LAUSR

From his early education to the end of his life Thomas Jefferson’s materialism played an essential role in his understanding of Christianity and his hopes for its eventual reform. Jefferson regarded refuting the spiritualist, immaterialist corruptions of Christianity as necessary for guaranteeing that religious freedom and free inquiry, which Jefferson considered inseparable, existed in practice and not just in theory. Central to Jefferson’s religious reformation was the question of the nature of human understanding and the issue of the material basis of thought, the study of which he at times referred to as metaphysics. Jefferson believed that free inquiry into the nature of human understanding would contribute to the reform of religion by separating the “diamonds” of primitive, or rational, Christianity from the “dunghill” of revealed religion, thus rendering religion a subordinate ally rather than an adversary of religious liberty and free inquiry.