If he did have memberships at those churches it was for purely political reasons.
Look here and you can see his beliefs were anything but christian:
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/john_remsburg/six_historic_americans/chapter_2.html
Here are some quotes of his from that web page:
In a letter to his nephew and ward, Peter Carr, while at school, Jefferson offers the following advice, which though thoroughly sound, would be considered rather questionable advice for a Christian to give a schoolboy:
"Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear. ... Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you" (Jefferson's Works, Vol. ii., p. 217).
The God of the Old Testament -- the God which Christians worship -- Jefferson pronounces "a being of terrific character -- cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust" (Works Vol. iv., p. 325).
In speaking of the Jewish priests, he denominates them "a bloodthirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac, and Jacob, and the local God of Israel" (Ibid.).
In a letter to John Adams, dated April 8, 1816, referring to the God of the Jews, be says:
"Their God would be deemed a very indifferent man with us" (Ibid., p. 373).
To his nephew he writes as follows regarding the Bible:
"
Read the Bible as you would Livy or Tacitus. For example, in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still for several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of their statues, beasts, etc. But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine, therefore, candidly, what evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand, you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature" (Works, Vol. ii., p. 217).
In this same letter, he thus refers to Jesus Christ:
"Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions: First, of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended and reversed the laws of Nature at will, and ascended bodily into heaven; and second, of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted, according to the Roman law, which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, and the second by exile or death in furea."
His own opinion respecting the above is expressed in a letter to John Adams, written a short time previous to his death:
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" (Works, Vol. iv, p. 365).
In the gospel history of Jesus, Jefferson discovers what he terms "a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticism, and fabrications" (Works, Vol. iv, p. 325).
He continues:
"If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor" (Ibid..).
Jefferson, however, did not regard Jesus as an impostor. He says:
"Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, of so much absurdity, so much untruth and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross, restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some and the roguery of others of his disciples" (Ibid., 320).
Jefferson made a compilation of the more rational and humane teachings of Jesus, the "gold," as he termed it, which has since been published. Some superficial readers have supposed this to be an acknowledgment of Christ. Orthodox teachers, however, know. better and ignore the book.
For the man Jesus, Jefferson, like Rousseau, Paine, Ingersoll, and other Freethinkers, had nothing but admiration; for the Christ Jesus of theology, nothing but contempt.
In regard to Jesus believing himself inspired he interposes the plea of mild insanity. He says:
"This belief carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates that he was under the care and admonition of a guardian demon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations while perfectly sane on all other subjects" (Works, Vol. iv, p. 327).
Several of the preceding quotations are from a lengthy communication to William Short. In the same communication he characterizes the Four Evangelists as "groveling authors" with "feeble minds." To the early disciples of Jesus he pays the following compliment:
"Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Corypheus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus" (Ibid.).
The published writings of Jefferson, which, however, do not contain many of his most radical thoughts, would indicate that he regarded Jesus Christ as a historical character. In a contribution to Frazer's Magazine for March, 1865, Dr. Conway shows that he was sometimes disposed to entertain the mythical hypothesis. Mr. Conway says:
"Jefferson occupied his Sundays at Monticello in writing letters to Paine (they are unpublished, I believe, but I have seen them) in favor of the probabilities that Christ and his Twelve Apostles were only personifications of the sun and the twelve signs of the Zodiac."
This was the opinion held by Paine during the last years of his life.
For nearly sixteen hundred years the doctrine of the Trinity has been a leading tenet of the Christian faith. To doubt this dogma is the rankest heresy; for denying it thousands have lost their lives. In a letter to Col. Pickering, Jefferson speaks of "the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one and one is three."
In a letter to James Smith, Jefferson says:
"
The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs" (Works, Vol. iv., p. 360).
Again, in the same communication, he says:
"The Athanasian paradox that one is three and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck."
Not at an insignificant minority, not at an unimportant and unpopular sect, but at nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand Christians -- at virtually the entire Christian church -- was the above scathing criticism hurled. Even more bitter is the following from a letter to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse:
"I should as soon undertake to bring the crazy skulls of Bedlam to sound understanding, as inculcate reason into that of an Athanasian" (Works, Vol. iv., p. 353).
