gration, much of which was stimulated by religious persecution and discrimination. As early as 1763, “there were already enough Irish in New York to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, enough Jews to support a synagogue, enough Scots to support a Presbyterian church, and enough Germans to maintain four churches with services in their language.” (Morison 176) At the time of the Revolution, perhaps two-thirds of Virginia’s citizens were dissenters from the established Anglican Church. (Peterson 114) Disestablishment also appears in retrospect as a natural consequence of the Enlightenment, the optimistic eighteenth-century philosophy that proclaimed the perfectibility of man through reason and experience, as well as a thoroughly understandable intellectual reaction to the excesses of the British crown, which was linked by law and tradition to the Church of England.
Whatever its causes and sources, this manifestation of the new social order did not occur overnight. Like many cultural and social changes, disestablishment was a struggle in which the old order gradually gave way to the new. The story of how that struggle played out in Virginia between 1776 and 1785 is important to our understanding of how religious liberty eventually won the day because Virginia, the most populous colony, was a bellwether; the outcome of the disestablishment debate among the commonwealth’s most influential thinkers greatly influenced its resolution in the other colonies, and eventually in the new nation they would form. It also is a fascinating and dramatic story, because the key participants were four of the most brilliant and celebrated figures of the Revolutionary era — James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and Patrick Henry.
Before setting the scene, let us briefly summarize what history tells us about the religious beliefs and attitudes of these four famous Founders.
Thomas Jefferson was a religious skeptic who was often accused during his lifetime of being an atheist. Historians often characterize him as a Unitarian, but while his theology was very much Unitarian in spirit, he never joined a Unitarian church, possibly because there were none near his home in Virginia during his lifetime. Moreover, the Unitarians were not formally organized into a sect until 1825, the year before his death. However, Jefferson embraced the theology of Joseph Priestly, who is widely viewed as the founder of Unitarianism, and regularly attended Priestly’s church in Philadelphia when he was nearby. Jefferson remained a nominal member of the Episcopal Church, but removed himself from the list of those eligible to serve as godparents because he could not unreservedly espouse belief in the Trinity.
When Jefferson ran for President in 1800, many clergymen told their congregations that a vote for him was a vote against Christianity, and that if he were elected they would have to hide their Bibles in their wells. (Brodie 431.) During his presidency he compiled a pamphlet entitled Syllabus of an Estimate on the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others, in which he characterized Jesus’ moral system as “the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man” but made it plain that he did not accept Jesus as divine. In later life he compiled a personal, expurgated New Testament from which he excluded all references to the supernatural, including the Virgin Birth, the miracles and the Resurrection, leaving in only “the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.” The resulting pamphlet was published after his death as The Jefferson Bible.
Both Jefferson’s personal attitude toward religion and his formulation of the proper relationship between religion and government were grounded in the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment, especially the views of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke. The dominant spirit of the Enlightenment was skepticism toward all orthodoxy, unbridled enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge, and optimism that free inquiry would lead men to discern the truths inherent in