After Thomas Jefferson passed
away on July 4th, 1826, it was discovered that he had written his epitaph
in advance. Accordingly his tombstone, when it was finally erected, bore only
the simple inscription: Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of
the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of
Virginia. That he felt no need to mention his time in Congress, as an
ambassador, as Secretary of State, Vice-President or President is telling of
Jefferson’s opinion of the outcome of the American Revolution, the state of the
American government in the 1820s, and his own professional legacy. Even more
telling, however, are the three items he saw fit to commemorate, and in
particular the second. Though at times stretched to the breaking point, the
separation of church and state is one of the defining aspects of American
political culture, and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom (or
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, hereafter to be referred as just the
Statute) is perhaps its finest articulation. Comparatively little known, it was
originally drafted in 1777, introduced into the Virginia General Assembly in
1779, and became law in 1786. It’s also quite brief, with three sections
covering a little over 730 words, yet it confronts one of the most
controversial issues in human history, contravenes centuries of established
relations between church and government, and handily encapsulates some of
Jefferson’s views on mankind, the nature of free will, and the power of truth.
It is, in many ways, a surprising document for how much it is able to cover in
such a short span of words. And, as with any other I’ve covered in these posts,
it is best appreciated in its proper context.
In the 1770s, on the eve of the
Revolution, most of the colonies possessed what are referred to as established
churches. These organizations received funding from the colonial governments,
administered institutes of higher learning, and were generally sanctioned and
endorsed by the political status quo. Citizens who were not congregants of one
of these churches were usually excluded from political participation, often
prohibited from owning property, and frequently harassed by members of the
dominant social order. Connecticut and Massachusetts were both bastions of the
Puritan faith, whose members had actually fled persecution by the established
Anglican Church in England, while New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were officially provinces of the Church of
England. Maryland had initially been organized as a safe haven for English
Catholics before being re-chartered as an Anglican colony in 1689, and
Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and New Jersey either prohibited any
established church or made no mention of them in their charters. These latter
four where exceptional in their promotion of religious liberty and had arrived
at that position via a set of exceptional circumstances (which I won’t go into
here). The promotion of an established sect and persecution of dissenters was
far more common in British North America, and was one of the many cultural and
political legacies of Britain itself.
The Church of England was founded in 1534 by Henry VIII, and for most of its history has been
closely intertwined with the British state. As the formal head if the church,
the British monarch has long held sway over the essential character of the
clerical hierarchy, and different factions supporting different sets of
practices have risen or fallen based on the backing they enjoyed from the
sitting king or queen. Generally speaking, whichever form of Protestant worship
was favored by the Crown was sanctioned and supported by the state, leaving all
others to be either sidelined or persecuted. In the 1640s and 1650s, during the
English Civil War and the formation of the English Commonwealth, the Church was
radically reformed by the formally persecuted and now victorious Puritans. This
reformation lasted until the restoration of Charles II in 1660, who reverted
the Church to its traditional form. In the years that followed, a series of
laws were passed by parliament in an attempt to finally and formally entrench
the Church of England, establish a set of basic practices, and disenfranchise
all “nonconformists” so as to ensure that they could no longer be a force in
British politics.
These included the
Corporation Act (1661) which made it necessary for all municipal officials to
take Anglican communion, the Uniformity Act (1662) which made the Book of
Common Prayer (the standard Anglican liturgical handbook) compulsory, the Conventicle
Act (1664) which prohibited unauthorized worship by meetings of more than five
people, the Five Mile Act (1665) which forbade nonconformist preachers from
coming within five miles or incorporated towns or from teaching in schools, and
the Test Acts (1673,1678) which declared that all persons (including members of
both houses of Parliament) filling any military or civil office were required
to take an oath of supremacy and allegiance to the monarch as the Supreme Head
of the Church of England, and state a formal rejection of certain key aspects
of the Catholic liturgy (transubstantiation in particular). So impenetrable
were these acts and the Protestant stronghold they created that when Charles
II’s Catholic younger brother and heir, James, Duke of York ascended the throne
in 1685 and attempted to promote religious liberty for Catholics and
nonconformists, he was deposed within three years by his daughter Mary and her
Dutch husband William. 17th-century Britain was a decidedly
Protestant land, and its political establishment increasingly of one mind as to
how their faith was to be practiced, and how their fellow congregants were to
maintain their hold on the reins of power.
It was ironically also during this era, while the Anglican Establishment was being erected in
Britain, that the philosophical Enlightenment was flourishing in intellectual
circles across Europe, and concepts like rationalism, empiricism, and religious
liberty were being openly discussed. Religious liberty in particular became a
favored topic of Enlightenment scholars and reformers who feared a return to
the religious wars of the past (in particular the recent Thirty Years War that
had devastated Central Europe between 1618 and 1648, to the cost of eight
million lives) and saw the end of established religion and the simplification
of complex religious doctrines as the surest way of avoiding future conflict.
Among the ideas that were put forward, some promoted a formal separation of
politics from religion and law, advocating instead that each person subscribe
to whichever belief they found most convincing. Others advanced the theory of
Deism, wherein God created the Universe and the physical laws by which it
operates (gravity, friction, momentum, radiation, etc…), and gave man a mind
capable of seeking out and discovering these things for himself without any
need for divine intervention. Though there was something of a divide between
those that viewed religion as absolutely necessary to the preservation of the
existing social order, and those that saw religion as deeply personal, and
concerning only the relationship between the individual and their creator,
there seemed to be a loose consensus that religion functioned best without the
use of force or coercion, when allowed to stand solely on the strength of its
fundamental moral quality.
Interestingly enough, Thomas Jefferson sat at the confluence of these two competing religious traditions.
On the one hand he was raised in late 18th-century colonial
Virginia, and like most men of his social standing was brought up in the
established Anglican faith. On the other he was a man of the Enlightenment, and
a devotee of European (and particularly French) philosophy and culture. He was
well-versed in the arguments of both sides, witnessed the operation of the
Anglican Establishment in Virginia firsthand, and showed a particular concern
for what he perceived as the corruption of Christianity’s superior moral
principles by its continued association with government. His 1779 Statute, introduced
during the first year of his tenure as Governor of Virginia, sought to address
this concern, and its successful passage in 1786 remained for him one of the
great triumphs of his lengthy public career.
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