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Stoutly upholding liberty of conscience and separation of church and state did not and does not equate with lack of religious faith. James Madison apparently considered the ministry as a young man and decided against it partly because of his poor speaking voice.
15 But he stayed on an extra half-year at the College of New Jersey in Princeton to study moral philosophy and Hebrew with his great mentor, President John Witherspoon, a Scottish Presbyterian and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. When time came to select theology books for the library at the University of Virginia that he and Jefferson founded in their old age and served as the first two rectors, it was to Madison that Jefferson turned because of his expertise in the field.
16 In his retirement years at Montpellier after his presidency, James Madison and his wife, Dolly, regularly drove the four miles on Sundays to attend services "at the quaint old brick church in the center of Orange Court House."
17
Such may not have been Jefferson's practice in his later years, but he had regularly attended Bruton Church in Williamsburg as a student at William and Mary and afterward.18 Moreover, as president of the United States residing in the new capital of Washington he began a practice, mentioned earlier, one that endured until well after the Civil War, of holding church services regularly in the Capitol. This was done at first in the Senate chamber and, after construction was completed, in the House of Representatives' chamber. The president frequently was present, often with the cabinet as well as members of Congress and the general public in attendance. On occasion, worship services were conducted simultaneously in both chambers with overflow crowds present. To be invited to preach there was, of course, a great honor for the various ministers, such as Jefferson's fiery Baptist admirer the Elder John Leland (1802) of "mammoth Cheese" fame who (along with George Eve) had been a formidable force in James Madison's Virginia House constituency when the Bill of Rights was at issue in 1789.19
In his old age Jefferson looked forward to eternal life and to reunion with those other stalwarts of the American cause already departed. He believed he was a Christian in the only sense that Jesus would have recognized, and he sought to return to the primitive purity and simplicity of the Gospel. Basic was his unswerving commitment to the existence of God, the creator and sustainer of the world and ultimate ground of being, and he lavishly praised Jesus for making God worthy of human worship. Thus, the unity of God, the moral teachings of Jesus as the most sublime in the history of the world, and the expectation of personal immortality formed his Christianity.20
