Just because Jefferson did not believe in the Deity of Jesus Christ doesn't mean he believed in a different Creator, or a "very different" Creator. It is the same Creator, rejecting the second and third person of the Godhead. Jefferson believed in the God of Israel, his error was his perception on the person of Jesus Christ. That Jesus Christ is God, is a distinction of God, just as Jefferson not believing The Holy Spirit is not God. The distortion is Ed Brayton portraying Jefferson as worshiping a different God altogether. Unitarians believe they worship the God of Israel.

When I said that Jefferson did not believe in the same creator that Barton did, I of course meant that Jefferson did not believe in the Biblical conception of God. That this is the case can be easily established by looking at Jefferson's own words, particularly his letter to William Short on August 4, 1820. In it, he describes not only his view of Jesus but his view on the Old Testament conception of God that, he argued, Jesus came to reform and amend:

There are, I acknowledge, passages not free from objection, which we may, with probability, ascribe to Jesus himself; but claiming indulgence from the circumstances under which he acted. His object was the reformation of some articles in the religion of the Jews, as taught by Moses. That sect had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust. Jesus, taking for his type the best qualities of the human head and heart, wisdom, justice, goodness, and adding to them power, ascribed all of these, but in infinite perfection, to the Supreme Being, and formed him really worthy of their adoration. Moses had either not believed in a future state of existence, or had not thought it essential to be explicitly taught to his people. Jesus inculcated that doctrine with emphasis and precision. Moses had bound the Jews to many idle ceremonies, mummeries and observances, of no effect towards producing the social utilities which constitute the essence of virtue; Jesus exposed their futility and insignificance. The one instilled into his people the most anti-social spirit towards other nations; the other preached philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence. The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation, is ever dangerous. Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel.

There are several important things about this passage. Notice how he explicitly contrasts the "Supreme Being", the one that he believed in, from the God presented by Moses as "the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel." He clearly rejects the entire Old Testament conception of God, arguing that this god is unjust, cruel, remorseless and obsessed with "idle ceremonies, mummeries and observances." It could not be more clear that he rejected the Biblical conception of God entirely.

Goswick then, for some strange reason, quotes Jefferson's famous statement about Jesus and his system of ethics:

"To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other."
Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803

The emphasis is his. Surely Goswick is not going to claim that Jefferson was a Christian in any serious sense. As can clearly be seen in the very quote he provides, Jefferson believed that Jesus was merely a man, not a divine being of any kind. He goes on to say that he thinks that the ethical system of Jesus was the purest and most sublime he had ever encountered, and it is on that basis that he says that he is "sincerely attached to his doctrines." He also explicitly rejected the virgin birth, the resurrection, the atonement and any claim that Jesus performed miracles. Surely Mr. Goswick would not call anyone a Christian with such beliefs.

Incidentally, Jefferson said something quite similar about Epicurus, and also did it in a letter to William Short a year before the one we've already quoted:

As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epictetus, indeed, has given us what was good of the Stoics; all beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace. Their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice.

He was a Christian in precisely the same sense in which he was an Epicurean. Goswick then goes on to quote the very passage that was so thoroughly debunked just a day before the post he is replying to:

No nation has ever existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I, as Chief Magistrate of this nation, am bound to give it the sanction of my example.
Thomas Jefferson in 1803-Hutson (see n. 8) at p. 96, quoting from a handwritten history in possession of the Library of Congress, "Washington Parish, Washington City," by Rev. Ethan Allen.

This is the recounting of the story that Chris Rodda so completely debunks and that I spelled out in great detail in this post. It is a third hand version of a story told 50 years after the fact of a conversation recounted by two people who were under 10 years old at the time it allegedly occurred. More importantly, it stands in stark contrast to virtually everything Jefferson wrote on the subject of Christianity as a religion (as opposed to what he believed to be authentic Christianity, the words of Jesus himself without all the claims of divinity, miracle or spiritual dithering).

Jefferson, was deceived about Christianity and its essentials. But his unitarian God, like that of John Adams, was Yahweh, the God of Israel

That is obviously false given the clear and explicit rejection of that God in the passages I quote above. Remember, we're talking about different conceptions of God, of different attributions of God's nature. Jefferson believed firmly in a personal, benevolent, interventionist God, but it is quite obvious that he rejected the Biblical conception of God. Look at how he contrasts how different his (and Adams') conception of God is with the God worshiped by the great Protestant reformer John Calvin (this is from an 1823 letter to John Adams):

I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Dæmonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in his 5. points is not the God whom you and I acknolege and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a dæmon 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. Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god. Now one sixth of mankind only are supposed to be Christians: the other five sixths then, who do not believe in the Jewish and Christian revelation, are without a knolege of the existance of a god!

