* to Alexander von Humboldt, 1813. ME 14:21
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
* to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814. ME 14:119
“The clergy, by getting themselves ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.”
* to Jeremiah Moor, 1800.
“The advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from [the clergy].”
* to Levi Lincoln, 1802. ME 10:305
“[If] the nature of… government [were] a subordination of the civil to the ecclesiastical power, I [would] consider it as desperate for long years to come.
Their steady habits [will] exclude the advances of information, and they [will] seem exactly where they [have always been]. And there [the] clergy will always keep them if they can. [They] will follow the bark of liberty only by the help of a tow-rope.”
* to Pierrepont Edwards, July 1801. (*)
“This doctrine ['that the condition of man cannot be ameliorated, that what has been must ever be, and that to secure ourselves where we are we must tread with awful reverence in the footsteps of our fathers'] is the genuine fruit of the alliance between Church and State, the tenants of which finding themselves but too well in their present condition, oppose all advances which might unmask their usurpation’s and monopolies of honors, wealth and power, and fear every change as endangering the comforts they now hold.”
* Report for University of Virginia, 1818.
“The clergy…believe that any portion of power confided to me [as President] will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion.”
* to Benjamin Rush, 1800. ME 10:173
“It is . . . proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe, a day of fasting and prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the United States an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly precluded them from. It must be meant, too, that this recommendation is to carry some authority and to be sanctioned by some penalty on those who disregard it; not indeed of fine and imprisonment, but of some degree of proscription, perhaps in public opinion. And does the change in the nature of the penalty make the recommendation less a law of conduct for those to whom it is directed?… Civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.”
* to Samuel Miller, 1808. ME 11:428
“[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom… was finally passed,… a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ”, so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion”. The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”
* Autobiography, 1821. ME 1: 67
“No man [should] be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor [should he] be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor… otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief… All men [should] be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and… the same [should] in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
* Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. (*) Papers,
“Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
* Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779.Papers, 2:545
“The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.”
* Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. Papers, 2:546
(I include the above three references to counter the religious “litmus test” positions that are being used with increasing frequency by religious Republicans to determine a candidate’s worthiness or assail an incumbent.)
“A recollection of our former vassalage in religion and civil government will unite the zeal of every heart, and the energy of every hand, to preserve that independence in both which, under the favor of Heaven, a disinterested devotion to the public cause first achieved, and a disinterested sacrifice of private interests will now maintain.”
* to Baltimore Baptists, 1808. ME 16:318
“It is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere [in the propagation of religious teachings] when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.”
* Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. Papers, 2:546
“The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it’s benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.”
* to Moses Robinson, 1801. ME 10:237
“Whenever… preachers, instead of a lesson in religion, put [their congregation] off with a discourse on the Copernican system, on chemical affinities, on the construction of government, or the characters or conduct of those administering it, it is a breach of contract, depriving their audience of the kind of service for which they are salaried, and giving them, instead of it, what they did not want, or, if wanted, would rather seek from better sources in that particular art of science.”
* to P. H. Wendover, 1815. ME 14:281
“Ministers of the Gospel are excluded [from serving as Visitors of the county Elementary Schools] to avoid jealousy from the other sects, were the public education committed to the ministers of a particular one; and with more reason than in the case of their exclusion from the legislative and executive functions.”
* Note to Elementary School Act, 1817. ME 17:419
“I do not know that it is a duty to disturb by missionaries the religion and peace of other countries, who may think the themselves bound to extinguish by fire and fagot the heresies to which we give the name of conversions, and quote our own example for it. Were the Pope, or his holy allies, to send in mission to us some thousands of Jesuit priests to convert us to their orthodoxy, I suspect that we should deem and treat it as a national aggression on our peace and faith.”
* to Michael Megear, 1823. ME 15:434
“Millions of innocent men, women and children since the introduction of Christianity have been burned, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”
“Believing… that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
* Thomas Jefferson to Danbury Baptists, 1802. ME 16:281