District President News

I have heard from a number of you about the proposal to change the name of the Thomas Jefferson District to either Atlantic Southeast, Towne-Jordan, Toward Justice, or some other name that a congregation may wish to propose.  In response, I have sent an excerpt from a sermon that I delivered to a few congregations in 2008 and 2009.  In at least one case, the information was new for one person and it changed that person’s opionion on the appropriateness of our curent name.

I have posted it below in hopes that those of you who will be delegates to the Annual Meeting in Beaufort, SC on April 30-May 1 may refer to it as one source to help you become informed as a delegate charged by your congregation to vote on the issue.

What’s In a Name:  Thomas Jefferson,  a noble defender of religious freedom or amoral owner of slaves, a conundrum for Unitarian Universalists? 

My interest this morning is the name of this geographic association of Unitarian Universalist congregations we call The Thomas Jefferson District.  

I want us to reflect on what the name Thomas Jefferson District of the UUA means to each of us.  Does it represent who we are and what we want to be as a progressive and inclusive religious movement that is on the front lines fighting oppression and working for justice?   And in the cold calculus of growth, does the name reflect our vision and values?  

Let me be clear:  Thomas Jefferson is a significant historical figure certainly worthy of Unitarian Universalists’ respect and appreciation.  Consider his bona fides.

“Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743 and died on July 4, 1826 and was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential (of the) Founding Fathers…Major events during his presidency include the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806).

“As a political philosopher, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment and knew many intellectual leaders in Britain and France…  (He)…supported the separation of church and state and was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786).  (I want to come back to that.)  He was the eponym of Jeffersonian democracy and the co-founder and leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, which dominated American politics for a quarter-century.  Jefferson served as the wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781), minister to France (1784-1789), first United States Secretary of State (1789–1793), second Vice President (1797–1801)”, (and the third President…the first of only two political trifecta.  Martin Van Buren was the other.)   

“A polymath, Jefferson achieved distinction as…a horticulturist, statesman, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, author, inventor, and founder of the University of Virginia.  When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”[1]

Jefferson is important to Unitarian Universalists for his lengthy correspondence about liberal theology with Dr. Benjamin Rush, a doctor from Philadelphia, well-respected scientist, and outspoken Universalist; as well as with Dr. Joseph Priestly, prominent scientist and Unitarian theologian.  Out of discussions and correspondence with these notables, Jefferson reflected on the errors of the Bible and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, what has come to be known as the Jefferson Bible.

But Thomas Jefferson’s most important contribution to religious thought and liberty is the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786).

The Statute is a statement about freedom of conscience and set out the principle of separation of church and state, so valued and appreciated by Unitarians and Universalists throughout our history.  Written by Thomas Jefferson and passed by the Virginia General Assembly on January 16, 1786, the Statute is the forerunner of the first amendment protections for religious freedom.  Divided into three paragraphs, the statute is a statement of Jefferson’s philosophy.

In Section 1, Jefferson argues that the concept of compulsory religion is wrong for reasons that include:

• “Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free”, God never coerced anyone to follow Him, and the imposition of a religion by government officials is impious.
• Government involvement in religious matters tends to end in the restraint of religion. (Think of a woman’s right to choose, stem-cell research, marriage equality, and the teaching creationism as science.)
• Civil rights do not depend on religious beliefs, and what a person thinks is no business of the government.

Section 2 (which remains part of Virginia law, in Article 1, Section 16 of the Constitution of Virginia) declares that:

…no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever …and that (should) in no way diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”  (Not a litmus test for service)

Jefferson, proud of this achievement in setting out this doctrine, had on inscribed on his tombstone that the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was one of the three things he was proudest, along with his founding of the University of Virginia, and the writing of the United States Declaration of Independence.  There is no mention on his burial monument of being President, Vice President, Secretary of State, or Governor of Virginia.

So Unitarian Universalists can be justifiably proud in claiming Jefferson as sympathetic to the denomination even if not one of their own.  And while there are many references to Jefferson as one of five Unitarian Presidents, Jefferson was an Episcopalian at his birth and at his death.  John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and William Howard Taft were our only Unitarian Presidents. 

