ca’s heritage as a place of religious asylum and refuge.
10. Citizens offended by the clergy tax may elect to leave Virginia.
11. The tax will encourage sectarian strife and discord.
12. A religious tax will discourage non-believers from coming to Virginia, where they might hear and receive the message of Christian salvation.
13. Like other unpopular measures, the tax will promote disrespect for the law.
14. There is no evidence that the people want this tax.
15. The concept of the tax is inimical to the freedom of conscience guaranteed by the Virginia Declaration of Rights.
These cryptic renderings of Madison’s arguments border on rhetorical insult, because the persuasiveness and longevity of the Remonstrance rests on its eloquence as well as its substance. Although most Americans have never heard of it, it deserves to be read, re-read, and studied by anyone who seriously undertakes to understand what the Founders intended by the First Amendment’s decree that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .”
Fortunately, many judges appreciate that the study and application of Constitutional Law requires, in the words of the North Carolina Constitution, “a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles,” including the principles laid out by Madison in his remarkable document. In furtherance of this maxim, courts often look to Madison’s Remonstrance: it has been cited in dozens of state and federal cases involving the relationship between church and state, and Justice Hugo Black’s opinion for the Supreme Court of the United States in Engel v. Vitale — the case that prohibits government officials from prescribing prayers to be said in public schools — cites it no fewer than five times. Perhaps the most lasting and significant effect of the Remonstrance, however, is that it established Madison as the Founder whose views concerning religious freedom were the most respected and set him on the road that led eventually to his authorship of the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights.
But that is another story.
James Madison: A Biography, by Ralph Ketcham. The University Press of Virginia, 1990.
Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration, by Adrienne Koch. Alfred A. Knopf, 1950.
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, by Fawn M. Brodie. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. 1974
The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic, by Lance Banning. Cornell University Press, 1995.
A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic, by Henry Mayer. University of Virginia Press, 1992.
The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison. Oxford University