evidence: Jefferson’s concern for religion seemed to grow over time, and it was a common topic in his private correspondence after he was elected president. Having read and reread Joseph Priestley’s An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782), Jefferson became convinced by the turn of the nineteenth century that, as he told Priestley, Jesus’s "morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught." It was in this period that he began, again, to identify himself as Christian, by which he meant that he was a devotee of Jesus’s ethical teachings. Jefferson was particularly taken by the fact that while various religious sects disagreed violently on dogma, and such disagreements had played an important role in bloody religious conflicts throughout history, all religions and sects tended to agree on what he saw as more fundamental moral standards. In retirement, he wrote to John Adams, with whom he had renewed a close friendship, that these "moral precepts, innate in man, and made a part of his physical constitution," should guide the growth of a rational American religion free of the control of dogmatic ministers.