The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life

6. Patrick Henry, Religious Liberty, and the Search for Civic Virtue

chapter 6 Patrick Henry, Religious Liberty, and the Search for Civic Virtue Thomas E. Buckley, S.J. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom ranks among the foremost documents in the history of American liberties. In sweeping terms it placed the rights of conscience—the freedom to believe and to worship without pressure or coercion of any kind—beyond the reach of the state. Thomas Jefferson was so proud of his composition that he ordered its title inscribed on his tombstone. In his old age, James Madison congratulated himself for guiding its passage through the Virginia legislature.1 And generations of historians, political scientists, and jurists have recognized the crucial role the statute played in expanding religious liberty in the new republic and laying the foundation for the First Amendment’s religion clause and its subsequentinterpretationbytheSupremeCourt . Toooftenminimized or misunderstood, however, has been the larger context in which the statute won approval and the roles that others, particularly Patrick Henry, played in the long struggle for religious freedom in the Old Dominion. In fact, historians, political scientists, and journalists writing about the Virginia contests sometimes place Henry among the opponents of religious liberty because of his support for a general assessment proposal in 1784. But by 125 making that moment indicative of Henry’s entire career, they miss his role as a leader in the struggle for conscience rights. He is, indeed, a forgotten founder of religious liberty. Context is crucial. Before any legislature would approve a measure as capacious in its language and implications as the Statute for Religious Freedom, a transformation needed to be worked in the way in which Virginians, especially the politically powerful elites who shaped public opinion, thought about the role of religion in society and the relationship between church and state. The value they placed on religion found expression, practically from the earliest days of the colony, in a formal religious establishment. They conceived of their society in organic terms. Just as all belonged to a single political entity—the English colony of Virginia governed from Williamsburg—so all should be members of the Church of England. Church and civil government on the local level were thoroughly entwined. The relationship between church and state was mutually beneficial and necessary. The church supported the state by its prayers in public worship and by teaching the Christian gospel, the moral law, and the obligations of good citizens. The government supported the church by favorable laws, public taxes, and benevolent oversight . Church and state worked together in friendly partnership for the well-being of the whole society. Of course the authorities recognized the existence of religious “dissenters”—Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists . But in Virginia, as in England, they were a tiny minority of the total population, the exception rather than the rule, whose presence necessitated at most a grudging, limited toleration. On the eve of the Revolution , the overwhelming majority of the men who governed the Old Dominion in the Williamsburg legislature and sat on the county courts and church vestries envisioned no change in that situation.2 But drastic changes were coming in both church and state and the relationship between them. The political and religious revolutions began at the same time, with events in the mid-1760s that ushered in a decade of controversy over the toleration of religious “dissenters.” Then in 1776 the revolutionary convention’s approval of the sixteenth article of the new state’s Declaration of Rights recognized the rights of conscience. Those two moments are crucial to the church-state drama. In them we 126 | Thomas E. Buckley, S.J. can identify Henry’s leadership in the evolution of religious liberty. Moreover, the two are intrinsically connected. Henry’s role in the formulation of the Declaration of Rights can only be understood and appreciated in light of his multiple interventions on behalf of dissenters in the years preceding it. Finally, in January 1786, the passage of Jefferson’s Statute was the culmination of the third act in the unfolding drama. In the Service of Religious Liberty Let us first consider what Henry did, and then attempt to assess his motivation . It must be admitted that Virginia’s first governor is a difficult subject. From the perspective of historians he possessed one egregious fault: he did not save his mail. Today we know much more about some of the other founding fathers because they saved theirs. Jefferson, for example , was...