Customer Reviews

The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson

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Sanford writes a well-documented but accessible account of Jefferson's religious ideas. Other books on Jefferson's religion extract his ideas from his letters, papers, and speeches, but Sanford goes deeper, tracing the roots of Jefferson's ideas and the influence Enlightenment philosophers played in shaping his thinking. Sanford's book reveals how Jefferson's ideas about liberty, rights, and democracy sprang from his profound belief in God. Sanford's book also shows the contradictions and complexities of Jefferson's beliefs: that he loved Jesus's teachings even while doubting his divinity, that Jefferson attacked immaterialism in religion while believing in the afterlife, and that he contributed to and regularly attended churches while blasting the corruptions of the church and clergy on the Christian faith. I highly recommend this book to understand Jefferson's religious ideas, but to get historical context for the development of this ideas, I recommend as a companion book. "Sworn on the Altar of God" by Edwin Gaustad. Together the two books give a complete potrait of Jefferson's religious life.

One of my favorite books that has helped challenge and shape my spiritual and philosophical outlooks on life. Sanford goes to great length explaining and detailing Thomas Jefferson's views on controversial topics such as the right and nature of Man, nature of God, separation of church and state, religious freedom, deism, Christianity, materialism, morality, and the afterlife. Sanford provides many citations, including Jefferson's personal letters, diaries, personal Jeffersonian Bible, and other primary sources. Sanford carefully places Jefferson's views in historical and cultural context, but yet there's no sugarcoating anything here. It's a great read and I recommend it for any open-minded and mature individual interested in learning about the beliefs that motivated Jefferson and our founding Fathers to create the US Constitituion and a free society.

This book is an excellent look at the deep roots of spirituality, not religion, of one of America's most important founders, Thomas Jefferson.

The book is both informative and very interesting. It's a great book to keep for future reference as well.

It points out that Jefferson, like many of America's key founders, was not a Christian, but was a Deist. That is, he believed in God based on reason and nature, not on the Bible, Torah or Koran or any other man made book.

This is a book that will stimulate your brain and cause you to expand your mind!

Robert L. Johnson

Sanford's book is amateurish at best. He makes basic historical errors- criticisms of Jefferson's religion began as early as 1792, not 1803 and the nature of Jefferson's religious convictions was far from ignored by scholars at the time he was writing (1980s). More alarming, however, is that Sanford fails to properly place Jefferson's ideas in their proper historical context. Jefferson was throughout his long life a consummate political being, and to discuss his ideas in a way that neither recognises their political or intellectual context is fatally myopic. The result is a clunky body of work that is at once detailed in its close reading of Jefferson's writing yet also painfully devoid of deep, probing, original thought. The style and format of the book, predictable introductions and conclusions for each chapter, is mechanistic, somewhat reflecting the flatness of Sanford's arguments. All this amounts to a book that reads in the a manner akin to a rushed dissertation. Useful as an introduction to Jefferson's religious views, but scholars will surely be disappointed.