Deism was popular in Europe and America around the time of the Declaration of Independence and many of America’s wealthy and better educated citizens subscribed to Deism in varying degrees. The God of Deism was a remote god who must have created the world (based on the logical rule of causality), but had then gone off on a celestial fishing trip and not returned. Temporal intervention in the affairs of mankind wasn’t on His agenda. As a person, Jefferson was a Christian Deist – he believed in the one God, that God was active in the world opposing evil and rewarding virtue, that Jesus was a great moral teacher – but he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation (Jesus was the Son of God) as having no basis in reason.

Toward your comments, Jefferson believed that the new republic required (in the strongest terms) a moral public (the citizenry) and that the basis for this morality was derived from God and God’s authority. Given Jefferson’s life experiences and his knowledge of history, it’s not surprising that Jefferson subscribed to this belief in a morality derived exclusively from God – almost everyone else at that time did as well.

When contemporary authors conjure up the ghosts of past leaders and thinkers and pretend to have a conversation with them, the problem is they assume such thinkers passed away only last week rather than centuries ago. Jefferson in a realistic literary context wouldn’t know that disco is dead, wouldn’t worry about the Dow Jones index and would have never heard of global warming. But, if we place Jefferson in his historical context subject to the lessons drawn from his knowledge of history up until that time, we must have an entirely different conversation.

For example, Jefferson was born into a New World that had escaped the problems of old Europe – as an incipient American nation and as a community we never went through a Reformation, bloody religious wars were unknown in America and the dual tyranny of the state and religion fell lightly on Americans of that time. But Jefferson wasn’t ignorant of Europe’s history and he drew lessons from it. He believed that one and only one state sanctioned religion inevitably led to tyranny and was proud of his efforts to award various Protestant denominations equal standing within Virginia’s educational institutions.

His famous “wall between Church and State” mentioned in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Church members (and derived from an earlier comment by Roger Williams) was never meant as a prescription for banishing God from government. What he wanted to encourage was a pluralistic religious community where different theologies and conceptions of God could co-exist peacefully and without interference from the state as sovereign temporal ruler. And, more importantly, he didn’t believe religious freedom was simply a matter of indulgent tolerance by the state, he believed that religion was vitally necessary to a healthy republic.

Deism and its apparent demise should show us that Jefferson was right to base our nation on a pluralistic, civil religion because Deism couldn’t sustain a philosophical foothold in the hearts of men. One problem was its appeal to pure reason without consideration of human emotions. For example, it didn’t seem reasonable or obvious to everyone that a God with the power to create the universe and mankind lacked the power to intervene in the temporal affairs of mankind or influence events within the world.

Also, such a God, remote and uncaring, had no emotional appeal to men and women looking at morality as the basis for virtue in this life and the promise of reward in an eternal life that would follow. Deism was short-lived and died out by the early 1800’s in both America and Europe. The children of Deists rejected their parent’s teachings and reverted to traditional religious beliefs.

However, today Deism has been resurrected as a sort of halfway house between Judeo-Christian beliefs and atheism. Due to the tension between science and religion, some Americans subscribe to a modern form of Deism as a means to believe in both God and “reason” as embodied in contemporary scientific thought. God is the author of the Big Bang and ordained evolution as the methodology of biological development – and God does ultimately exist. But, God remains aloof from our world relying on the physical laws He created to run the show. Some even believe that God is evolving along with the universe and mankind, a less than omniscient and omnipotent god – or God the semi-competent as one commentator put it.

Needless to say neither orthodox religious believers or atheists have much sympathy for God in this guise. But, getting back to Jefferson and your point, can we base morality on pure reason without reference to God? I doubt that Jefferson would agree or even understand the question. For some modern intellectuals, the answer would be yes, we can. Human reason alone can determine correct principles for structuring a society and deriving all rules of sovereign authority the state would employ. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would agree and was instrumental in the gestation of this concept within modern law and legal theory.

But, as you have pointed out in your past writings, whose reasoning should determine the basis for this scientific morality? And would this reasoning conflict with the mankind’s inherent moral tendencies? The yearnings of the human heart discarded deism once and, so far, it has done the same for process theology (God the semi-competent) and scientific atheism; the majority of Americans remain religious believers despite the best efforts of post-modern intellectuals.

And, Jefferson was himself a leading intellectual of his time, but his public speeches and public writings often conflicted with his private thoughts on religion. I think Jefferson realized that there must be room for intellectual doubts about theology and support for freedom of personal conscience in our nation. But, in both his first and second inaugural addresses, he acknowledged the need for God in community and political life to support morality and he asked Americans to unite with him in supplication to “that Being in whose hands we are.”

The question is how would he see us now – a pluralistic nation that is having difficulty sustaining the original vision of one nation under God? And, would he sustain his belief that a pluralistic civil religion is necessary to maintain our political freedoms or would he believe that our modern pluralism is leading us into corruption, factionalism and a moral relativism which will ultimately destroy those freedoms?

I think you are looking for a solution to a problem which does not exist.

The Founders created a majoritarian system, not one designed to confer power on minorities.

You mean, like, “True Conservative”? No, I don’t believe we’ve ever had this discussion before.

Go shill for the Ron Paul juggernaut elsewhere.

Here’s a great video link:

http://www.ronpaulnation.com/tv.html

Equality is not equality of outcome (like one would find in a theoretical Communist society), but a recognition that no one human being is inherently superior to another human being. What divides us is our abilities, and our willingness to use those abilities to succeed in life; not a class-system that assigns intrinsically higher worth to one class of individuals over another, or any ancestry-based or race-based designations that give one group higher status than another group.

Combine this with an understanding of Rights under the US Constitution, where the United States system of Constitutional government was founded on a Declaration of Independence that invoked centuries of Judeo-Christian thought to justify the creation of a new country. It did not set up a theocracy. But it did recognize that laws made by men APART from a Higher Authority, as opposed to laws that are A PART OF a Higher Authority’s PURPOSE FOR MAN, are fundamentally immoral. And immoral laws, ultimately, cannot stand. Not even ones rationalized as conforming to this Higher purpose.

This is why the seeds of slavery’s own destruction were sewn at the very creation of the U.S. Constitution when southern landowners acknowledged the limited humanity of their slaves through the Three-Fifths compromise. The same human being who had no Constitutional rights was counted as three-fifths of a person for taxation and representation purposes. It took almost a hundred years for those seeds to blossom, but that intervening time was used to clarify the moral bankruptcy of slavery and prepare the country for eventual change. If the Civil War had not been fought, enough new states would have joined the Union to legally abolish this abominable practice. With each passing year the rationalizations for allowing slavery were slowly being pealed away to expose the moral ground below it, until nothing but naked, venal self-interest remained to justify the practice of owning another human being.

The question isn’t whether the laws and Constitution of the United States directly acknowledge the existence of God, but whether the laws man makes conform to the God-given moral justification for having a government in the first place. This justification for rebellion against England both defines “equality” and “Rights” under what was ultimately to become the Constitution of the United States. So-called majority rights and actions must conform to this justification for government, the same as minority rights and actions must conform to it. It isn’t whether the majority — or minority for that matter — appear to be acting tyrannically. It’s whether their actions are part of the higher purpose for man as stated in the Declaration of Independence, which derives its source authority from God, not human consensus or the work of any individual political philosophers.