Bush, Jefferson, and the Theocratization of America

Nor was that the end of his caution against America becoming embroiled in foreign adventures. Among many quotes counseling against such entanglements, Jefferson wrote to George Logan that

The usage of Jefferson to justify the very thing Jefferson hoped to keep our country from engaging in seems particularly blockheaded, and one wonders whether such a ploy is the result of the ignorance of Bush's speech writers, or of their confidence in the ignorance of his listeners.

And yet it only gets worse...

After many years of war, the United States won its independence. The principles that Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration became the guiding principles of the new nation. And at every generation, Americans have rededicated themselves to the belief that all men are created equal, with the God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (Applause.)

Thomas Jefferson understood that these rights do not belong to Americans alone. They belong to all mankind. And he looked to the day when all people could secure them.

Certainly, Jefferson cited "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and laid the concept of unalienable rights at the feet of "their Creator", but it would be a stretch to contend that Jefferson attributed those rights to God as much as to their presence as natural rights. "The Creator" entered into a Jeffersonian formulation of rights only inasmuch as he believed in a deistic, impersonal God who created nature's laws. Men's rights, as Jefferson wrote on more than one occasion, were natural rights

Perhaps most distressing is the clear elision of Jefferson's own opinions about religion from the quote which is then used to bolster the notion that rights originate from God:

On the 50th anniversary of America's independence, Thomas Jefferson passed away. But before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, "May it be to the world, what I believe it will be -- to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all -- the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."

That quote from Jefferson was lifted (in part) from Jefferson's letter to Roger Weightman, as America approached the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But the part that is curiously missing sets it in contrast to the aim which George Bush gives it. In whole, Jefferson stated

Jefferson had no taste for the pronouncements of religion or for religious hierarchies; and it seems a bit of pernicious legerdemain to enlist Jefferson's words in an underhanded campaign to bolster the notion of American government's underpinnings in Christianity by purposefully erasing portions of them in order to reverse the meaning their author intended.

The chains Jefferson hoped men would be aroused to burst were the chains which religion had fettered them with: the idea that rulers ruled by Divine Right, and that rights originated from God and were best interpreted by God's emissaries.

While we contemplate the origins of this country, and on America's birthday enjoy the freedoms our Founders vouchsafed us, let us not forget the whole of who our Founders were and what they said; not merely the political uses to which their words can, with careful editing, be put.