1797-1801
In contrast to his predecessor, John Adams was a self-professed "church-going animal" who made no secret of his religiosity. Raised in the Congregational Church, the established church in his home state of Massachusetts, John Adams later became a Unitarian. Unitarianism, a liberal strand of Christianity popular in New England, began in the liberal wing of the Congregational Church. Adams' childhood church subscribed to Unitarian principles 75 years before fully separating from the Congregational denomination.
Like other men educated during the period of the Enlightenment, Adams professed belief in a simpler, less mysterious form of Christianity. In a letter to his early political rival and late-in-life friend Thomas Jefferson, Adams condemned the superstition that he believed had corrupted Christianity, writing, "Twenty times in the course of my late readings, I have been on the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all worlds if there were no religion in it!' But in this exclamation I should have been as fanatical as [Adams' former pastor Lemuel] Bryant or [his former teacher Joseph] Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company -- I mean hell."
In a second letter to Jefferson, written following the death of his beloved wife, Abigail, Adams ponders the question of the afterlife: "I do not know how to prove physically, that we shall meet and know each other in a future state; nor does Revelation, as I can find, give us any positive assurance of such a felicity. My reasons for believing it, as I do most undoubtedly, are that I cannot conceive such a being could make such a species as the human, merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe in a future state, I should believe in no God. This Universe, this all would appear, with all of its swelling pomp, a boyish firework. And if there be a future state, why should the Almighty dissolve forever all the tender ties which unite us so delightfully in this world, and forbid us to see each other in the next?"
In contrast to his predecessor, John Adams was a self-professed "church-going animal" who made no secret of his religiosity. Raised in the Congregational Church, the established church in his home state of Massachusetts, John Adams later became a Unitarian. Unitarianism, a liberal strand of Christianity popular in New England, began in the liberal wing of the Congregational Church. Adams' childhood church subscribed to Unitarian principles 75 years before fully separating from the Congregational denomination.
Like other men educated during the period of the Enlightenment, Adams professed belief in a simpler, less mysterious form of Christianity. In a letter to his early political rival and late-in-life friend Thomas Jefferson, Adams condemned the superstition that he believed had corrupted Christianity, writing, "Twenty times in the course of my late readings, I have been on the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all worlds if there were no religion in it!' But in this exclamation I should have been as fanatical as [Adams' former pastor Lemuel] Bryant or [his former teacher Joseph] Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company -- I mean hell."
In a second letter to Jefferson, written following the death of his beloved wife, Abigail, Adams ponders the question of the afterlife: "I do not know how to prove physically, that we shall meet and know each other in a future state; nor does Revelation, as I can find, give us any positive assurance of such a felicity. My reasons for believing it, as I do most undoubtedly, are that I cannot conceive such a being could make such a species as the human, merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe in a future state, I should believe in no God. This Universe, this all would appear, with all of its swelling pomp, a boyish firework. And if there be a future state, why should the Almighty dissolve forever all the tender ties which unite us so delightfully in this world, and forbid us to see each other in the next?"
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