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Sorry, Rep. Wimmer, but Thomas Jefferson was, indeed, a deist.
So say historians.
And while the nation's third president was a self-proclaimed Christian, he may not have been the kind of Christian the Utah lawmaker thinks.
Jefferson rejected Christ's virgin birth, miracles, resurrection and ascension into heaven, putting his faith solely in Jesus' ethical and moral teachings.
But Carl Wimmer is hardly alone in his views of the man from Monticello. As the nation prepares to celebrate the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson penned, many believers see a much more devout Jefferson than historians do.
They point to the document's soaring moral rhetoric and to Jefferson's pronouncement that "I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." They note that he attended Episcopal services all his life, studied the New Testament as much as or more than any other president of that era and believed that a divine providence guided the birth of a free America.
Jefferson was "an incredible man who was raised up to be at the founding of our country," says Wimmer, R-Herriman, echoing the sentiments of many conservative Christians. "He was devoutly religious."
So what's the real story?
The lanky Virginian believed Christ's true sentiments had been corrupted by the Apostle Paul, the early church, the Protestant reformers and the clergy down through the centuries.
Jefferson was driven to uncover Christian essentials "the way a parent whose child was kidnapped is driven to find the culprit," Beliefnet founder Steven Waldman writes in Founding Faith. "Jefferson loved Jesus and was attempting to rescue him."
Now, it seems, Jefferson himself needs rescuing — from the partisan reading of history.
"Some see him as an atheist and some see him as an evangelical Christian," says historian David Holmes, a retired professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. "Neither is true."
Utah Rep. Joel Briscoe,a former Advanced Placement history teacher,also sees the complexity of the man and warned his high-school students not to judge the past by today's standards.
"[Jefferson] might not look like [an LDS] stake president, but he was not irreligious," says Briscoe, D-Salt Lake City. "He was a product of his times."
Reason over revelation
Jefferson believed Christianity was "ruined almost from the start," Waldman writes, by the four gospel writers — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — and especially by Paul.
"Of this band of dupes and imposters," the founder wrote, "Paul was … the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus."
The Council of Nicaea made it worse, Jefferson believed, by introducing the concept of the Trinity, a notion he called "hocus-pocus phantasm of a god, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads."
He felt similar animosity toward Protestants Martin Luther and John Calvin, the latter of whom Jefferson said "introduced into the Christian religion more new absurdities than its leader [Jesus] had purged it of old ones."
The American revolutionary respected reason above revelation, Holmes says, and empiricism over mystery. That made him a Christian deist, much like the Unitarians of the day.
Jefferson did believe in a God who should be worshipped and in a divine providence hovering over the founding of the new republic, the historian says. But, to Jefferson, Jesus was always a man, never divine.
He refused to assume the role of godfather, saying he could never affirm Anglican (Church of England, or, after the war, Episcopalian) doctrines.
Toward the end of his life, Jefferson moved toward "a more traditional interpretation of Christianity," Holmes writes in his book, Faiths of the Founding Fathers. "Unlike some deists, he came to believe in prayer and in a life after death. But [those] were standard Unitarian beliefs of the time. Holding them did not move him into the category of orthodoxy."
When he couldn't remove the Anglican presence and traditions from his alma mater, William and Mary, Jefferson launched the University of Virginia and refused to let clergy teach there.
And he endeavored to excise — physically — parts of the Bible he considered unreliable and superstitious.
The Jefferson Bible
In 1804, the frustrated president took scissors, paper and glue and cut up his Bible, omitting the virgin birth, angels and miracles and then pasting the remaining sections together to create a more "authentic" account of, as he called it, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."
He told his friend John Adams that parts of the New Testament "proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds."
It is as easy to separate those parts, Jefferson wrote, "as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."
Jefferson went through the exercise a second time, in the 1820s, but never circulated his manuscript. It wasn't published until decades after his death.
Today, there is much debate and confusion about it — and the president's religious views.
The so-called Jefferson Bible was actually a primer for American Indians that Jefferson had prepared, says Wimmer, who is writing a book, The Refounding of America, citing a notation on the work's frontispiece. In this, the Utah legislator is drawing on an idea promoted by evangelical Christian writer David Barton.
Waldman, the Beliefnet author, sees no evidence of that thesis in Jefferson's works.
Jefferson went through the "extracting process" twice, Waldman writes in an email. The American Indian idea came up only in regard to the original. He then did what we now have as the Jefferson Bible.
Also, in letter after letter, Jefferson explains "why he wanted to rescue Christianity from the church and clerics, who he thought had ruined it."
In other words, Waldman says, the Jefferson Bible "was a clear and accurate reflection of Jefferson's actual theology, not something he watered down to appeal to the Indians."
Wimmer remains unpersuaded. He rejects any claim that Jefferson didn't believe in Jesus' divinity or that he was a deist. Anyone who makes such claims, the Utah lawmaker says, "has done little or no research in the source documents."
Wimmer adds that Jefferson dated his presidential documents with the phrase, "in the year of our Lord Christ."
Those are not the words of a deist, Wimmer says. "You don't sign your name that way unless you believe in the divinity of Christ."
So while the author of the Declaration of Independence saw certain truths as "self-evident," his personal faith continues to be anything but.
Jefferson and religious liberty
Thomas Jefferson was one of the earliest and most passionate advocates of religious freedom among the Founding Fathers.
He grew up in Virginia, which had the biggest Anglican establishment in the colonies. Like friend James Madison, he witnessed clergy from minority faiths — such as Baptists, Quakers and Presbyterians — suffer at the hands of what was a government-sponsored church.
In his notes on the state of Virginia, Jefferson wrote that governments should be concerned with behavior, not belief.
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no god," he wrote in his chapter on religion. "It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
That sentiment was enshrined in Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom, which Jefferson penned and felt was so important that he wanted it listed it on his tombstone, along with his ties to the Declaration of Independence and the University of Virginia.
These were the primary accomplishments, Jefferson wrote, for which he wished "most to be remembered."