mine, and I am a king's son. my father sent me hither, and made me a fisherman to take vipers, and I neither fear God, devil, nor man, and I am a younger brother to Christ, an angel of God." He was locked up in the mad house (Bedlam) but the keeper reported that Taylor was not mad and was a blasphemer, so he was tried and found guilty. The fine of 1,000 marks amounted to a life sentence since he had not the wherewithal or sponsors to pay it. One court reporter reported that Justice Hale said:
"And... such kind of wicked blasphemous words were not only an offence to God and religion, but a crime against the laws, State and Government, and therefore punishable in this Court. For to say, religion is a cheat, is to dissolve all those obligations whereby the civil societies are preserved, and that Christianity is parcel of the laws of England; and therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law."
Now, then, Jefferson tracked the alleged insertion of Christianity into the common law to Blackstone, who repeated in 1763, "Christianity is part of the laws of England," and to Lord Mansfield who said in the Evans case in 1767 that "the essential principles of revealed religion are part of the common law. Jefferson complains that the judges do all this gratuitous citing on their own authority. Furthermore, he notes that even some of the Anglo-Saxon priests had interpolated some of Exodus and Acts into Alfred's laws.
"What a conspiracy this, between Church and State! Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!" sang Jefferson to Cartwright.
In retrospect, after centuries of research into early English history, it appears that the controversial "incontrovertible" assumption that English common law is rooted in primitive Anglo-Saxon law is in fact controvertible. The great founding father of the United States may have been correct in his view that the common law was and is not and should never be Christian, but mistaken in his view that its essence is somehow Anglo-Saxon. No doubt law or at least the need for it is rooted in the potential for human freedom, a rebellious "free will" possessed by every individual.
Of course this question on the whole might seem moot and even absurd to members of the human race, citizens of the cosmos, and residents of the city of god who have transcended such trivial pursuits. Nevertheless, since the disputes continue to have some influence over our mundane lives on Earth, I shall return with a discussion of the Anglo-Saxon controversy, argue that Western law is for the most part Roman, thanks to the Roman Catholic Church - even the relatively isolated English common law had points of contact with the Roman law during nearly all periods, resulting in similarities of legal thought between England and the Continent.
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