Reading Thomas Jefferson’s Bible
W an atheist? Plenty of people thought so. Jefferson never identified himself as such, of course. But it was his microscopes, his French friends, his whole swinging, freethinking Enlightenment vibe … “I hope he is not an unbeliever, as he has been represented,” worried the Nonconformist English clergyman (and chemist) Joseph Priestley, after Jefferson came to hear him speak in Philadelphia in 1797. Others could smell the godlessness like brimstone; if Jefferson became president, thundered a Federalist opponent in 1798, “the Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat.” Two years later, as news of Jefferson’s election victory spread, there
