The John Adams’ quote is taken from a letter he wrote to Thomas Jefferson on April 19, 1817, in which Adams illustrated the intolerance often manifested between Christians in their denominational disputes. Adams recounted a conversation between two ministers he had known: Seventy years ago. Lemuel Bryant was my parish priest, and Joseph Cleverly my Latin schoolmaster. Lemuel was a jocular humorous and liberal scholar and divine. Joseph a scholar and a gentleman.
The parson and the pedagogue lived much together, but were eternally disputing about government and religion. One day when the schoolmaster Joseph Cleverly had been more than commonly fanatical and declared “if he were a monarch, he would have but one religion in his dominions;” the parson Lemuel Bryant coolly replied, “Cleverly! You would be the best man in the world if you had no religion.” Lamenting these types of petty disputes, Adams declared to Jefferson:
Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!” But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell. In reality, Adams’ position on religion was exactly the opposite of what is put forth by many groups.
Adams believed that it would be “fanatical” to desire a world without religion, for such a world would be “hell.” Jefferson wrote back and declared that he agreed. Amazingly, while the assertion concerning Adams was completely inaccurate, the words attributed to Washington are totally false “The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion”.
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