Comment | The issue of Jefferson's Unitarianism may be a red herring here. Unitarians certainly can and do have worship services, and the word worship does basically mean a religious service, whether one for prayer, meditation, communion, or whatever. So 'religious worship' might be a tad redundant now, but maybe it wasn't so much so in his day, or maybe he just wanted to explicitly exclude other senses like, say, the worship of money or power.
The point seems to me to be that by avoiding the word 'church' he avoids limiting it to Christianity (much as he probably did by declining to build a chapel), and by avoiding the word 'services' he reduces the likelihood that people will automatically think of a traditional, structured liturgy, as opposed to other forms such as, for example, a Quaker meeting.
Or, who knows, a rational exchange of ideas, a public forum -- Jefferson might even have considered that a form of worship, in a sense. Certainly he seems to have taken pains not to build physical, architectural boundaries between 'religious' and other human activities. |
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