Precursors of the First Amendment: the Fight for Disestablishment of the Episcopal Church in Colonial Virginia
As citizens of the United States in the 21st Century, we are prone to take our freedom of religion for granted. To most of us, the fact that every American is free to adhere to whatever religious creed may appeal to his or her conscience — or to none — seems to us as natural as breathing. If Sheriff Harrison were to announce that no traveling evangelist could hold a revival meeting in Wake County without his approval, or a member of the North Carolina General Assembly were to introduce a bill to tax everyone in order to pay the salaries of Christian ministers, most citizens would find both proposals jarring and unthinkable, and judges would promptly declare them unconstitutional.
It was not always thus. Although our high school history books told us – truthfully – that the followers of many sects sought religious refuge in colonial America, and that some influential leaders, such as William Penn in Pennsylvania and Roger Williams in Rhode Island, promoted religious pluralism and tolerance, established churches were the rule in the English colonies. Massachusetts and Connecticut were “officially” Congregationalist, and the Church of England was established in all of the Southern colonies (although Samuel Eliot Morison says that it did not “enjoy great influence” in any of them). The story of how we moved from there to here — how official churches were “disestablished” in favor of the religious pluralism so familiar to us today — is both fascinating and complex.
With the advantage of two centuries of hindsight, we are inclined to see religious freedom as an important and inevitable by-product of the era of the American Revolution, which Lafayette, writing in his old age, called “the era of declarations of rights,” and which he regarded as “the beginning of a new social order for the entire world.” The decline of “official” churches also can be seen as an almost inevitable consequence of multi-cultural immigration, 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 hi