Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was the subject of a national symposium planned and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, September 19-21, 1985, at the University of Virginia. The Statute, called by Bernard Bailyn “the most important document in American history, bar none,” struck down the practice of taxing citizens to support an established church and became the basis for the First Amendment to the US Constitution. By extension it made a case against all tyranny over opinion and opened the way for the new nation’s diverse intellectual and religious culture, according to Merrill D. Peterson, Professor of History and co-chairman of the planning committee. He describes the Statute as “an eloquent manifesto to the sanctity of the human mind and spirit.”
The symposium, which was open to the public, generated lively discussion among an audience of 300 from around the country. Among the distinguished participants who made presentations, based on manuscripts prepared for the symposium and a subsequent publication, were historians Edwin S. Gaustad (University of California, Riverside), Henry F. May (University of California, Berkeley), and J. G. A. Pocock (Johns Hopkins University). Their topics included Origins of the Statute, Colonial Religion, and the Enlightenment. Thomas E. Buckley (Loyola Marymount University), Lance Banning (University of Kentucky), and Rhys Isaac (LeTrobe University, Australia) spoke on the Making of the Statute and the contributions of Jefferson, James Madison, and the Dissenters.
They were joined by scholars in law, theology, philosophy, and government including Walter Berns, John Noonan, and Cushing Strout, speaking on the tradition’s establishment in other states, the Constitution, and American religious culture. David Little, A. E. Dick Howard, and Richard Rorty examined Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Freedom from the perspectives of religious studies, law, and philosophy. And Robert Drinan, Martin Marty, and Leo Pfeffer addressed a large evening forum on the Statute 200 Years Later.
By the early 1780s, Virginia had been transformed from a stable colonial government, based upon inherited hierarchy, into a revolutionary society held together by social contract. Jefferson saw the end of the Revolution as providing a unique window of opportunity. The time was ripe for permanent institution of the spirit of revolution in a body of law. He had first written his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Fredericksburg in 1777. It had been introduced into the General Assembly in June 1779 and was killed during that session. In October 1785 the bill was revived by James Madison, and, after the failure of a number of amendments, was finally passed by the legislature on January 16, 1786. The preamble to the Statute has become famous as a “justification . . . not merely of the ideas of religious toleration and the separation of state and church but also for the right of the individual to complete intellectual liberty.” The heart of the bill reads as follows:
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 of 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.
The context for this decision was a culture in which popular religious movements—notably by Baptists and Presbyterians—had left the Anglican church fighting a rear-guard action in defense of its legal establishment. During the war, the penalties for religious dissent had largely been softened or removed. Citizens were no longer required to surrender any income in support of the established church. In 1784 allies of the establishment, led by Patrick Henry, attempted passage of a bill to levy a “general assessment” to be distributed equally among all Christian churches. It was the reaction against this bill, one clearly intended to prop up a failing establishment, that prompted Madison to revive Jefferson’s Statute.
Though the most obvious and immediate impact of the Statute was on religion in Virginia and on the incipient national Bill of Rights, the lasting value of the Statute may have been less in the settling of a question than in the fram ing of a debate. Like the Constitution itself, the Statute has proven a fair field for interpretation.
Future debates will be informed by the publication of the essays prepared for the symposium and now being revised. Several major presses have expressed interest, and the editors, Merrill Peterson and Robert Vaughan, are hopeful that a volume will be forthcom ing by January 1987.
Robert C. Vaughan, co-chairman of the symposium, is Executive Director of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. His doctorate is in American literature.
