Establishing Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Statute in Virginia by Thomas E. Buckley (review)

There is a certain pristine clarity to Thomas Jefferson’s “Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom.” After a series of preliminary justifications for liberty of conscience, the Statute guarantees that

no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry … 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 … all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

And yet, as Thomas Buckley points out in this scrupulously researched and intricately narrated treatment of religious politics in Virginia, “dissolving the innumerable links between religion and government proved much more complicated than anyone had anticipated,” and Virginians’ “struggle to achieve separation curtailed the very religious freedom they sought to establish” (p. 2). The first of these claims is perhaps uncontroversial, although Buckley shows in extraordinary detail the complexity involved in pursuing disestablishment in a place like Virginia. The second claim is far more provocative and opens up a range of questions regarding the meaning of religious liberty in both historical and contemporary terms.

Establishing Religious Freedom opens with a chapter laying out the contours of the colonial religious establishment and the ways in which insurgent groups like Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists sought to use the 1689 Toleration Act to secure a foothold in the Old Dominion. He stresses the role of the Revolution in fostering toleration and the complex legislative history of Jefferson’s Statute, which was finally adopted by the Virginia General Assembly in January 1786. Motivations for separating church and state varied; evangelicals warmed to Jefferson’s call for religious freedom even if they did not share his rationalist, Unitarian sympathies. Much to Jefferson’s chagrin, evangelical Protestantism flourished as he aged, and Buckley narrates the history of church-state relations in Virginia as a story of the crumbling of Jefferson’s rationalist vision before the forces of evangelical Protestantism. By the mid-nineteenth century, “Protestant Christianity increasingly assumed the characteristics of a functional establishment with ever-increasing state support for, and endorsement of, religion in general [since] Virginians believed that religion encouraged the public virtue they regarded as essential for republican government” (pp. 184–85). None of the lofty language of Jefferson’s Statute was ever applied to African Americans, as Buckley perhaps too briefly points out (pp. 180–81).

Perhaps the most contentious area of church-state relations in Virginia had to do with the disposition of church property after the Revolution, a long-running debate that culminated with repeal of the state’s glebe laws—which Baptists argued “was necessary to fulfill the implicit promise of [Jefferson’s statute]” (p. 103)—at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet the legislation, which Buckley describes as “the most radical step taken by any one of the new republics against the property rights of any individual or group in the aftermath of the Revolution” (p. 113), proved not to be the decisive step that many envisioned. Instead, it “created a legal situation that would vex the churches, courts, and legislatures throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth” (p. 117).

Behind all these details lies a more fundamental question: what do we mean by religious freedom? Do the rights of conscience attach primarily to individuals and the beliefs they hold about issues of ultimate significance? Or are there particular aspects of corporate religious practice that make special treatment of religious institutions permissible, perhaps even mandatory, entailments of a commitment to such liberty? Much of the rhetorical power of Jefferson’s statute—and of the early-modern movement for toleration in England and America, so heavily influenced by Protestant anti-Catholicism—derives from the “specter of an incorporated Catholicism” (p. 139), b...