Two hundred fifty years ago, the American revolution began with the “Shot Heard” Round The World “. The revolution has prepared the way for a new nation not based on ethnicity, geography or religion, but on the search for democratic principles. Religious freedom was among the most important of these principles.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the Evangelicals of the 18th century were all deeply attached to religious freedom, including a strict separation of the Church and the State. Having lived in a world in which the government and religion were intertwined, they considered separation as essential to prevent the corruption of religion and the government, and to alleviate conflicts between various citizens.
Unfortunately, this founding principle is attacked today before the courts and by President Donald Trump and his supporters. Several judges of the Supreme Court openly questioned the principle, its request to the States and its historical history. And republican legislators have promoted initiatives to finance religious schools with taxes and use the allegations of “religious freedom” to undermine the laws against discrimination.
Jefferson, Madison and their evangelical supporters would be amazed.
The 250th anniversary of the Revolution is a good time to think not only of the importance of religious freedom, but also the way it was won and what it meant for the patriots who fought to insure it.
Before the Revolution, there was no separation of the Church and the State in the American colonies. Many colonies have supported the churches established with taxes. Others have imposed religious restrictions on the vote or the holding of functions.
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In Virginia, the most populous colony, the Church of England was the established church. Everyone has paid taxes to support him, even non-members: presbyterians, baptists, quakers, Lutherans and other religious dissidents. For the most part, the church tax was the largest tax they paid. The Anglican Church also controlled marriage, poor relief, care for orphans and applied laws concerning blasphemies and frequentation of the Church. If dissidents with young children died, Anglican officials often placed orphaned children in a good Anglican house. Religious dissidents who failed to attend the Anglican services regularly were frequently sentenced to a fine, while a blind eye was turned towards the absences of the Anglican members.
But despite this discrimination, religious dissent increased rapidly in the middle of the 18th century, led by presbyterians and evangelical Baptists. In response, the Anglicans went from legal discrimination to outright persecution.
The supporters of the establishment have driven out dissident ministers with dogs, threw rocks and sometimes fired. The men on horseback whipped together gathered worshipers. A nest of Hornets was thrown into a single prayer meeting. A communion table was desecrated with “the most dotted things,” reported Minister Baptiste Morgan Edwards.
At the time of the American revolution, more than half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia underwent a prison sentence for charges of smuggling peace disruption or preaching without a license. Many have attempts that their license came from the “King Jesus”. Even in prison, the ministers were attacked: James Ireland was urinated while he preached in a window in the ground level in a County County prison; John Weatherford, with arms stretched in the prayer of his cell in Chesterfield County, had their arms cut with knives.
Despite these attacks, when the revolution began, the dissidents represented up to a third of the population of Virginia, and the Patriotic leaders quickly realized that their support was desperately necessary in the fight against Great Britain. The dissidents saw their luck and demanded religious freedom as their price to support the war.
Prolonged negotiations followed. The dissidents flooded the general assembly of petitions listing the necessary reforms – the end of the taxes of the Church, making poor compensation a civil affair and giving the ministers dissidents the right to carry out marriages. “These things granted”, they would support the fight. If religious freedom was guaranteed, “internal animosities can stop,” they offered – an implicit threat. Noting the desperate need for unanimity, a newspaper letter asked for restrictions, closing in a high way, “a word to the wise is enough.”
In what Jefferson described as “the most serious competitions” he has ever fought, the general assembly slowly lifted the restrictions on dissent. But at the end of the war, the reforms were incomplete.
When supporters of the old Anglican order sought to impose a new tax on the church in 1784, the dissidents reacted with indignation. A Baptist Minister wrote: “The illegal cohabitation between the Church and the State, which was so often considered as a holy marriage, must now undergo a separation and be put forever.”
Jefferson being minister in France, Madison presented the status of the religious freedom of Jefferson to the Assembly which later became a foundation of the first amendment.
Virginia status separates the Church and the State, explaining that “our civil rights does not depend on our religious opinions” and that religion will not decrease in any [a person’s] Civil capacities. Jefferson then triumphantly declared that the first amendment had created a “wall of separation between the church and State. “In 1879, a unanimous supreme court accepted.
Of course, religious restrictions have continued for years: officials and people who testify in court often had to take a religious oath. Reading the Bible has been mandated in many schools. Another discrimination has been imposed. But over time, a strong American movement went to the Jeffersonian from the separation of the Church and the State.
It shouldn’t surprise us. In fact, many of the principles on which this nation was built were ambitious and not always encountered by the founders. The nauseating institution of slavery, as well as persistent discrimination against women and Amerindians, have fun of the declaration that “all men are created equal”. But the principle has become a rallying cry for millions of people who demanded, and continue to ask, that they be treated with equity.
The same thing was true for religious freedom. Our nation continues to combat the implementation fully of the principle, in particular the separation of the Church and the State.
For example, Jefferson was clear that religious freedom gave no one the right to ignore neutral laws (what he called “impartial”). Until the end of the 20th century, the religious exemptions from which Jefferson warned was widely rejected. For example, in a 1990 Supreme Court case, Employment division V. SmithJudge Antonin SCALIA stressed that religious exemptions with “neutral” laws would tangle the government and religion, and would lead to a meli-meloo of laws.
But then, in the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993”, the Congress, overthrew this principle and put the burden on the government to oppose such exemptions.
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Now, if a law prohibits a company from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, a company could try to refuse to serve a couple of the same sex citing religious beliefs. A company or hospital opposed to birth control could try to claim an exemption from the regulations of the government of health or insurance. In 2017, President Trump sought to expand these religious exemptions by decree and has since promised more tangles of church / state. In the past, this type of exception has left the door open, for example, to companies refusing to serve the African-Americans affirming that they suffer from the “Curse of ham”. Today, people can try to justify other illegal actions depending on religion.
Jefferson and his supporters understood that such a mixture of the Church and the State corrupted both. In 2005, when the Supreme Court canceled a demonstration of the courthouse of the ten commandments, judge Sandra Day O’Connor channeled Jefferson by asking “those who were renegant the boundaries between the Church and the State, … Why would we exchange a system that served us so well for the one who was so badly served the others?” The question sounds true today.
The struggle for religious freedom and the separation of the Church and the State is continuing, as for all the founding principles, from equality to the rights of citizenship to freedom of movement.
But despite failures and gaps, these principles are always ideas that Americans can strive to achieve.
John A. Ragosta, former interim director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies in Monticello, is the author of Religious freedom: Jefferson’s inheritance, America’s Creed.
The Road to 250 series is a collaboration between Made by History and historians for 2026, a group of early Americans devoted to the formation of a precise, inclusive and just public memory of the American Foundation for the 250th anniversary to come.Made by history takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History on time here. The opinions expressed does not necessarily reflect the views of time publishers.
