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Purity Tests, Friendship and Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson [1]

I see the opposite of Jefferson’s wise approach [2] commonly being celebrated on FB.

A few months ago, I was booted from a decades-long friendship by a woman who insisted, out of the blue, that I needed to acknowledge the unparalleled wisdom of the Roman Catholic Church. Ideological purity tests everywhere I look these days. This is exactly what Terror Management Theory [3] predicts when death is in the air, when mortality is “salient.”

Supp 2025.09.16

“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”
Thomas Jefferson [In a letter to William Hamilton on April 22, 1800.]

Screenshot 2025 09 16 at 12.38.47 PM [4]

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