On November 4, 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Reverend Jared Sparks. He stated:
“I hold the precepts of Jesus, as delivered by himself, to be the most pure, benevolent, and sublime which have ever been preached to man. I adhere to the principles of the first age; and consider all subsequent innovations as corruptions of his religion, having no foundation in what came from him. The metaphisical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, & of Calvin, are to my understanding, mere relapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible. The religion of Jesus is founded in the Unity of God, and this principle chiefly, gave it triumph over the rabble of heathen gods then acknoleged. Thinking men of all nations rallied readily to the doctrine of one only god, and embraced it with the pure morals which Jesus inculcated. If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, truth will prevail over fanaticism, and the genuine doctrines of Jesus, so long perverted by His pseudo-priests, will again be restored to their original purity. This reformation will advance with the other improvements of the human mind, but too late for me to witness it.”
(“Thomas Jefferson to Jared Sparks, 4 November 1820,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-16-02-0321. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 16, 1 June 1820 to 28 February 1821, ed. J. Jefferson Looney et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 394.])
One other quotation from Thomas Jefferson on apostasy and restoration is recorded in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Waterhouse July 19, 1822:
“Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger Athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.”
(“Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Waterhouse, 19 July 1822,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-18-02-0496. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 18, 1 December 1821 to 15 September 1822, ed. J. Jefferson Looney et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021, pp. 563–564.])
In a letter to Ezra Stiles, Thomas Jefferson expressed the belief that he was alone in his feelings on Christ’s church:
“You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.”
(“Thomas Jefferson to Ezra Stiles Ely, 25 June 1819,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-14-02-0428. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 14, 1 February to 31 August 1819, ed. J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 470–471.])
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