The Family We Have Yet to Become

Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the unfinished work of reconciliation

Thomas Jefferson had a penknife and a Bible.

In his retirement at Monticello, he carefully cut passages from several editions of the New Testament, arranging those he wished to preserve into a volume of his own making. He retained much of Jesus’ moral teaching while leaving aside the miracles and supernatural claims that he found difficult to accept.

Two centuries later, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution have been engaged in another kind of reconstruction. Rather than removing passages from an inherited account, they have sought to recover a history that generations of Americans had disputed or obscured.

Their subject was Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello, and the children she bore.

A November 2026 Smithsonian Magazine article describes the culmination of nearly fifteen years of research into that relationship. The findings, according to the author, establish with great certainty that Jefferson fathered children who were born into slavery.

The irony is difficult to miss. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, whose words helped give a nation its understanding of liberty, fathered children who were not born free.

The article’s concluding reflection is both generous and unsettling. Jefferson’s contradictions, the author argues, do not invalidate the aspirations of the Declaration or erase his contributions to the nation’s founding. Rather, the discoveries remind us that Americans belong to one complicated family.

I find myself drawn to that conclusion. But I wonder whether it arrives a little too quickly.

The discovery of kinship does not accomplish reconciliation. It makes the demands of reconciliation harder to evade.

There is something almost biblical about the situation. The families through which the story of God’s covenant unfolds are hardly models of domestic harmony. Abraham’s household includes Hagar, an enslaved woman whose child becomes entangled in questions of inheritance and belonging. Jacob’s sons sell their brother Joseph into slavery. Again and again, the biblical narratives describe relationships in which kinship coexists with domination, betrayal, and violence.

The family bond does not prevent the injustice. Sometimes it makes the injustice more intimate.

Jefferson’s children were not strangers whose humanity he failed to recognize. They were his own children, born into a legal and social order in which their father exercised the power of an enslaver.

That is more than an inconsistency between Jefferson’s principles and his practices. It is a reminder that our most cherished ideals can coexist with arrangements that contradict them, sometimes within our own households.

The story of Joseph offers an instructive theological perspective.

Years after his brothers sold him into slavery, Joseph finds himself in a position to preserve their lives. Following their father’s death, the brothers fear that Joseph will finally take revenge. Instead, he assures them that he will provide for them and their children.

Joseph tells them that although they intended harm, God intended good (Genesis 50:20).

That passage has sometimes been read as though the eventual good justified the original betrayal. But Joseph does not declare his brothers innocent. He names their wrongdoing for what it was.

The evil remains evil, even when it does not have the final word.

This distinction is essential to any Christian account of providence. To believe that God can bring good out of evil is not to believe that evil was necessary for the good to occur. Nor does the eventual good somehow compensate for the suffering that preceded it.

We need not be grateful for slavery in order to be grateful for emancipation.

The aspirations of the Declaration of Independence have inspired generations of Americans to demand liberties that Jefferson himself did not extend to those he enslaved. The enduring power of those aspirations need not depend upon the innocence of their author.

Indeed, there is something deeply theological about the distinction between a promise and the imperfect people through whom it is articulated.

The promise may exceed the faithfulness of those entrusted with it.

But neither does the promise excuse their unfaithfulness.

The Christian understanding of reconciliation introduces a further complication.

Paul writes that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). Yet he also describes the Church as entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation. Reconciliation is both something proclaimed and something to be practiced.

We are not invited merely to recognize that we belong together. We are called to live differently because we belong together.

And belonging does not mean that our circumstances, responsibilities, or injuries are identical.

Some Americans inherited advantages sustained by institutions that deprived others of freedom and opportunity. Others inherited the continuing consequences of those deprivations. We share a history, but we have not experienced that history in the same way.

Nor does responsibility require that we be personally guilty of every injustice whose consequences we inherit. We may nevertheless be responsible for what we do with those consequences.

Christian theology has words for this work: confession, repentance, restitution, forgiveness, reconciliation.

They are not interchangeable.

Confession requires truthfulness. Repentance involves a change of direction. Restitution attempts to repair what can be repaired. Forgiveness may open possibilities that wrongdoing has endangered. Reconciliation concerns the transformation of relationships themselves.

And reconciliation cannot be demanded of those who have suffered injustice merely because others have discovered the comfort of a shared identity.

The Church should understand this better than it sometimes has. Christians defended slavery, invoked Scripture to justify it, and employed the language of household and family to preserve relationships of domination. Our own history ought to make us cautious about announcing reconciliation before attending to justice.

Perhaps the Smithsonian author’s image of the American family is most promising when understood not as a conclusion but as an invitation.

If we are family, what do we owe one another?

What histories have we preferred not to remember? Whose testimony have we been reluctant to hear? What would have to change for our common belonging to become something more than a historical fact?

The Christian proclamation of resurrection offers an image worth considering.

When the risen Christ appears to the disciples, the wounds of crucifixion have not disappeared. Resurrection has not made the violence of the cross righteous. Nor has it erased the history of what happened.

The wounds remain.

But they no longer tell the whole story.

Perhaps our national history must be approached with something of that same honesty. The aspiration to liberty is not invalidated by Jefferson’s contradictions. But neither can those contradictions be excised from the story of American freedom.

Jefferson could cut passages from his Bible. We cannot cut the troubling passages from our history without losing something of its truth.

And yet the recovery of that truth need not leave us imprisoned by the past.

The Christian hope is not that our histories can somehow be made innocent. They cannot. It is that the injuries of the past, however real and enduring, need not determine forever the possibilities of our future.

The discovery that we belong to one complicated American family is important.

But a common history is not yet a reconciled history.

We already possess the former.

The latter remains a vocation.

Perhaps grace is not the assurance that this work has already been completed, but the possibility that we may yet become the family we have discovered ourselves to be.

Reference

Smithsonian Magazine. “Did Thomas Jefferson Father Sally Hemings’ Children? After More Than a Decade of Research, the Answer Is Finally Firmly in Hand.” November 2026. https://apple.news/Aw0R0bGSgQw2XuQnEbfXymg