I would also note that this pretty clearly destroys any pretense, lately popularized by Hitchens, that Jefferson was secretly an atheist. But that is another argument with another group on the other side who engages in the same kind of historical distortions that Goswick and Barton do. For the purposes of the present discussion, what is important is that Jefferson makes clear that he rejects the orthodox Christian conception of God and the claims of "Jewish and Christian revelation."

Goswick finally writes:

Where is the evidence Jefferson was a universalist while forming the nation? Where is this evidence at any point in his life?

Again, if one just reads Jefferson's voluminous private letters on the subject of religion rather than only reading isolated quotes from David Barton pamphlets, this evidence is easily found. For instance, Jefferson wrote to William Camby in 1813:

An eloquent preacher of your society, Richard Motte, in a discourse of much emotion and pathos, is said to have exclaimed aloud to his congregation, that he did not believe there was a Quaker, Presbyterian, Methodist or Baptist in heaven, having paused to give his hearers time to stare and to wonder. He added, that in heaven, God knew of no distinctions, but considered all good men as his children, and as brethren of the same family. I believe, with the Quaker preacher, that he who steadily observes those moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven, as to the dogmas in which they all differ. That on entering there, all these are left behind us, and the Aristides and Catos, the Penns and Tillotsons, Presbyterians and Baptists, will find themselves united in all principles which are in concert with the reason of the supreme mind.

Note that he goes further than the Quaker preacher, listing even Aristides and Cato, both pagans, as being in heaven along with all who accept "those moral precepts in which all religions concur." He develops this idea further in an 1809 letter to James Fishback:

Every religion consists of moral precepts, and of dogmas. In the first they all agree. All forbid us to murder, steal, plunder, bear false witness &ca. and these are the articles necessary for the preservation of order, justice, and happiness in society. In their particular dogmas all differ; no two professing the same. These respect vestments, ceremonies, physical opinions, and metaphysical speculations, totally unconnected with morality, and unimportant to the legitimate objects of society. Yet these are the questions on which have hung the bitter schisms of Nazarenes, Socinians, Arians, Athanasians in former times, and now of Trinitarians, Unitarians, Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers &c. Among the Mahometans we are told that thousands fell victims to the dispute whether the first or second toe of Mahomet was longest; and what blood, how many human lives have the words 'this do in remembrance of me' cost the Christian world! We all agree in the obligation of the moral precepts of Jesus; but we schismatize and lose ourselves in subtleties about his nature, his conception maculate or immaculate, whether he was a god or not a god, whether his votaries are to be initiated by simple aspersion, by immersion, or without water; whether his priests must be robed in white, in black, or not robed at all; whether we are to use our own reason, or the reason of others, in the opinions we form, or as to the evidence we are to believe. It is on questions of this, and still less importance, that such oceans of human blood have been spilt, and whole regions of the earth have been desolated by wars and persecutions, in which human ingenuity has been exhausted in inventing new tortures for their brethren. It is time then to become sensible how insoluble these questions are by minds like ours, how unimportant, and how mischievous; and to consign them to the sleep of death, never to be awakened from it. ... We see good men in all religions, and as many in one as another. It is then a matter of principle with me to avoid disturbing the tranquility of others by the expression of any opinion on the [unimportant points] innocent questions on which we schismatize, and think it enough to hold fast to those moral precepts which are of the essence of Christianity, and of all other religions.

This is the very essence of syncretic universalism, the notion that all the major religions share a similar core of moral precepts but that each of them pile upon that core an enormous artifice of ritual, hierarchy and obsession with irrelevant minutiae over which endless wars are fought, and further that all such artifice should be ignored because the real God cares nothing about them, only with our basic human virtue toward one another.

There really is no serious doubt what Jefferson believed on such matters; he is quite clear in his letters about them. The secret is you actually have to read those letters, not just isolated excerpts from them quoted by someone with an axe to grind. And this is as true of those who seek to make Jefferson into some sort of proto-atheist as it is of the Christian Nation apologists.