Jefferson was never a member of the Unitarian denomination nor was he ever active in any Unitarian congregation.  But he wrote to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse (on June 26, 1822):  “I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.”  And to Dr. Thomas Cooper, he wrote (on November 2, 1822), “Unitarianism will, ere long, be the religion of the majority from north to south, I have no doubt.”  Jefferson’s predictions about the ascendancy of Unitarianism throughout the land was a bit optimistic it seems in hindsight.   

What’s in a name?  Certainly, Thomas Jefferson is a fitting name for a UU district if we were singularly focused on separation of church and state, or if we were only trying to attract Deists. 

So why am I raising the prospect of changing the name of this District from Thomas Jefferson to something else?

Despite his contributions to the core values and structures of our Republic:  the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, he was, as we know, a slave holder and probable father of slaves. 

Let’s look at his record on slavery:  Certainly Jefferson was conflicted over the issue of slavery and spoke out throughout his life against the institution of slavery and for the right of enslaved people to be free despite the fact that he owned slaves himself.  To Edward Bancroft he wrote (in 1788), “As far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to…persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.”   

Thus, he seems to have believed that merely freeing the slaves was not the best solution, and that the most important step to take was the elimination of the real source of this injustice, which was the institution of slavery itself. Thus he wrote to Edward Rutledge (in 1787), “I congratulate you, my dear friend, on the law of your State, for suspending the importation of slaves, and for the glory you have justly acquired by endeavoring to prevent it forever. This abomination must have an end. And there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.”  It is ironic that Rutledge, one of the representatives from South Carolina to the Continental Congress, is also credited with removing the anti-slavery clause from the Declaration of Independence.  

Jefferson’s solution to the slavery problem was to return blacks to their own African homeland or to some land where they could live as “a free and independent people,” and to provide them with implements and skills to establish their own nation. 

Jefferson’s idealism was rooted in the ideas of the men and women of the Enlightenment that influenced these words from the second paragraph of The Declaration of Independence:  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  But these words did not apply fully to women and certainly not at all to Native Americans nor enslaved Africans. 

I recently read Twilight at Monticello, the Final Years of Thomas Jefferson by Alan Pell Crawford.   Crawford was a Residential Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.  Drawing on the correspondence of Jefferson’s children, grandchildren, distant relatives, and Monticello neighbors, (Crawford) examines in…detail the struggles (Jefferson) faced in his retirement years—his chaotic and sometimes violent family life, his mounting personal debts, and his evolving yet contradictory views on race and slavery.  It was during these years—from his return to Monticello in 1809 after two terms as president until his death in 1826—that Jefferson’s idealism would be most severely…tested.[2]

I was fascinated by this biography of Jefferson.  I have long been a student of Jefferson and a great admirer of the great man.  As a son of the Commonwealth of Virginia, born in Roanoke, educated at Jefferson High School, residing just off Jefferson Avenue, attending movies at the Jefferson Theater, and married to a graduate of the University of Virginia, my own Thomas Jefferson bona fides are firmly established. 

I have read many biographies of Jefferson over the years.  My library holds the six-volume definitive biography of Thomas Jefferson by Dumas Malone who won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1975 for his efforts.  Malone’s volumes explore Jefferson’s life of the mind.  But I also have Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History which explores Jefferson’s life of the heart.

All of these works:  by Crawford, Malone, and Brodie cover a series of letters in 1814 between Jefferson and Edward Coles on the subject of slavery which is revealing. 

Coles was in his 20s and secretary to President James Madison.  He had inherited a plantation not far from Monticello, and it came with 23 slaves attached to it.  But Coles saw slavery as evil.  He was determined not to be a slaveholder and to do justice to the black people he now owned.  But he saw no realistic way to achieve his goals.  He could sell his slaves, but then they would become the property of others.  He could free them, but under Virginia law, they would be required to leave the state within a year of their emancipation and have to fend for themselves without money, property, or political rights.  So Coles wrote to the great man for advice on how best to proceed.

