Thomas Jefferson: Anti-papist

Thomas Jefferson’s well known anti-clericalism is generally treated as part of his advocacy for intellectual freedom, but it is also a sign of his participation in a much broader culture of anti-popery. Evan Haefeli will set Jefferson’s much lauded hope that America would “be to the world . . . the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves,” within a longstanding anti-popish tradition that contrasted liberty, knowledge, and science with stereotypes usually associated with Roman Catholicism. More than just anti-Catholic prejudice, the religious and political values derived from this tradition fused had been a fundamental part of how British Americans understood their liberty. It remained invaluable to Americans as they forged a separate national identity by offering a compellingly familiar model of what Americans knew they were notat a time when they were not sure who they really were.

About the Speaker

An historian of colonial North America and the Atlantic world at Texas A&M University, Evan Haefeli previously taught at Princeton University, where he received his PhD, as well as Tufts, Columbia University, and the London School of Economics, where he was a Visiting Fellow. His interests lie primarily in the religious and political origins of early American society, and the relationships between the many different peoples, English and other, that created it. He is the author of New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (2012), Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662 (2020) and editor of the volume entitled Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism (2020). He has also published works on Indigenous North American history.

At Monticello, Haefeli will be working on the role of anti-Catholic (or, more appropriately, anti-popish) thinking and sentiment in the shaping of early Virginia history. Anti-Catholicism, the animus against Roman Catholic religion and those, like Irish immigrants, who adhere to it, has been well-studied for the North. However, it has received almost no attention for the early South. However, if we expand the category to include anti-popery, the animus against the papacy and the political and intellectual tyranny it was believed to represent – something Protestants could be as guilty of as Roman Catholics – then we can find oodles of it, not least in Thomas Jefferson’s pronouncements on intellectual freedom (which he contrasts with “Monkish darkness"). In numerous ways, this popish anti-type helped Virginians negotiate the transition from being British to becoming American because it was fundamental to their understanding of what they stood against, even when they disagreed about what they stood for.