Editor’s Note: During this 250th anniversary year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Church & State is examining the legacy of the document that birthed the United States of America.
Nathaniel Saunders of Culpeper County, Va., had long been fighting in a freedom revolution; not freedom from tyrannical Great Britain, but freedom from religious tyranny in his Anglican-controlled colony.
“I understand that you intend to preach this day,” a prominent Anglican warned Saunders — a Baptist preacher well acquainted with jail cells but for the moment free — in an April 9, 1775, written missive. “I hereby forewarn you neither to Preach, Exhort, or attempt many thing of the sort in this Neighborhood as you shall answer the same at your Peril, as I am determined to order a Prosecution ags’t [against] you if you attempt to.”
Saunders, not known for backing down, likely proceeded to preach. If so, there are no known records that the threats against him were actually carried out.
Ten days later the first significant battles of the Revolutionary War commenced at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, with no religious freedom in sight for Saunders or his fellow dissenters. Nor did they yet have freedom when, a year later in March, Benjamin Franklin — America’s first diplomat — falsely proclaimed to Canada [then known as Quebec] that his fellow countrymen “hold sacred the rights of conscience.”
Trying to cajole Catholic-dominant Quebec — to which strategic-minded Great Britain had recently granted religious freedom — into siding with the breakaway colonies, Franklin made a “promise to the whole [Canadian] people, solemnly in our name, the free and undisturbed exercise of their [Catholic] religion” and exemption “from the payment of any tythes [tithes] or taxes for the support of any religion.”
Franklin’s pretensions ignored the reality of American states’ widespread lack of religious freedom.
Smelling a rat, Canada declined the proposed alliance.
Two months later in May 1776, Virginia officials carried on, as usual, the persecution of minority Baptists, their ministers considered to be unruly and uneducated. Nonetheless, Baptists — unlettered or not — continued drafting petitions to the legislature. One petition, similar to many others, demanded “That we be allowed to worship God in our own way, without interruption,” and “to maintain our own Ministers” and “be married, buried and like, without paying” the state church for such privileges.
Should they be allowed freedom, the signatories noted, “we will gladly unite with our Brethren of other denominations, and to the utmost of our ability promote the common cause of Freedom [from Great Britain].”
That was a warning. Virginia needed as many men as possible to bear arms against Great Britain. Yet Baptists hesitated to fight in the Revolutionary War as long as the state refused to grant freedom of religion and from religion equally to all.
Northward, New York’s delegates to the Second Continental Congress voiced parallel concerns. In order for the new nation to remain “united in a political Creed … the burying of all Disputes on ecclesiastical Points” was necessary in congressional proceedings. Religious opinions “have for ages had no other Tendency than that of banishing Peace and Charity from the World,” they warned.
Thomas Jefferson, an ally of Virginia’s religious dissenters, understood those concerns.
Primary composer of the nation’s Declaration of Independence, Jefferson chose his words carefully. Though he focused on grievances against Great Britain’s overreach, Jefferson’s pen also pointed the new American nation toward the only solution for avoiding religious tyranny: the creation of a secular federal government.
Departing from colonial theocrats’ biblical demands that humanity obey God’s laws, the Declaration turned to Enlightenment natural law, truth derived from a “higher law” rooted in authoritative, timeless principles discoverable only through reason — not religion or theology: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Anchored in reason and absent religious impulses, creeds, or holy text, Deists’ concept of “Creator” [“Nature’s God”] voiced Americans’ “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Nonetheless, “unalienable Rights” applied to white men only. Jefferson, an enslaver like many of the nation’s founders, refused to acknowledge Black people as worthy of freedom. Nor were Native Americans. Nor women.
Making no mention of the Bible, the Ten Commandments, or the Christian God, the Declaration of Independence voiced aspirational rights only achievable by a government “instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” — not from God or Church.
In closing, America’s 1776 freedom statement declared “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence” as signers pledged their lives, fortunes, and honor in defense of liberty. Thoroughly Deistic language, “divine Providence” [notably, with a small “d”] spoke to Enlightenment thinkers’ perception of divine laws natural and rationale — absent miracles, sacraments, and superstition — and non-religious Providence as the unfolding of those laws.
Grounded in reason rather than religion, America’s Declaration of Independence set the stage for a secular government — which religious dissenters had long demanded as necessary for religious freedom. Not that religious freedom would easily be achieved — as, weeks prior, fellow Virginian James Madison had learned as delegates of the Fifth Virginia Convention formulated a Declaration of Rights.
During the convention, Madison had worked hard to convince delegates to set aside George Mason’s suggestion of granting mere “toleration” to religious dissenters. With much effort he had emerged triumphant, the final draft of the Declaration granting “free exercise of religion”:
That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practise Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.
This was significant progress. Still, dissenting Baptists wanted more: religion should not be a “duty,” but rather a voluntary choice. The statement also failed to repeal religious taxes or abolish the state church.
Sensing correctly that dissenters were unswayed, the state’s House of Delegates, convening in early October, established a Committee of Religion to address a stream of petitions for religious freedom. Serving on the committee, Jefferson came to know fellow committee member Madison. The two prominent men were on hand on October 16 when a singular petition bearing 10,000 signatures — primarily from Baptists — landed on the committee’s desk.
As thick as an altar Bible, its heft drew gasps. So did the 10,000 petitioners’ demands to be relieved of their “oppression” by the state: foremost, mandatory religious assessments funding the state church, a tax that had existed since Virginia’s founding at Jamestown in 1607. Only with the abolishment of religious taxes could Virginians enjoy “equal Liberty” for all:
… [petitioners] being (in Common with the other Inhabitants of this Commonwealth), delivered from British Oppression, rejoice in the Prospect of having their Freedom secured and maintained to them and their posterity inviolate. The hopes of your Petitioners have been raised and confirmed by the Declaration of your Honourable House with regard to equal Liberty. Equal Liberty! that invaluable Blessing; which though it be the Birthright of every good Member of the State, is what your Petitioners have been deprived of; in that, by taxation, their property hath been wrested from them and given to those from whom they receive no equivalent. Your petitioners therefore having long groaned under the Burden of an ecclesiastical Establishment beg leave to move your Honourable House that this as well as every other Yoke may be broken, and that the Oppressed may go free that so every religious Denomination being on a Level…
But would dissenters’ demands for freedom stop there? Many other petitions more directly called for a complete separation of church and state —unfathomable for Anglican lawmakers.
Struggling to find agreement, week after week the Committee of Religion remained starkly divided. In Jefferson’s wording, “a brawl ensued,” the “petitions of the dissenters” leading to “the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.” Some committee members sided with dissenters. Others defended the Anglican Church, whose clergy counter-petitioned for the continuance of the state church.
Should their taxpayer-funded status be eliminated, state clergy bemoaned, they would be “precluded from gaining a tolerable subsistence in any other way of life.” Furthermore, “a religious establishment in a State is conducive to its peace and happiness.” Therefore, the “hardships” that state religion visited on dissenters “ought not to be considered.”
For two months the battle between religious freedom and oppression continued, the oppressors eventually emerging largely victorious. Only partially relenting on religious taxation by annulling the requirement that religious dissenters pay taxes in support of the state church, Anglican legislators dismissed calls to sever church from state.
Deeply disappointed but unbowed, Jefferson, Madison, and religious dissenters remained steadfast in their determination to secure a secular government.