Jefferson wrote back to Coles that he should “reconcile (himself) to (his) country and its unfortunate condition” and leave it to future generations to solve the problem of slavery.  Jefferson believed that when slaves were ultimately emancipated, they could never live among white society without harm to whites.  He wrote: “The amalgamation (of blacks and whites) produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of human character, can innocently consent”.  Black people “brought up from their infancy…are by their habits rendered as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.  Left to their own devices, they lacked the capacity to care for their own offspring.”[3] 

Edward Coles did what Thomas Jefferson would not, could not, and did not do.  He ignored Jefferson’s advice and sold his plantation in Virginia, moved to what is now Illinois, emancipated his slaves, purchased land for them, and set them up as farmers and free men.  He would later become governor of the free state of Illinois.  That is the finest example I know of acknowledging white privilege and doing something noble and just about it.

“That Jefferson could not act when urged to do more to end an institution that he acknowledged to be a moral wrong indicates the extent to which he was lacking in moral imagination.  Jefferson believed for most of his life that the proper subject of ethics was the maximization of human happiness.  Happiness consists of tranquility of the soul, which is achieved not by heroic gesture but through prudent conduct. 

“Ethics to Jefferson was little more than a process by which the rational individual chooses the most commonsense course from among a finite set of options.  By reducing morality to a matter of rational selection and removing it from…influences of religious faith and practice, Jefferson ruled out the bold, the adventurous, (and) the imaginative, by which great challenges, such as ending slavery, might be accomplished…”

Crawford writes and I agree that, “this seems a surprisingly constricted view of the moral universe, especially from the author of the Declaration of Independence with is soaring sense of human possibility…He could always insist, as he did throughout his life, that the time to end slavery had not arrived.  But tragically, that was in no small part because Jefferson had resolutely chosen not to hasten its coming.”[4]

So this summary of Jefferson’s contributions and conflicts leads to me to ask again, what’s in a name?  Does the name Thomas Jefferson District of the UUA represent our vision and values today?  Unitarian Universalism claims that revelation is not sealed as Biblical literalists believe, but rather open to new truths, new insights, and new prophets.  Is the name off-putting to those who would otherwise be drawn to our liberal religious faith?  Does it send the appropriate message to people of color and their allies that this denomination is truly welcoming of all people?

Isn’t it time to let Thomas go as our religious namesake?  Letting Thomas go as our namesake, does not distract from his unrivaled importance as a civic figure.  I do not suggest we change all of the names of the schools, towns, cities, streets, and theaters…just the name of this district of religious liberals who wish to be more inclusive…just  as Jesus taught with the parable of the Good Samaritan.

What’s in a name?  A great deal…as it represents who we are institutionally and personally to those we wish to attract, whether we like that fact or not.  I have come to believe that religion isn’t about belief, it is about behavior.  We will attract more people to this great faith movement by how we live and what we stand for, rather than for our principles and sources, however much we cherish them.  We have an opportunity and a responsibility to be in solidarity with those who find our current name off putting. 

More importantly, we have a great opportunity in our association of congregations to begin the process of transforming our society.  The conversation about the actual name that we choose is secondary to the conversation about if and to what degree the current name inhibits our ability to reach out and attract more people to our movement.  People whose lives might be saved by joining us in our never-ending work to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person; and justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.  

It is important work that calls us.  Won’t you join me in this conversation?

[2] http://alanpellcrawford.com/twilight.htm

[3] Twilight at Monticello, Alan Pell Crawford, pp 100-104

[4] Ibid, pp 107, 108

The Board of Directors of the Thomas Jefferson District have been working on moving to a Policy-based Governance model since our Annual Meeting last May.  The draft of our propsoed policy manual is available at http://www.tjdistrict.org/tjdgovernance/policiesprocedures.html.  We welcome your comments here on the blogosphere or at one of the town hall meetings at the Anti-Racism Conference or scheduled cluster meetings.  We will also have additional Webinars so  you can  become familiar with what policy-based governance is and what it means for the covenant between congregations, district, and the association.    I hope to hear from many of you.

In faith,

Jim Key, President

Thomas Jefferson District