A Christian President? The Politics of Anti-Deist Rhetoric in the Elections of 1796 and 1800

Concern over the personal religious beliefs of American presidential candidates is not a recent phenomenon.  In the first two contested presidential elections in U.S. history, clergymen and political leaders actively debated the potential impact Thomas Jefferson’s deist beliefs would have on American religious life.  During the elections of 1796 and 1800, Jefferson’s political opponents demonized him in sermons, pamphlets, and newspapers, insisting that a Jefferson presidency would result in the persecution of Christians and the prohibition of all religion.  This extreme anti-deist rhetoric was not limited to the North where the Federalist Party was strongest.  It also existed in the South, even in Jefferson’s home state of Virginia.  In this paper, I examine the language used by politicized clergymen in Election Day sermons (which functioned as meaningful political rituals), and the extent to which the hyperbolic language used by Jefferson’s opponents was motivated by genuine fears for “America’s soul.”  I conclude that these attacks on Jefferson’s religion were primarily a “straw man” set up to distract voters from more political concerns of party and regional interests.  Viewing Election Day sermons in their full political context and juxtaposed with voting records reveals the political motivations behind these sermons.  In Jefferson’s Virginia, the use of anti-deist rhetoric to oppose Jefferson was not limited to Federalists, as historians generally assume, but was also prominent among men in the state’s mountainous region resentful of tidewater elite’s stranglehold on wealth and power.  Even though Jefferson’s election in 1800 proved to have no ill-effects on American religious life, many held the notion that America required a Christian president, even if only nominally.  Furthermore, attacking political rivals based on their religious beliefs has become a common strategy in American presidential politics.  This paper explains the strategy’s genesis and elucidates the partisan origins of the Christian president myth.