It is difficult to stay sane knowing literal elementary facts about history when dealing with America’s modern know-nothing party. The right-wing is safely ensconced in their safe space for bigotry and world-historic ignorance, completely disconnected from the objective reality shared by those of us who don’t spend our entire lives getting radicalized on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. There is a talking point on the right that has been adopted by President Trump and many others that is so ahistorical and unfathomably stupid, I must yell at them for innovating new ways in knowing less than nothing.
Yesterday, Trump associated Thomas Jefferson with the religious vision of his evangelical Republican base, saying “We have to bring religion back. Thomas Jefferson himself once attended Sunday services held in the old house chamber on the very ground where I stand today.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also invoked Thomas Jefferson as a supposed religious figure just before he was sworn in last month, offering a “prayer for the nation” that supposedly was said every day by President Jefferson while in the White House.
Except he didn’t. This is a lie that is so widespread and pernicious on the religious right that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has a page on its website dedicated to debunking this bullshit. Jefferson very famously cut out all the parts of the New Testament with Jesus’s moral teachings and all of God’s miracles, and you can see Jefferson’s quite literally godless Bible on display at Washington’s Museum of the Bible. If Thomas Jefferson was around today and did this, Johnson and Trump would surely try to have him thrown in prison.
Jefferson beat the effort to insert “Jesus Christ” into the preamble to the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and he said that religious freedom was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.” Speaker Mike Johnson once said that “the separation of church and state was a misnomer,” a separation that Jefferson was so passionate about it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he would have challenged the Speaker to a duel if this lying liar said that to his face. The very overt effort to turn America into a Christian nationalist nation by Trump, Johnson and the religious right would have found one of its fiercest opponents in this man whose legacy they are flat-out misrepresenting in yet another demonstration of how these disrespectful know-nothings are the opposite of what they say they are.
Jefferson wasn’t necessarily an atheist, as he was influenced by religious writers and penned the phrase “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence, and he did attend church throughout his life–but he very clearly looked at it as an intellectual pursuit more than a religious one, and Jefferson scared the daylights out of the Mike Johnsons of the 1800s. Reverend Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College during Jefferson’s 1800 campaign and an influential federalist, said that if Jefferson won, “we may behold a strumpet personating a Goddess on the altars of Jehovah; … the Bible cast into a bonfire, … our children, either wheedled or terrified, uniting in chanting mockeries against God, … we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.”
Jefferson’s lack of traditional religious conviction was a massive issue in the election of 1800. Perhaps the biggest one. Any hungover 18-year-old in any freshman political science class anywhere in America could explain this very simple notion to the know-nothings, as the Gazette of the United States, one of the leading federalist newspapers at the time, accused Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party of having a “creed of atheism and revolution.” During the election of 1800 where Jefferson narrowly defeated John Adams, they wrote that voters could choose “GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT or impiously declare for JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD.”
If Thomas Jefferson was alive today, there is an infinitely likelier chance that the Republican Party would try to burn him at the stake as a witch than they would embrace his godless vision of the Bible. The rhetorical assaults from federalists against Jefferson during the election of 1800 could be repurposed verbatim for Republican Party attacks on any Democrat today. It is very funny watching these small, naive children tell themselves a fairy tale about a guy whose guts they would undoubtedly hate if the know-nothings knew anything.
The reason that Republicans have glommed on to Jefferson is that his vision of a democracy with a small federal government led by semi-sovereign farmers does align with their goal of immiserating every major city in blue state America so that their rural base can enable the billionaires who run the party to rule America unchecked. Republicans correctly see that Jefferson’s vision of the United States with a small bureaucracy is similar to theirs (other than the whole “other religions should exist” part), which is why they are embracing a man they would condemn as a godless heretic if Republicans knew anything about anything.
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