In December 1776, Virginia’s First General Assembly came to a close with the Anglican Church remaining the official state church. Pleas from more than 10,000 dissenters demanding an end to the tyranny of the state church — pleas taken up with great fervor by legislative delegates Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — had failed to persuade most state legislators.
Still, religious dissenters — Baptists foremost — remained unbowed: The legislature’s exempting them from being forced to pay taxes to fund the salaries of Anglican Church ministers was a meaningless token. Government funding of religion in any capacity was tyranny. Only equal freedom of religion and from religion — that which they and their forbears had been demanding since the beginnings of England’s New World colonies, demands often met with jailings and bloody punishments — would suffice.
On Dec. 25, 1776 — a day not yet widely celebrated as the birthday of Christ, and almost certainly not the day of Christ’s birth — Baptist preachers renewed their freedom offensive with a defiant statement.
“We believe that preachers should be supported by voluntary contributions from the people” only, the missive began. Government taxes in support of any religion “is pregnant with various evils, destructive to the rights and privileges of religious society” and a censoring of freedom of conscience, they admonished. They “unitedly” agreed “to give discharges in full to every person who shall direct the payment” of the government religious tax “assessment to them.” In other words, the Baptist clergy vowed to remove from their congregations anyone who paid the tax and tried to have it directed to Baptist preachers.
Only through the establishment of a secular state could the religious freedom of all be achieved.
Still, Jefferson’s, Madison’s, and religious dissenters’ quest for complete church-state separation remained a long shot — as did military victory in the American Revolution.
The very night that Baptists of Virginia made their religious freedom stand, Virginian George Washington, commander of America’s Continental Army, made a daring move. Under the cover of darkness he led his weary but unbowed soldiers across the icy Delaware River and on a ten-mile trek to attack encamped German soldiers in employment of the British Army. Surprising the enemy, Washington’s army secured a pivotal victory that gave new life to Americans’ hopes for freedom from Great Britain.
As Washington and his army’s Christmas victory lifted the hopes of patriotic Americans, Jefferson redoubled his efforts on the parallel revolutionary front of religious freedom. In the coming months as chair of Virginia’s Committee on Revisors tasked with updating Virginia’s colonial-era laws, he made his move.
Agreeing with dissenters’ demands for a secular state within which religious freedom for all could flourish, Jefferson began penning words directed at freedom’s opponents. He skewered the “presumptions” of state legislators who had set “up their own opinions and modes of thinking, as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others.” To “compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors,” Jefferson continued, “is sinful and tyrannical … even forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion” is a deprivation of religious freedom.
Knowing he would have to convince Anglican legislators to abandon their opposition to secular governance, he chose his words carefully. Echoing the earliest Baptists’ persuasive argument that all persons’ consciences must be protected from state intervention because one’s conscience was answerable only to their God, Jefferson inked words designed to win over religious opponents. “Almighty God hath created the mind free … all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations” are wrong.
Writing frankly, he noted that “legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical,” were “themselves but fallible and uninspired men” who had no business telling others what to believe. In fact, he continued, “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
Having framed the context of holistic religious freedom by persuasion, reason, and logic, Jefferson turned to what he wanted the legislature to enact into law: “that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief.”
And then he waited for the right time to submit his bill to Virginia’s Anglican-controlled legislature. Two more years would pass, and persecution of religious dissenters would continue, before that time arrived.
One instance of persecution took place in 1778 “on the Nansemond River near the mouth of the James River.” There Baptist minister David Barrow, while preaching, found himself “beneath the severe hand of persecution,” according to eyewitness accounts in the documentary volume Imprisoned Preachers and Religious Liberty in Virginia.
Apprehended by “twenty stout fellows” for not having obtained legal permission to preach, Barrow was submitted to a primitive form of waterboarding, being “pressed … into the mud” and then held “long under water” to the point of “near drowning” for refusing to recant his faith as the thugs demanded.
The same year a second Baptist preacher found himself “jailed for some time on the charge of vagrancy” before being “released, his accusers not being able to make a case against him.” In yet another instance of persecution, a gang of armed hooligans interrupted a church service of some 700 people. Brave churchmen accosted the intruders as the preacher fled to a nearby house.
Finally, Jefferson’s stature led to his election in 1779 as Virginia’s second governor. Shortly thereafter, a legislative ally in the House of Delegates introduced the governor’s religious freedom bill — “Bill No. 82: A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.”
Thrown into the fray as lawmakers debated marriages and church property, the bill sparked fervent debate, as had prior legislative attempts to separate church from state. Supporting Jefferson’s bill, dissenting ministers demanded the freedom to perform marriages without having to obtain approval from Anglican authorities. They also demanded that the government cease funding religious institutions.
Fiercely resisting, Anglican legislators clung to the status quo, leading to the tabling of Jefferson’s religious freedom bill. Victorious, Virginia’s Anglican legislators, though wanting more, bided their time until the British surrendered at Yorktown, Va., in October 1781, effectively bringing an end to hostilities with Great Britain. Then they set about further entrenching the state church.
In the 1784 General Assembly, dominant legislators introduced a bill to incorporate the Protestant Episcopal Church, thereby transferring government-provided religious property from the traditional Anglican Church to the new American denomination. Cleverly, they also introduced a general assessment bill levying taxes to support Christian churches only, while maintaining dominance of the state church.
With Jefferson preparing to sail to France as a diplomat, Madison took up the difficult task of shepherding the secularizing of Virginia. Realizing Anglican-now-Episcopalian legislators were determined to retain religious governance, he maneuvered to delay the general assessment bill. At the same time, religious dissenters — Baptists and Presbyterians primarily — spoke forcefully against the anti-freedom legislation.
Observers noted the opposition. “I have been through a considerable part of the country,” Virginian George Nicholas wrote, “and am well assured that it would be impossible to carry such laws [maintaining the church-state alliance] into execution and that the attempt would bring about a revolution [from religious dissenters].”
His words proved prescient. Sensing an opportunity, Madison in 1785 reintroduced Jefferson’s religious freedom bill that was passionately supported by religious dissenters. Again, intense legislative debate ensued. But this time dissenters would not be denied.
Following lengthy deliberation, the bill — with minor edits — passed on Jan. 16, 1786 as the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Signed into law three days later, the legislation declared:
“Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
Nearly a decade after the signing of the Declaration of Independence — a document drafted by Jefferson and envisioning a secular nation — the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom formally abolished Virginia’s establishment church and created secular governance for which Jefferson and religious dissenters had long advocated.
The Virginia Statute, in turn, directly influenced the crafting and 1791 ratification of the religious freedom clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
First Virginia and then the United States of America had been established as secular governments, separating church from state and thus securing freedom of religion and from religion for all.
A new, liberating era in history had begun.