The Mind of Thomas Jefferson by Peter S. Onuf

Author:Peter S. Onuf [Onuf, Peter S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813926117
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2007-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Priestcraft

Jefferson’s animosity toward the clergy did not abate after the war was won and the Anglican Church was disestablished in Virginia. Because establishments survived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut—in the heartland of Federalism—and because clergymen elsewhere sought to regain power, “priestcraft” remained a clear and present danger to the republican cause. The threat of clerical influence was exacerbated because the Revolution had driven aristocratic impulses underground. The piety of Godly Christians provided a new, ostensibly republican, “foundation” for hierarchy and privilege: even when they failed to capture the state, the clergy could shape public opinion to promote their own interests and those of their aristocratic allies. They could rally the Christian majority against unpopular individuals or groups, narrowing the ambit of religious liberty and thus preparing the way for dangerous new alliances between church and state.

Jefferson was particularly alert to the dangers of reestablishment in Virginia. Not surprisingly, he linked sectarianism with partisan politics: the eclipse of Anglicanism led other groups to jockey for preferential position. Presbyterians thus provided critical support for future Federalist Patrick Henry’s nearly successful proposal for a multiple establishment in 1785.15 As party divisions deepened in the 1790s, the alliance between Presbyterianism and Federalism grew stronger, culminating in the vicious assault on Jefferson’s heresies in the 1800 presidential campaign. The subsequent Republican ascendancy scattered the forces of partisan and clerical reaction, at least for the time being: the little Federalism “we have,” Jefferson reported to Postmaster General Gideon Granger, a Connecticut ally, “is in the string of Presbyterian counties in the valley between the blue ridge & North Mountain where the clergy are as bitter as they are in Connecticut.”16 But the Presbyterian clergy would rise again, during Jefferson’s retirement, to block the appointment of the infamous deist Thomas Cooper at Jefferson’s new university. “The Presbyterian clergy are loudest; the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical and ambitious,” Jefferson fulminated to William Short. If they could, they would burn heretics at the stake, as “their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus” in Geneva: “they pant to re-establish, by law, that holy inquisition, which they can now only infuse into public opinion. We have most unwisely committed to the hierophants of our particular superstition, the direction of public opinion, that lord of the universe.”17

Jefferson assumed that clergymen were always “ambitious” for political power, that the influence they exercised over their followers’ spiritual lives was instrumental to these worldly purposes. Whatever their professions, priests as a class were harbingers of counterrevolution and enemies of republican government. The paradoxical dilemma was that disestablishment gave preachers extraordinary new opportunities to sway public opinion, and thus to subvert the foundations of republican government. If the republican experiment failed in America, it would not be because the people yearned for a return to monarchy and aristocracy, but because they were totally engrossed in their own private pursuits, tamely submitting to priestly power (presumably to save their souls) and failing to recognize and resist the new and insidious forms of hierarchy the priests promoted.

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