urch attendance was compulsory and that heresy was punishable by death and denial of the Trinity by three years’ imprisonment. The fact that these laws were not enforced, he said, did not remove their stigma. He also decried the ongoing persecution of Baptist ministers, and the fact that dissenters were taxed to support the Anglican Church. Jefferson also argued for change on political, as well as philosophical, grounds. How, he asked, could nonconformists be expected to support a government that discriminated against them on behalf of a church associated with the oppressive British government?
Jefferson’s and Madison’s efforts on behalf of disestablishment met with limited success. The issue was so controversial that it engendered 10 days of fractious debate by the entire Assembly. Eventually a series of compromises — proposed by George Mason — were adopted. The Assembly revoked all parliamentary statutes concerning religion, exempted dissenters from religious taxes, and suspended government payments to the clergy for a year. At the same time, the government retained the power to license ministers, Anglican clergy alone were authorized to perform legal marriage ceremonies, and the parishes of the established church continued to perform several civil functions.
Between 1776 and 1784 — a period in which Madison did not serve in the Assembly — religious issues were not prominent in Virginia. Although Jefferson served in the Assembly until his election as governor in 1779, the year he introduced his famous Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom, the colony was preoccupied with the war against Britain. Except for repeal of the suspended law providing salaries for the Episcopal clergy, the legislature passed no major bills relating to religion during the period.
Freedom of religion returned to the Assembly’s agenda in 1784, the year that Madison, who had been serving as a member of the Continental Congress, returned as a member. Mason and Henry also were present, but Jefferson had embarked for Paris as Minister to France; accordingly, he participated vicariously in the remarkable events that unfolded, primarily through regular but painfully slow correspondence with Madison.
Two controversial and interrelated religious issues confronted the 1784 Virginia Assembly. Supporters of the Anglican Church, which had been renamed as the Protestant Episcopal Church, recognized that tax support for religion, which they favored, was becoming increasingly problematical, but they put greater hope in having the church incorporated by the Assembly, a move that would confirm its title to enormous tracts of land assigned to the church during the colonial period. The Baptists and Presbyterians found this idea abhorrent, arguing that it would invest the Episcopal Church with property that conceptually belonged to everyone, but they had different opinions about what the Assembly should do. The Baptists wanted government to eschew all involvement with religion, but many Presbyterians preferred a plural establishment whereby religious taxes would be distributed proportionately among the various Protestant denominations. Madison thought both proposals “obnoxious.”
Patrick Henry, who like most of his contemporaries believed that virtue could not exist without religion, supported the Presbyterian position as being in the best interests of the state. With the assistance of John Blair Smith, a Presbyterian clergyman who had founded Hampden-Sydney College (and who, like Madison, had studied at Princeton under John Witherspoon), Henry drafted a resolution that called for both “the inalienable rights of conscience” and “an equal share of the protection and favor of government to all denominations of Christians.” (Mayer 360) He proposed that the Assembly draft legislation imposing “a moderate tax or contribution, annually, for the support of the Christian religion . . .” The motion passed, and Henry himself was appointed to head the drafting committee, which produced a bill imposing a “general assessment,” the proceeds of which would be distributed among