Listening to God is an American Tradition

Dallas Blog | Jeff Turner:

“Revolutionary War hero Rev. Ethan Allen recorded an instructive incident he had with President [Thomas] Jefferson. The President was walking one Sunday morning carrying a large red prayer book. Rev. Allen greeted him and inquired which way he was walking. The President answered, 'To church, sir.' Rev. Allen was surprised, 'You going to church, Mr. Jefferson. You do not believe a word of it.' The President offered this bit of wisdom: 'Sir, no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has ever been given to man and I, as chief Magistrate of this nation, am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning, Sir.'”

Ed Cognoski responds:

Instructive incident, indeed. There is much we can learn from this apocryphal story. The story appeared in Historical Sketch of Washington Parish, Washington City, 1794-1857, by Reverend Ethan Allen (1796-1897).

First, is the story true? According to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Jefferson's home, Monticello:

"This is a sticky one, since Jefferson was supposedly overheard saying this, rather than having written it. ... Reverend Allen would have been a child at the time this statement was supposedly uttered, and the anecdote actually came to the Reverend through the filter of several other people. We remain skeptical of its authenticity."

Chris Rodda, at Talk to Action, explains further:

"What we have is the account of two men who heard a story about an encounter between Jefferson and a stranger that occurred when they were children, recalling this story over fifty years later - hardly a primary source. Nevertheless, the words allegedly uttered by Jefferson have become a popular Jefferson quote, misrepresented in various ways on religious right websites, in their books, and even in amicus briefs filed in several court cases - most recently the McCreary County, Kentucky ten commandments case, heard by the Supreme Court in 2005, in which the quote was claimed to be found not in Rev. Allen's third-hand account of an unsubstantiated story, but in a letter from Jefferson to Allen."

That last part about misrepresenting where the story comes from is fitting. Because Jeff Turner, in his own Dallas Blog posting, claims the story was told by "Revolutionary War hero Rev. Ethan Allen." The Rev. Ethan Allen who wrote down this third-hand story wasn't even born until more than a decade after the Revolutionary War ended and didn't record the story until more than a half century after that. Obviously, Mr Turner is confusing one Ethan Allen with another. And it wasn't even the latter Ethan Allen who had that "instructive incident" with President Jefferson. It was an unidentified stranger who supposedly recounted it to two boys who, fifty years later, recounted it to the Rev. Allen. This incident is instructive alright. It teaches us how little to trust right wing religious advocates in search of a good quote.

Last, but not least, it takes audacity to choose Thomas Jefferson, spurious quotations or not, in support of the 56th annual national Day of Prayer. It's no coincidence that such an observance wasn't established until over a century after Jefferson himself was no longer alive to comment. Can you imagine a President Jefferson speaking instead of President Bush, perhaps repeating this famous Jefferson opinion about Christianity?

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter."