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What Children Did Not Learn in School: The Intellectual Quickening of Young Americans in the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

R. Laurence Moore
R. Laurence Moore
Affiliation:
is Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies at Cornell University
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Extract

Thomas Jefferson belonged to a generation of common-sense rationalists who hoped that religious tolerance in the United States would put an end to religious quarreling. Once freed to practice religion as they pleased, adult citizens, Jefferson thought, would recognize the moral advantages of nondogmatic creeds and treat religion as a philosophical inquiry based not on Scripture but on what was selfevidently true. Religion, a subject for mature minds who could weigh evidence, was not for infants. Young children, he said, were “at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries.” Children had to learn to think about religion gradually and to study it with a questioning mind only after they had attained adulthood.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 42 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1999

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