The chapter on Thomas Jefferson in my book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction is titled “Thomas Jefferson: Follower of Jesus.” In that chapter I discuss Jefferson’s attempt to model his life after the teachings of Jesus. Jefferson had no use for the way Christianity turned Jesus’s teachings into creedal statements and other forms of dogma, but he did think that Jesus was the greatest moral teacher that ever lived, even if he didn’t rise from the dead. This explains why he took a razor to the four Gospels, removing anything that wreaked of supernaturalism.
I’ve met some Jeffersonian-style followers of Jesus in my life, but this weekend I met a whole group of them. They even asked me to deliver a few lectures! I was in Anderson, South Carolina on Saturday and Sunday for a speaking engagement sponsored by the Anderson Forum for Progressive Theology (AFPT). While the APFT does not identity itself as a “Jeffersonian” organization, and I am not sure it’s fair to label it as such, its members sounded a lot like the former president and author of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, in a friendly conversation over lunch, one member seemed pleased when I suggested that he sounded like a “deist.” Many of the AFPT identify as progressive Christians and attend one of a handful of progressive churches in the general Anderson vicinity. Rev. Steven Morgan, the president of the group, is a retired United Methodist pastor.
The membership of the AFPT is small (there aren’t too many Jeffersonian-style Christians in the South Carolina Upstate region), but very active. They are kind, hospitable, exceedingly friendly, and intellectually engaged. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. I learned new things and I hope they did too. I also think I made a few new friends. I even met a Springsteen fan.
Some of the members of AFPT are local activists. I’ve learned over the years that activists tend to be purists. They don’t do well with complexity. This is especially the case when they dabble in the past. These kinds of groups are often guilty of cherry-picking from the past to promote present-day agendas (conservatives are not the only ones who do this!) But those who came to my lectures clearly wanted to learn and grow in understanding. Some of them laughed and nodded in agreement when I said–half jokingly– that they needed to “get out of their progressive bubbles.”
We found a lot of common ground over the weekend. I hope the AFPT members in attendance will go forward with a more nuanced understanding of religion and the American founding. And I hope I was able to help them think more deeply about how to use the past in the present. It would have been easy to preach to the choir this weekend (and don’t get me wrong, there was some of that–especially during my lecture “The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump”). But as a historian, preaching to the choir is only part of my calling. Sometimes historians need to make the smooth places rough and offer the kind of informed complexity that furthers democratic conversation.