Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
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NON-PROTESTANT CITIZENSHIP AS LAW: JEFFERSON’S EARLIEST LEGISLATION ABOUT IMMIGRATION WITHOUT REGARD TO RELIGION, OCTOBER 1776
Though Jefferson might accept Locke’s thinking about the civil rights of Muslims and Jews, the question remains: Did he intend for them to become citizens of his state? The answer is clarified by one of his earliest pieces of legislation put forth on October 14, 1776: A Bill for the Naturalization of Foreign Protestants.192 Jefferson crossed out the original title from the first draft by his fellow legislator Edmund Pendleton and replaced it with A Bill for the Naturalization of Foreigners, thus implicitly opening the door to Catholics, as well as Muslims and Jews.193 He later removed “Foreigners” and made it “Persons.”194
By November, the bill was debated by the state Committee on Religion, on which Jefferson served. On the back of the bill, he wrote debate notes, most specifically supporting the admission of Jews, and listing some of the “advantages” of universal citizenship, including the economic and demographic considerations of “Consumption, Labor, Procreation.” He then defended Jewish character with the words “Honesty” and “Veracity.” He added a rhetorical question somewhat later: “Religion—is theirs less moral.” Jefferson also enumerated the dangers of religious discrimination, warning that “all who have not full rights are secret enem[ies].”195 This idea might have been inspired by Locke, who wrote in his first letter on toleration:
Let those Dissenters enjoy the same Privileges in Civils as his other Subjects, and he will quickly find that these Religious Meetings will no longer be dangerous. For if men enter into Seditious Conspiracies, ’tis not Religion that inspires them to it in their Meetings; but their Sufferings and Oppressions that make them willing to ease themselves. Just and moderate Governments are everywhere quiet, every where safe. But Oppression raises Ferments, and makes men struggle to cast off an uneasie and tyrannical Yoke.196
Jefferson then wrote that “this Obj.[ect] no nation allows them to realize,” referring to the reality that Jews were barred from full citizenship everywhere in the world. Finally, he concluded, “Jews advantageous.”197 Despite Jefferson’s best efforts, however, the bill never became law.198
Julian Boyd, the editor of Jefferson’s voluminous early papers, was first to emphasize that this rejection of Protestant exclusivity in immigration and naturalization in Virginia—and by extension the United States—opened the door to Catholics.199 Indeed, the bill mentioned no religious qualification in affirming that “all persons born in other countries,” after residing for an unspecified number of years in Virginia, “shall be considered as Free Citizens of the same and shall be entitled to the Rights, privileges and immunities civil and religious of this Commonwealth, as those born therein.”200 There was, however, a requirement that an “Oath of Fidelity” to the “Commonwealth” be taken by new residents. Jefferson would draft his own version of this pledge of allegiance to the state in 1779.
Jefferson probably knew no Jews personally during this period. There were only about two thousand in the country at the time, and a Baptist contemporary noted that there were no synagogues in Virginia.201 Indeed Jefferson’s support of Jewish rights was given without understanding very much about Judaism; what he did know, he found “defective in several respects.” He rejected the idea that the Old Testament was divinely revealed, believing that God’s existence must be proven only through rational means. Though embracing what he defined as Jewish “Deism,” he rejected the religion’s vision of God as “cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”202 Nor did he have much regard for the rabbinate or its politically coercive policies, which he described as “bloodthirsty,” “cruel,” and “remorseless.”203
Yet in spite of his reservations about the faith, Jefferson supported Jewish religious and political equality, and would later collaborate and correspond with a few American Jews. One, David S. Franks, a patriot of the Revolutionary War, would serve as his secretary from 1782 to 1783. They also worked together in France, when Jefferson served as minister and Franks as vice-consul in Marseille.204 In 1820, Jefferson wrote Joseph Marx, also a Jew, of his “regret … at seeing a sect, the parent and basis of all those of Christendom, singled out by all of them for persecution and oppression.” Six months before his death, the former president would aver that colleges forcing Jewish students to study Christianity were making “a cruel addition to the wrongs which that injured sect have suffered,” excluding them “from the instructions in science afforded to others in our public seminaries by imposing on them a course of theological reading which their consciences do not permit them to pursue.”205
This theological objection to a religion together with support for the rights of its adherents would be replicated in Jefferson’s stance on Islam and Muslims. As with Jews at this early point, there was no personal acquaintance with actual Muslims to inspire his advocacy for their religious and political equality. And although he attempted to study Islam, his learning was limited and often faulty, and sometimes entirely negative. Still, his low opinion of Islam as a religion and a political system had no bearing on his support for the rights of a future population of American Muslims. His principles of toleration and inclusion were universal respecting not only religion but immigration and citizenship, and so implicitly Muslims too had a place in the pluralist society he envisioned for Virginia and the United States.
