Mike – Thanks for your civil tone. However, you actually support the evidence I have presented. The documents you linked to were sea passports, as I pointed out in Getting Jefferson Right. Those documents had the words “In the year of our Lord Christ” preprinted – this was a form that was printed in advance and Washington and Jefferson simply signed their names as required by several treaties we signed with European nations. Washington and Jefferson were bound by treaty to sign that particular form. They did not chose that language. No act of Congress chose the language out of any deference to Christianity. The Dutch, French and other countries used this language in their diplomatic forms and when the treaties were signed, passport language already in use was inserted into the treaty. You sound like you could have an open mind, Mike, please read this article and it will give references and links to prove what I say here: /2011/04/20/david-barton-on-thomas-jefferson-in-the-year-of-our-lord-christ/ — Mike, if you ever find a document where Jefferson signed with his own hand, without requirement of law or treaty, in the year of our Lord Christ, then you will have a million dollar document — it would be that rare. I know of no such instance. I have read hundreds of Jefferson’s letters. Not one is signed with any religious closing. No “in Christ,” “in His service,” “prayerfully” etc. Such a letter may exist, but I haven’t seen it.
Regarding your second source, the author offers two views of the Establishment Clause. This is accurate; this has been and will be debated at length. However, we need to get the facts and their context clear. Yes, Jefferson accepted the requests of the Kaskaskia Indians to build them a church and pay for a priest to work in that church. The Kaskaskia were already Catholic. If they had not been Catholic, they would not have asked for a church and a priest in exchange for the state of Illinois. The government did not impose that on them as a condition of signing the treaty. That makes a huge difference. The second huge difference is that Indians at that time were not citizens of the United States and thus they nor Jefferson were precented by the Establishment Clause to negotiate issues of religion. The Kaskaskia tribe was a sovereign nation. These facts matter. Just because Jefferson traded a church and a priest’s salary to a sovereign nation for land does not mean much when it comes to how to interpret the First Amendment for citizens of the US. As an imperfect analogy, current the US govt negotiates with other nations over such matters. We give PEPFAR money for AIDS treatment to African nations who used religious groups to do the work of AIDS prevention, etc. These groups mix religion and treatment in ways that we would not allow under the First Amendment. Some here don’t like it, but I would argue that these funds are being used constitutionally. This analogy has flaws but I hope you can see that understanding what happened with the Kaskaskia really matters to how you apply the situation today.
PS – Read my posts, I am not an atheist, nor a leftist. Barton’s straw men are many but none of them apply to me. I am not attacking Christianity but, if anything, defending it.

So we look at the guys today and we look only what appears to be their non-religious or anti-religious side, and we think that is who they are…And You look at the rest of Jefferson and he would make most Christians today look embarrassingly shallow and yet Jefferson still had questions about the divinity of Christ

Note that even when Barton is seemingly being honest and making a concession, he is in fact fibbing.
Because Jefferson “had questions” about the divinity of Christ like I’ve “had questions” about my heterosexuality since my sophomore year of college 20 years ago — which is to say that every single time, I answer the question with a very resounding “No, I’m NOT heterosexual.” (Or, rather, “Ngumph, um MOB mebawo-fefuah!”) 😉
As a politician in a mostly Christian country, Jefferson may have preferred carefully ambiguous language in his public statements — but in his private correspondence, he bluntly rejected the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection.