Thomas Jefferson is the most enigmatic of the American Founding Fathers. The author of the Declaration of Independence, he is sometimes called the “Author of America.” As a son of the Enlightenment and the American founding, he is claimed by many sides.

And as Thomas Kidd reminds us in his splendid new biography, we still haven’t quite got Thomas Jefferson right, especially in his religious and philosophic views. What Kidd reveals is that Jefferson was, and remains, America’s chief political theologian articulating a theology of liberty. //

Jefferson the thinker, and “sect unto himself,” was a man who combined elements of “Christianity, Epicureanism, the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism and universal rights, and the republican values of virtue, limited government, and political liberty.” The problem with discerning Jefferson’s moral universe and commitments from our standpoint comes from the fact that we live in an age of dogmatic ideology.

We impose a dogmatic reading of Jefferson, whereas Jefferson lived in age of intellectual experimentation that usually left contradictory and incompatible philosophies contesting, without seeking to resolve them. Jefferson’s mishmash of views was only possible to weave together because of the intellectual excitement and relative openness the Enlightenment afforded.

Dogmatists of the secularist post-Enlightenment want an only secular and rationalist Jefferson and misleadingly (ignorantly or otherwise) present the third president in that light. Dogmatists of the new Christian right present a misleading portrait of what Kidd describes as a “brilliant but troubled person,” as they selectively cobble together some of Jefferson’s positive comments about the relationship of Christianity and public virtue with contemporary anti-statist politics. //

Jefferson’s moral universe, a universe undergirded by a God of justice, a moral order knowable through rational inquiry, and an individual soul seeking the felicity of tranquility in all relations, becomes the spirit and flesh that comes to govern — however imperfectly, and imperfect it was — Jefferson’s life.

Jefferson’s life seeking union with the moral universe that he conceived in his mind became, in soft cultural form, the moral universe of the United States and its people, even if we don’t always realize it. We too want a God of justice, a moral order to conform to by the dictates of reason, and a tranquil soul and community where liberty abounds within that harmony under God’s justice and moral rationalism. In sum, we are still Jefferson’s children. Jefferson’s political theology has become our own. //

Because Jefferson’s moral imagination and universe drew upon many worlds, Jefferson remains an enigma for narrow-minded dogmatists who want an equally narrow Jefferson contrary to who Jefferson actually was. But, as Kidd shows in this splendid biography, we benefit by entering Jefferson’s worlds on his terms, not ours. We do ourselves, and Jefferson, a gross abuse by trying to impose our ideological presuppositions on him rather than becoming better humans by learning from the life and intellect of the Sage of Monticello. And Jefferson’s moral universe was one in which God, liberty, and man were meant to be united