THE LIMITS OF TOLERATION FOR LOCKE SURPASSED BY JEFFERSON
In his notes on Locke, Jefferson’s first reference to Muslims notes that Locke “denies toleration” to those whose opinions are “contrary to those moral rules necessary for the preservation of society,” including people whose “obedience is due to some foreign prince,” or those “who will not own & teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of religion, or who deny the existence of a god.”206 As mentioned, Locke had been concerned that some Muslims in England would owe fealty to the chief cleric in Istanbul and, by extension, to the Ottoman sultan. He had also refused toleration to atheists, citing their will to “undermine and destroy all Religion,” and considered their oaths untrustworthy, since they recognized no otherworldly consequences for lying.207 Jefferson harbored no such fears, and included atheists as well as Muslims in his vision for a new society.208 Likewise, he rejected Locke’s belief that Catholics should be considered a threat because of their allegiance to the pope. In a footnote, Jefferson affirmed that it was a civil offense for a citizen to acknowledge “a foreign prince,” but refused the idea that any religious devotion would necessarily corrupt civic loyalty.209 Indeed, unlike Locke, Jefferson never specifically attributed any conflict of loyalties to either Muslims or Catholics.210
In 1779, Jefferson drafted A Bill Prescribing the Oath of Fidelity and the Oaths of Certain Public Officers. The legislation required that anyone “migrating hither to become citizens of the commonwealth shall take the following oath of fidelity before some court of record.” The would-be citizen had to “relinquish and renounce the character of subject or citizen of any Prince, or other state, whatsoever, and abjure all allegiance, which may be claimed by such Prince, or other state.” The oath concluded, “and I do swear to be faithful and true to the said commonwealth of Virginia, so long as I continue a citizen thereof.”211 Most notable in this pledge, which was also to be taken by all would-be holders of government office, is its absence of a religious test. There is nothing to exclude non-Protestants from citizenship, and by implication no religious requirement for any who might seek office. Here then is the first American legislative precedent for the Constitution’s explicit proscription of a religious test in Article VI, section 3, which states that an individual should be bound only “by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” The traditional notion expressed by Locke that the validity of an oath is contingent on one’s faith thus fell away.
In his 1784 Notes on Virginia, we find Jefferson’s only reflections in print about his legislative struggle from 1776 through 1779 over religious freedom in the Commonwealth. Of
fering “a summary view of that religious slavery under which people have been willing to remain,” he concludes, “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God.” Despite this evidence of Jefferson’s own belief in a divine being, immediately thereafter comes his famous defense of the freedom to believe—or not believe—in anything:
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.212
In proposing that government’s only rightful purview was over behavior and explicitly not the metaphysical beliefs of its citizens, Jefferson unintentionally invited his political enemies to question his Christian convictions, an attack that would continue throughout his political life.213
Jefferson agreed with Locke that toleration should be denied those “who will not own & teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of religion,” but where Locke stipulated other exceptions, Jefferson demanded universal toleration beyond the ranks of the intolerant. “[It was a great thing to go so far (as he himself sais of the parl. [parliament] who framed the act of tolern.) [toleration],” he writes of Locke’s effort, “but where he stopped short we may go on.]”214 (The 1689 Toleration Act had granted freedom of worship and political office to certain non-Anglican Protestants, including Baptists and Congregationalists, but explicitly excluded Catholics and Unitarians, and implicitly Jews and Muslims.) The safeguard Jefferson proposed to make his more expansive vision work was the mandatory oath that would stipulate tolerance as a precondition for like treatment: “Perhaps the single thing which may be required of others before toleration to them would be an oath that they would allow toleration to others.”215
Jefferson’s insistence on this expansive vision was not built on idealism for its own sake but a practical awareness of the terrible legacy of European religious violence, which he determined his own state and country should escape. He had collected several books by Sebastian Castellio, who in the sixteenth century had proposed an end to religious persecution in the name of Christianity, advocating for Christian heretics as well as Muslims and Jews, even in his preface to his Latin New Testament,216 which Jefferson inscribed with his initials.217 Though he did not possess Castellio’s most important treatise, Concerning Heretics, written in response to the 1553 immolation of Michael Servetus, Jefferson did note Voltaire’s description of Calvin’s role in Servetus’s fiery death.218 Perhaps it inspired his later, private assessment of Calvin as “an atheist,” whose “religion was daemonism.” His final word on the Protestant reformer could apply equally to all intolerance in the name of faith: “If ever a man worshipped a false God, he did.”219
JEFFERSON’S CRITIQUE OF COERCION IN RELIGION: MOVING BEYOND LOCKE’S CHRISTIAN STATE AND TOWARD SUPPORT FOR “DIFFERENCE OF OPINION” IN RELIGION
As much as Jefferson despised Calvin, he venerated John Locke, placing him among “my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced,”220 the other two being Isaac Newton (d. 1727) and Francis Bacon (d. 1626).221 In Locke, Jefferson would find the language he needed to frame a legal abolition of his state’s control over religion. Borrowing from the philosopher, he writes:
[Co]mpulsion in religion is distinguished peculiarly from compulsion in every other thing. I may grow rich by art I am compelled to follow, I may recover health by medicines I am compelled to take agt. [against] my own judgmt. [judgment], but I cannot be saved by a worship I disbelieve & abhor.222
A year later, in 1777, Locke’s thought would be echoed by Jefferson in his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which decried not only religious coercion but its material support through taxation: “that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”223 The two words taken directly from Locke—“and abhors”—would be deleted from the legislation as finally passed, no doubt out of political necessity, but surely suggest Jefferson’s unvarnished opinion.
