From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia

6. Virginia’s Contributions to the Enduring Themes of Religious Liberty in America

In the bicentennial year of the U.S. Constitution, a wordsmith for the Virginia Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution coined a clever slogan that was displayed prominently on commission literature and state promotional materials .1 It read: “The Constitution: It has Virginia written all over it.” The tagline packs a lot of truth. The same could be said of religious liberty in the American experience: “It has Virginia written all over it.” The last third of the eighteenth century, especially, was a time of great innovation in Western thinking about religious liberty and church-state relationships, and Virginia played a crucial role in shaping and promoting creative approaches to a persistent and vexing controversy. The pursuit of religious liberty in Virginia in the tumultuous decade between 1776 and 1787 is one of the great stories in human history, and the lessons learned from the struggle to recognize religious liberty in Virginia’s laws and public policies merit scrutiny. In 1776 and the decade that followed, Virginia was the epicenter of the former British colonies that would become the United States of America. It was the largest, most populous, prosperous, and influential of the former colonies. And, as the most central geographically, it had the potential to unify or divide the southern and northern extremities of the fledgling American confederation . Virginia also produced great leaders, respected throughout the former colonies, who played decisive roles in the independence movement. Events in the Commonwealth inevitably impacted other states; thus, they were carefully scrutinized. As John Adams six Virginia’s Contributions to the Enduring Themes of Religious Liberty in America daniel l. dreisbach virginia’s contributions to religious liberty 167 of Massachusetts wrote to Patrick Henry of Virginia in the anxious days of June 1776, “we all look up to Virginia for examples.”2 In the decades that followed independence, virtually every state scrambled to redefine the church-state arrangements they inherited from colonial times. In none was this process more dramatic and, in the end, momentous than in Virginia. From the first shots of the War for American Independence to the ratification of the national constitution, as Thomas J. Curry observes, “no state surpassed Virginia in speed and extent of alterations in Church-State relations.”3 By 1786, Virginia had replaced a policy of toleration with the principle of religious liberty, eliminated state restrictions on religious exercise, terminated direct tax support for the established church, and placed churches on a purely voluntary footing. Although none moved with the speed and decisiveness of Virginia, other states wrestled with the same issues, and some adopted similar policies. In many respects, “Virginia was a microcosm of the ferment taking place throughout the new nation.”4 The struggle to redefine the Commonwealth’s church-state arrangements was important to the entire nation. As Thomas E. Buckley observes: [The Old Dominion] provided the most critical experiment of the Revolutionary era, for Virginia served as a politicoreligious microcosm in which the whole nation could study the alternatives for a church-state relationship and then choose from among them. . . . From Chesapeake Bay across the mountains to the Shenandoah Valley there existed both a church established by law and a religiously diverse society. In this largest and most populous of the new states with a leadership noted for its intellectual and political talent, all sides of the church-state controversy were ably represented : the traditional religionists who clung to the establishment ideal and insisted upon civil support for religion; the rationalists who believed religion to be an entirely personal affair and fought for an absolute separation of church and state; and dissenters of every stripe who, despite their own differences in polity and theory, wanted equal religious rights and a church freed from state control. For over a decade these Virginians developed the full range of 168 daniel l. dreisbach arguments over the various alternatives presented for consideration: the retention of a single establishment, its replacement by a multiple system with state aid for all churches, the removal of religion from any relationship with civil authority, and the equality of religious groups without government assistance but free to influence society’s morals and values.5 The dramatic story of religious liberty’s emergence in Virginia has been recounted numerous times in the last two centuries, perhaps no more passionately than by the principal actors in this epic contest. Historians, not...