In a letter to John Adams, written August 22, 1813, Jefferson says:
"It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism that three are one and one is three, and yet, that the one is not three, and the three are not one.... But this constitutes the craft, the power, and profits of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies" (Ibid, p. 205).
Writing to John Adams a year later -- July 5, 1814 -- he again refers to this subject:
"The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticisms of Plato materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence" (Ibid, p. 242).
Alluding to the eucharist, he styles the orthodox clergy "cannibal priests" (Ibid, p. 205).
Jefferson's hatred of Calvinism was intense. He never ceased to denounce the "blasphemous absurdity of the five points of Calvin." Three years before his death he writes John Adams:
"His [Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God, he did. The being described in his five points is ... a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin" (Works, Vol. iv., p. 363).
"It is hard to say observes Bancroft, "which surpassed the other in boiling hatred of Calvinism, Jefferson or John Adams."
To Dr. Cooper, November 2, 1822, Jefferson writes:
"I had no idea, however, that in Pennsylvania, the cradle of toleration and freedom of religion, it [fanaticism] could have arisen to the height you describe. This must be owing to the growth of Presbyterianism. The blasphemy of the five points of Calvin, and the impossibility of defending them, render their advocates impatient of reasoning, irritable, and prone to denunciation" (Works, Vol. iv, p. 358).
In the same letter, after mentioning the fact that in Virginia where he resides, the Christians being divided into different sects, including the Presbyterian, are more tolerant, he continues:
"It is not so in the districts where Presbyterianism prevails undividedly. Their ambition and tyranny would tolerate no rival if they had power. Systematical in grasping at an ascendancy over all other sects, they aim, like the Jesuits, at engrossing the education of the country, are hostile to every institution they do not direct, and jealous at seeing others begin to attend at all to that object."
In the following significant passage we have Jefferson's opinion of the Christian religion as a whole:
"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies" (Letter to Dr. Woods).
Could a more emphatic declaration of disbelief in Christianity be framed than this?
In his "Notes on Virginia," the following caustic allusion to Christianity occurs:
"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites."
In his letter to Dr. Cooper, prayer meetings and revivals receive this cruel thrust from his pen:
"In our Richmond there is much fanaticism, but chiefly among the women. They have their night meetings and praying parties, where, attended by their priests, and sometimes by a henpecked husband, they pour forth the effusions of their love to Jesus in terms as amatory and carnal as their modesty would permit to a merely earthly lover" (Works, Vol. iv., p. 358).
A short time before his death, Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams, after commending the morals of Jesus, wrote as follows concerning his philosophical belief:
"It is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist."
In support of his Materialistic creed, he argues as follows:
"On the basis of sensation we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive thought to be an action of matter or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of motion called thinking shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins the planets in their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will, and by that will put matter into motion, then the Materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences, is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise. But I believe that I am supported in my creed of Materialism by the Lockes, the Tracys, and the Stewarts."
Noting the absence of the idea of immortality in the Bible and particularly in the books ascribed to Moses, he writes:
"Moses had either not believed in a future state of existence, or had not thought it essential to be explicitly taught to the people." (Works, Vol. iv., p. 326.)
Jefferson's wife preceded him to the grave by nearly forty-four years. If ever woman was adored by man this woman was adored by her husband. The blow stunned him; and for weeks he lay prostrated with grief. Referring to the sad event, Wm. O. Stoddard, the Presidential biographer, says:
"He was utterly absorbed in sorrow, and took no note of what was going on around him. His dream of life had been shattered, and it seemed as if life itself had lost its claim upon him, for no faith or hope of his reached onward and inward to any other." (Lives of the Presidents, Vol. ii, p. 270.)
In the following brave and truthful words we have Jefferson's estimate of priestcraft:
"In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty; he is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
Alluding to his beloved child, the University of Virginia, he writes:
"The serious enemies are the priests of the different religious sects to whose spells on the human mind its improvement is ominous" (Works, Vol. iv., p. 322).
