Edwin S. Gaustad - Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson

Edited by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and Allen C. Guelzo

The LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY is a series of original biographies on important religious figures throughout American and British history.

The authors are well-known historians, each a recognized authority in the period of religious history in which his or her subject lived and worked. Grounded in solid research of both published and archival sources, these volumes link the lives of their subjects-not always thought of as "religious" persons - to the broader cultural contexts and religious issues that surrounded them. Each volume includes a bibliographical essay and an index to serve the needs of students, teachers, and researchers.

Marked by careful scholarship yet free of footnotes and academic jargon, the books in this series are well-written narratives meant to be read and enjoyed as well as studied.

Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America

Lyle W. Dorsett

Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America

Edwin S. Gaustad

The Divine Dramatist:

George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism

Harry S. Stout

William Ewart Gladstone:

Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain

David Bebbington

Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody's Sister

Edith Blumhofer

Sworn on the Altar of God:

A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson

Edwin S. Gaustad

Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism

Charles Hambrick-Stowe

Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart

Marvin R. O'Connell

Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief

Roger Lundin

Edwin S. Gaustad

For Susan who likewise "cannot live without books"

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Unlike those of all but a small handful of his fellow Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson's name has not faded into the mists of time. When the producers of a recent film, Jefferson in Paris, chose to play fast and loose with his character and what he had done in his years as the new American ambassador to France, discomfited pundits joined angry scholars in vigorous protest. A phrase from one of Jefferson's letters concerning a "wall of separation" between church and state has been for the past fifty years at the forefront of constitutional discussion on sensitive questions about the proper place of religion in public life. (Nor is it irrelevant to note that reader demand prompts new editions of his many and always interesting letters.) Jefferson's words in many significant documents - especially the Declaration of Independence - remain a focus for diligent historical research into the moral as well as political world in which the United States came into existence. His presence on the nickel, as a revered icon for Democratic politicians at Jefferson-Jackson dinners, and more recently as an inspiration for Republican congressional leaders who invoke his sentiments on the danger of big government - all this and more testifies to Jefferson's continuing power in American memory.

The great achievement of Edwin S. Gaustad's biographical study of Jefferson is its demonstration of how religious concerns were central to many of Jefferson's main preoccupations. That achievement requires, by the nature of the case, great nuance, for Jefferson is a type of person who has become considerably more difficult to assess in the twentieth century than he was in his own day. He was sincerely, even profoundly, religious, and yet he also repudiated many of the doctrines, attitudes, and convictions of traditional Christianity. The Jefferson who read the New Testament (often in Greek or Latin) almost every day for the last fifty years of his life also prepared two different editions of the Gospels for his own use so that he could read about Jesus with the miraculous bits cut away. The Jefferson who cooperated with his friend James Madison in passing a landmark bill separating church and state in Virginia (thereby helping almost immediately Baptists, Presbyterians, and several feisty Protestant sects) also blithely predicted that most of the country would soon become Unitarian. The Jefferson who contributed money on at least one occasion to a Bible society also railed against the tyranny of New England-based religious voluntary societies. The Jefferson who intensely disliked the moral economy of slavery himself kept slaves. The Jefferson who distrusted any large-scale concentration of power nevertheless expressed nearly unbounded confidence in the moral potential of the monolithic educational system he proposed for Virginia. This is, in other words, a complicated person whose religious opinions and practices need every bit of the cautious wisdom that Gaustad devotes to his subject in the pages that follow.

Good historical studies do not necessarily have to speak directly to the present. But because this religious biography pays such close attention to a person whose ideals remain so important in American life, it becomes something of a challeng ing tract for the times as well as a luminous historical study. Readers who ponder Gaustad's picture of Jefferson's friendships with Madison, John Adams, and Benjamin Rush will be tempted to ask why today's partisan political differences exhibit so much less intelligence and so much more meanspiritedness. Those who take seriously Gaustad's contention that modern conservative evangelicals have as much to learn from Jefferson as to scorn will be in a better position to discriminate between essentials and nonessentials in contemporary culture wars. Those who note the resemblance between Jefferson's views and those of Jonathan Edwards on the subject of God's providential care for the world may find themselves more willing to seek wisdom in political opponents as well as in political friends. And those who, with the editors of this series, think that Jefferson went too far in critiquing the Puritan heritage or that he overestimated the virtues of French political life while underestimating the residual value of British politics should nonetheless find some attractive surprises in Gaustad's portrait. The book, in short, embodies many of its subject's virtues and, from any point on the political spectrum - from the start of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth - that is a substantial recommendation indeed.