Member-only story
The Jefferson Unitarian Church Votes to Drop Thomas Jefferson’s Name from Title
The Church Considers the “Conflicting Realities” of Jefferson
Technically, the Jefferson Initarian Church in Golden, Colorado, isn’t named after Thomas Jefferson. It was named after Jefferson County, where it is geographically located. Jefferson County was named after the nation’s third president. Notably, the church was founded in 1959, before its affiliation with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) in 1962.
Thomas Jefferson’s relationship to formalized religion was strained. He believed in many of Jesus' teachings, yet thought his early followers had corrupted some of them, allowing him to pick and choose what to obey. He created his own version of the Bible, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," which excluded the miracles performed by Jesus and focused on his moral message.
There has been controversy among Unitarian Universalists for some time about Thomas Jefferson. Some tout him as a famous church member, like a school might claim its famous alums. Yet Jefferson wasn’t truly a member of a Unitarian church, though he sometimes attended Joseph Priestley’s Unitarian church in Philadelphia. In 1993, at the UUA’s General Assembly, a group led by African-American UU ministers expressed outrage at plans to…