Jefferson further elaborated his own view later in his Notes on Virginia, justifying his universalism by setting American Protestantism in a global perspective. The practical futility of the alternative is clear, even if one allowed for evangelical aspirations:
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. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the nine hundred and ninety-nine wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free inquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.224
In fact, Jefferson was prepared to acknowledge no religion as uniquely “right,” but even if such existed and “ours [be] that one,” there was still no justification for converting others by “force.”225 On this point, he agrees broadly with Castellio, Locke, and Sale, but goes beyond all of them in envisioning a society in which the rights of non-Christians would not depend on the Christian sentiments of the majority.
Locke, by contrast, maintains an ultimately Christian frame of reference, even as he laments Christianity’s loss of prestige owing to an inclination toward “Factions, Tumults, and Civil Wars,” a history that fostered in some an impression that “the Christian Religion is the worst of all Religions, and ought neither to be embraced by any particular Person, nor tolerated in any Commonwealth.” Locke vehemently rejects this critique, arguing that Christianity is “the most modest and peaceable religion that ever was.”226 He professes a sincere belief in the “genius” of Christianity, even while admitting its presence in “turbulent and destructive” cases of religious intolerance. Indeed, Locke believed that his definition of toleration—rooted in Christian precepts—could itself prevent religious persecution, so long as the majority remained firmly Christian:
We must therefore seek another cause of those evils that are imputed to religion. And if we consider rightly, we shall find it to consist wholly in the subject that I am discussing: It is not the diversity of opinions, which cannot be avoided, but the refusal of toleration to people of diverse opinions, which could have been granted, that has produced most of the disputes and wars that have arisen in the Christian world on account of religion.227
Characteristically, Jefferson condenses this sentiment and questions the “genius” of Christianity that Locke so admired:
[Wh]y have Xns. [Christians] been distinguished above all people who have ever lived for persecutions? is it because it is the genius of their religion? No, it’s [sic] genius is the reverse. It is the refusing toleration to those of a different opn. [opinion] which has produced all the bustles & wars on account of religion.228
But not until 1784 would Jefferson explicitly enunciate a radical idea taken from Locke that had motivated his groundbreaking legislation on religious freedom: “Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.”229 It was a notion that would shock many of his contemporaries in the newly formed United States.
MAKING LOCKE’S IDEAS INTO LAW: JEFFERSON’S BILL FOR ESTABLISHING RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, 1777
Between 1776 and 1779, Jefferson drafted over one hundred pieces of legislation for the state of Virginia, but until his dying day he would remain most proud of number eighty-two: A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which would be called “the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom” on his tombstone.230 It was Jefferson’s will that it be so listed among what he deemed his three major achievements, the other two being his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia. Jefferson drew several points for the statute
directly from Locke, including the aforementioned argument against taxes supporting the “abhorred” state religion.231 From Locke’s first letter on toleration, Jefferson had noted that “the magistrate’s jurisdn. [jurisdiction] extends only to civil rights.”232 From Locke’s poetical assessment of the limitations of temporal authority—“the narrow way which leads to Heaven is not better known to the Magistrate than to other private Persons”233—Jefferson produced a more lawyerly paraphrase in his notes: “I cannot give up my guidance to the magistrate; because he knows no more the way to heaven than I do & is less concerned to direct me right than I am to go right.”234 But in drafting the bill, he evokes his own powerful voice:
[T]he impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.235
If government has no business meddling in matters of faith, it follows that every individual’s religious freedom should be protected by law. But such protection would require a perfect neutrality toward religion on the part of the state, and in 1777 such did not exist in the United States or in Europe. As Merrill D. Peterson explains:
Everywhere in the world, church and state were united, and dissenters from the one true faith—the established religion—while they might be tolerated, suffered numerous pains and penalties. Jefferson proposed a revolutionary change based on two principles: first, absolute freedom of religious conscience and opinion; and second, the separation of church and state. Each principle was dependent on the other, in his view. True religious freedom cannot exist as long as the state is a party to or adopts as much as an opinion about religion; and the state cannot be disentangled from religious quarrels and hatreds except under conditions of freedom, wherein no church or sect is dominant.236