Revisiting Jefferson as President's Day nears

In just over a week it will be President's Day.

One of the most consequential chief executives from the standpoint of religion was our third -- Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson espoused a view now memorialized in a letter, which many Americans believe is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. It is not.

The fact that Jefferson's "separation of church and state" argument -- made in a letter to Connecticut Baptists in 1802 -- has such currency in the minds of Americans is a credit to how simple the idea is.

Jefferson feared a theocracy, a nation governed by religious interests, which he surmised would result in a "favored" faith to the exclusion of others.

In my New Testament class at Southeast, we discuss the 4th century conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity.

Until Constantine's declaration of faith in Jesus, followers of "The Way" (an early name for followers of Christ) faced intermittent persecution.

The emperor's decision ended Rome's war on Christ but introduced an insidious problem we live with even in our day.

We must drill down first into ancient history.

Constantine's conversion is a bit of misnomer. While he did profess faith in Christ, as an inheritor of Greco-Roman culture, the emperor was also a polytheist.

He didn't give up his other gods either, in other words.

The upshot was that Christianity was "in," and many Romans flocked to get baptized in the faith seemingly overnight -- conversions not based on conviction but on political interest.

People embraced Jesus in large numbers in order to cozy up to the power of the day.

Jefferson feared this sort of marriage of church and government in the fledgling United States so he wrote his landmark missive, the most notable words of which are:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and state."

The notion of a "wall of separation" is Jefferson's gloss on what the Framers wrote in the Amendment I of the Constitution.

Jefferson was a man who had unusual religious ideas, not all of which are examined in this column.

One lesser known notion of the president who occupied the White House from 1797-1801 is this -- late in his life, Jefferson began collecting the sayings of Jesus into a little book he wrote entitled "The Philosophy of Jesus."

Jefferson found the ethical teachings of Jesus fascinating -- as indeed we still do today.

Historians suggest the Virginia studied the words of the Master until he died on July 4, 1826, the same day as his predecessor, John Adams.

An example Jefferson noted was Jesus' take on charitable giving found in the Sermon on the Mount.

"When you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what the right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." (Matthew 6:1-4)