Does that matter?
Which, as I said, does not make him a deist. Certainly not in an unambiguous sense.
Nonsense. A public speech – especially an inaugural speech – does not have to contain an appeal to religion. It most certainly is not something that is necessarily expected.
Even if we grant that some sort of appeal is expected though, so what? We have to go where the evidence points. It’s much more reasonable to suppose that these words reflected his own thoughts rather than anything else. After all, these were his own words, and this was his own inauguration. If he simply wanted to placate the masses, he could have said something like “For those of you who believe in a personal God, some manner of prayer would be appreciated.” After all, his other writings show that Jefferson was not shy about attacking Christianity, so he wasn’t the type who was overly concerned about fitting in with the masses.
Or hell, I’ll go one farther… legal oaths and oaths of fealty in our democracy descend from and originate in Roman Paganism and are common to many different cultures and religions historically, by Jove!
The oath I’ll grant, but the affirmation mentioned in the Constitution came from a particular interpretation of Christian doctrine. And while I would be the first to mention that this is a comparatively minor point, it does point out that the original assertion about the absence of such doctrine in the Constitution was probably an overreach.
Jefferson had, in both the 1800 and 1804 elections, faced attacks by the Federalists accusing him of being an atheist and an infidel. Saying something like “For those of you who believe in a personal God, some manner of prayer would be appreciated.” would have just reinforced the popular opinion that he wasn’t a Christian, and regardless of what his actual religious beliefs were, a man running for and holding public office in 1804 had to be seen as a Christian, at least. Jefferson wasn’t shy about attacking Christianity in private letters to friends, but he was publicly silent on the matter, and as a matter of fact, was a contributor to his local churches.
I’m not saying Jefferson didn’t believe in the efficacy of prayer. I don’t know if he did or he didn’t. But I’m saying that even if he didn’t, he would have to, in his public statements, appear to.
Allowing affirmations seems to me less an example of doctorine in the document than the inclusion of what amounted to a legal term, that was excluded specifically to avoid making it religion-specific. You might as well say that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” is an example of doctorine in the document because it uses the term “religion”.
He wasn’t, and he made no attempt to hide the fact. In fact, people have already cited the outspoken manner in which he attacked Christianity. So no, I don’t buy the notion that he inserted this language so that people would think he was Christian. That was not like him at all.
“But he only did that in private!” you say. I’ll grant that point, but he still wrote an awful lot about his attacks on Christianity. Moreover, your argument requires a great deal of special pleading. It requires explaining away both his church contributions and his appeals for prayer at attempts to placate the masses. This may very well have been true, but that’s supposition, not evidenced fact.
If anything, those objections underscore my point that Jefferson was not unambiguously deistic. Some are quick to insist that he was a deist, plain and simple, when the reality is that there’s an abundance of evidence that points both ways.
What about them comes from “Gospel?”
It’s not an incoropration of doctrine, it’s a concession to free practice. I did not overreach. There isn’t a syllable of Christian doctrine in the US Constitution.
That didn’t seem to stop Ben Franklin, who did run for public office as the President of Pennsylvania. His rejection of Christian dogma is publicly recorded in his 1725 pamphlet, “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,” written when he was but a young man. He continued to espouse religious views, but he continued to publicly espouse unconventional beliefs, despite his political career. So Franklin at least did not believe that adherence to conventional Christianit was necessary in order to advance his career.
Now it’s possible that Thomas Jefferson did, but as I said, that’s supposition rather than evidence.
Might it not really come from an early example of the accommodation of minorities? I’d guess one member of the convention, at least, was a Quaker. Saying that this represents Christian doctrine in the Constitution is like saying an airline which allows the option of Kosher meals embodies Orthodox Judaism.
I make church contributions. I’m a stone atheist.
I can’t tell if that was a rhetorical question or not, so I’ll go ahead and answer … IIRC, he did in fact ask them to do that, as well as look for saber-tooths and other creatures known only from fossils. And that was at least partially due to his conviction that the Creator would not create a species and then allow it to perish entirely from the Earth.
There’s evidence that he later became convinced by the evidence that there were species that existed in the past but no longer, and adjusted his ideas about God to accommodate the facts. His ability to do that is, to my mind, one of his most admirable qualities.
And if I had declared that making church contributions made Jefferson a Christian or any manner of theist, your objection would have some merit. I did not, though. Quite the contrary, I’ve taken great pains to emphasize that the evidence is mixed and that he is not unambiguously a deist.
OK, I’d love a cite on this!
An affirmation, in law, is a form of solemnly promising to tell the truth in a legal proceeding or to perform some duty which avoids that person having to swear on some holy book or swear by some God. So, because the Constitution specifically proclaims that religious or non-religious promises to tell the truth or perform legal duties shall have equal weight (and nowhere specifies that “oaths” are necessarily in the form of Christian oaths, as opposed to Jewish oaths, Muslim oaths, or Rastafarian oaths)–from that you get a claim that the Constitution (or at least part of it) is founded on Christianity?
That seems like an exceedingly odd point of view.
Only if it can be shown that it was added specifically because it was religious doctrine, and not because it was a very sensible part of the (English, now American) Common Law.
It’s a distinction with a big difference.
CMC fnord!
On which? 
I can’t find anything more direct at the moment, but in the discussion here of the L&C expedition, it mentions their failure to find any live mammoths as one of the disappointments. Here you can find a reference to the general doubt that existed about extinctions among scientists of this period raised by theological concerns, in footnote 3 (although the page is about Jefferson’s interest in fossils, this item admittedly does not directly reference his own beliefs). And the only reference I’ve found to his changing opinions is a short, unsourced excerpt from an 1823 letter to John Adams; but certainly, the evidence was becoming conclusive well before Jefferson’s death that there were species that had existed in the past but of which no living specimens could be found.
No, it was not rhetorical, and Thos. learned things he didn’t expect from the Voyage of Discovery.
ETA too late: I was always told we lived across from the Clarks’ land, but it’s more likely we were across from where Meriwether Lewis grew up. Works for me.