"We have most unwisely committed to the hierophants of our particular superstition the direction of public opinion -- that lord of the universe. We have given them stated and privileged days to collect and catechise us, opportunities of delivering their oracles to the people in mass, and of molding their minds as wax in the hollow of their hands." (Ibid.).
His uncomplimentary allusions to the Christian clergy, to the Christian Sabbath, and to Christianity itself as "our particular superstition," are as unorthodox as anything to be found in Paine.
To John Adams he writes as following regarding disestablishment in New England:
"I join you, therefore, in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a Protestant Popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character." (Works, Vol. iv., p. 301).
Jefferson's hatred of priestcraft was life-long; for while the above was written but a few years prior to his death, the following from a letter to Mr. Whyte, was written nearly half a century before:
"If anybody thinks that kings, nobles and priests, are good conservators of the public happiness, send him here [Paris]. It is the best school in the universe to cure him of that folly. He will see here with his own eyes that these descriptions of men are an abandoned confederacy against the happiness of the mass of the people."
While he detested the entire clergy, regarding them as a worthless class, living like parasites upon the labors of others, his denunciation of the Presbyterian priesthood was particularly severe, as evinced by the following:
"The Presbyterian clergy are the loudest, the most intolerant of all sects; the most tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the law-giver, if such a word could now be obtained, to put their torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flame in which their oracle, Calvin, consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not subscribe to the proposition of Calvin, that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to the Calvinistic creed! They pant to re-establish by law that holy inquisition which they can now only infuse into public opinion" (Works, Vol. iv., p. 322).
He charges the early church in this country with uniform cruelty -- in Virginia as well as New England. Re says:
"If no capital execution [of Quakers) took place here it was not owing to the moderation of the church." (Notes on Virginia, p. 262.)
His noble fight against the church and in behalf of religious freedom for Virginia, in which he acknowledged the valiant support of Madison, entitles him to the everlasting gratitude of every lover of liberty. From his argument in favor of the disestablishment of religion, to be found in his "Notes on Virginia," (pp. 234-237,) the following extracts are taken:
"By our own act of Assembly of 1705, c. 30, if a person brought up in the Christian religion denies the being of God, or the Trinity, or asserts there are more gods than one, or denies the Christian religion to be true, or the Scriptures to be of divine authority, he is punishable on the first offense by incapacity to hold any office or employment, ecclesiastical, civil, or military; on the second, by disability to sue, to take any gift or legacy, to be guardian, executor, or administrator, and by three years' imprisonment without bail. A fathers right to the custody of his own children being founded in law on his right of guardianship, this being taken away, they may of course be severed from him, and put by the authority of the court, into more orthodox hands. This is a summary view of that religious slavery under which a people have been willing to remain, who have lavished their lives and fortunes for the establishment of civil freedom."
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man."
"Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these free inquiry must be indulged; how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves? But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No two, say I, have established the same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of establishments?"
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
There are still existing on the statute books of many states laws but little less intolerant than those which Jefferson and his friends removed from the statute books of Virginia. To those who Contend that these laws are not dangerous because no longer enforced, I commend these words of Jefferson:
"I doubt whether the people of this country would suffer an execution for heresy, or a three months' imprisonment for not comprehending the mysteries of the Trinity. But is the spirit of the people infallible -- a permanent reliance? Is it government? Is this the kind of protection we receive in return for the rights we give up? Besides, the spirit of the times may alter -- will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may become persecutor, and better men become his victims." (Notes on Virginia, p. 269.)
Jefferson's Presidential administration was probably the most purely secular this country has ever had. During his eight years' incumbency of the office not a single religious proclamation was issued. Referring to his action in this matter, he says:
"I know it will give great offense to the clergy, but the advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from them."
In answer to a communication from the Rev. Mr. Miller relative to this subject, he writes as follows:
"I consider the Government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from meddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. But it is only proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe a day of fasting and praying. That is, I should indirectly assume to the United States an authority over religious exercises, which the Constitution has directly precluded them from. ... Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents."
