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Bush cuts antireligious phrase from Jefferson quote in 4th of July speech

This is amusing, and here is a link to more on the topic.

First, here is the original quote by Thomas Jefferson in his letter to Roger C. Weightman (JPG image):

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which Monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

Jefferson was not a fan of organized religion, and it shows here. George W. Bush is a big fan of using the federal government to promote his religion. Jefferson's ideology on religion is not compatible with Bush's, but Bush decides to use this quote anyway. For the result, here is Bush quoting Jefferson:

... but before leaving this world, he explained that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were universal. In one of the final letters of his life, he wrote, "May it be to the world, what I believe it will be -- to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all -- the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government."

Notice something missing here? Yes, it is the whole part about Jefferson blaming religion for the oppressive governments of the time and calling on people to cast off their faith, or as he put it, "monkish ignorance and superstition". Leaving that part out changes the meaning of the quotation.

Googling around, I see the same omission made on a PBS website for Capital Concerts, a General Services Administration "MarkeTips" newsletter from 2004 [PDF], a 2006 Baltimore Sun editorial, and California Assemblyman Greg Aghazarian. The Department of Housing and Urban Development carried the abbreviated quote in 2004, and here is South Carolina Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom leaving out the ellipsis entirely in a 2007 pro-religion press release.

[Side note: I have also found a few web pages carrying an unsourced essay about the 4th of July that merges this 2002 Queens Gazette article, which includes the Bowdlerized version of the Jefferson quote, with this article from the blog "A Slower Place" which does not mention the quote at all. I won't link to an example of the combined essay because I don't trust the type of sites carrying it. They all look like fake sites with the same fake content hastily tossed up there to trap search engine users.]

Chances are that Bush and his speechwriting team were working off an already gutted quote from a pre-existing article about the Declaration of Independence. The quote could have first been chopped any time since Jefferson wrote it in 1826, which incidentally was in the middle of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. There have been lots of religious groups since Jefferson's time that would have been offended by his antireligious views, and there have been several instances of organized censorship and fakery of the Founding Fathers' quotations in order to paint them as pro-religion or to forget when they were not.

Guessing about the source: Since everything I've found on the web is post-2000, this points toward an origin in the 1990s or 1980s, probably from the fundamentalist right. It is possible that the censored quote was already well known to some right-wingers who came to join the Bush Administration, possibly through an influential July 4 sermon, and they came to repeat it in the July editions of government agency newsletters. The chopped quote might also have been published in a book that became popular in fundamentalist circles, in which case the original cut might date earlier. I suspect a religious-right source for the chopped quote because all context has been removed and the one line is cited by several people, with no one having gone back to the source to see what it means. That is definitely their modus operandi.

In closing, here is another fun quote from the letter to Weightman:

The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.