Though it is remarkably brief,
considering the weighty topic it seeks to address, Jefferson’s Statute for
Religious Freedom covers a lot of ground. Discussing, at turns, the nature of
free will, reason and truth, the inherent fallibility of man, and the
impossibility of objectivity, it is in some ways more of a philosophical treatise
than a piece of legislation. Its character is decidedly that of the
Enlightenment, though it also carries the influence of the British view of
established religion (as inherited by the various colonies), and possibly of
earlier American attempts at making freedom of conscience a matter of law.
The Statute is divided into three
sections, the first of which acts as a sort of preamble that attempts to
establish the intellectual and moral basis of the proposed law. Among the ideas
that Jefferson puts forward in this section, most could be said to flow out of
an Enlightenment, or more specifically Deist, worldview. First, he asserts that
God granted to man both free will and the ability to reason, and that because
the Almighty chose not to propagate religious belief by force, though he could
very easily do so, he must have wanted his creations to make use of these
faculties and decide on such matters for themselves. It then follows, Jefferson
claims, that attempts to forcefully convert or coerce any person into believing
or supporting a particular religious faith controverts the implicit will of God.
To this first argument, Jefferson
couples an affirmation of the inability of man to sit in judgement of the
religious beliefs of others as a consequence of his intrinsic weakness. Men, he
claims, are “fallible and uninspired,” and manifestly incapable of accurately
or objectively evaluating, for the benefit of others, the suitability of
religious faiths that are foreign to their experience. More often than not, a
man who finds himself tasked with weighing the rightness of this or that set of
beliefs in the public sphere will simply take his own as the baseline, and
“approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or
differ from his own.” Because this would further contravene the God-granted
free will of those whose faith is being judged, and create a nation of
followers rather than believers, it is, in Jefferson’s view, wholly
unacceptable.
Furthermore, and in a somewhat
veiled criticism of the traditions of the Anglican Establishment, Jefferson
argues that, in addition to people suffering under the yoke of religious regimes,
religion itself suffers too. A great believer in the Enlightenment concept of
natural rights, he claims in his 1779 Statute that every person has the
fundamental right to form their own religious opinion, and to not have that
opinion, unless it’s proven to be an extraordinarily destructive one, held
against them in the eyes of the law or used to discriminate against them in any
way. Successful attempts at disenfranchising or otherwise persecuting those
deemed religious outsiders, nonconformists, or dissenters had become common a
features of both the British and colonial administrations, particularly in the
17th century, as each sought to create a stable social order defined
by a set of agreed upon elite values. This previously mentioned Anglican
Establishment had solidified in Britain in the 1660s and 1670, and managed to
sideline any number of Catholics, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists,
and Methodists, as well as a host of more radical faiths, like the Quakers,
Shakers, Diggers and Adamites. This persistent persecution was, in fact, the
central motivation behind much of the British emigration to North America, and
influenced the formation of colonial governments that formally promoted
religious liberty (such as in Pennsylvania or Rhode Island), and those that
sought to perpetuate religious exclusion on their own terms (as with the
Puritans of Massachusetts and Connecticut).
Jefferson also asserted that
religion itself, in its purest moral sense, suffers greatly by its association
with the use of coercion, and by “bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours
and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it.” In Britain
and in many of the colonies, the Church of England was closely intertwined with
the political status quo. By the 1670s, only communion-taking Anglicans could
sit in the House of Commons or accept positions in the military hierarchy,
bishops continued to sit in the House of Lords, and the Supreme Head of the
Church of England was the reigning British monarch. Much of this carried over
to Virginia, where political office was denied to non-Anglicans, and priests
were paid and housed at government expense. In Jefferson’s view, this
confluence of spiritual authority and political and economic power ultimately
corrupts the virtues that religion (and by that he no doubt means Christianity)
is meant to encourage, like charity, humility, and honesty. As well, by
rewarding outward professions of faith with greater social and economic
influence without being able to truly measure a person’s sincerity, religious
establishments served only to fill their congregations with shallow, ambitious
wealth-seekers who have no compunctions about mouthing the words of one faith
while holding another in their hearts. This too, Jefferson sought to avoid.
The idea of a religious
establishment also ran contrary to what Jefferson believed was the nature of
truth itself. At the end of his initial preamble, he concludes that, “truth is
great and will prevail if left to herself,” has nothing to fear from conflict
or disagreement, and will always triumph if free argument and reasoned debate
are permitted. This is another notion derived from the Enlightenment; that
though there was such a thing as truth it belonged to no one sect or faith. The
purpose of life, then, was to seek out this truth, test it against reason, and
distill and render it down to something pure and universal; remembering always
that truth aided by force or coercion is only an illusion. In Jefferson’s
opinion, the Anglican Establishment was inherently flawed because it required
the apparatus of the state to prop it up, silence its critics and spread its
doctrine. If the Church feared debate, he believed that it was only because it
knew that its own principles would not stand up to scrutiny. For the author of
the Declaration of Independence, this was manifestly unjust and illogical and
needed to be done away with.
This was, among other things, the
purpose of the Virginia Statute. By making religion solely a matter of
conscience it freed government from committing egregious sins against the will
of God, freed religion from the temptation of material wealth and advantage,
took account of the fallibility of mankind, and made the laws Virginia better
reflect those of nature and of truth. Rather than try to describe or paraphrase
the core of the Statute, the second section which actually defines what is and
is not to be permitted, I’ll simply excerpt the entire paragraph. It reads, in
a very straightforward and concise manner:
“Be it enacted by the General
Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support an religious
worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained,
molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on
account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to
profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and
that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil
capacities.”
Of particular importance is the fact
that Jefferson makes no mention of the Protestant, or even Christian faith.
Though there were a comparatively small number of Jewish people living in the
Unites States at the end of the 18th century, and far fewer of any
other religions, he believed that freedom of conscience must be absolute if it’s
to mean anything at all. In addition to being a far cry from the established
traditions of Britain and its colonies, the Statute went further even than most
attempts by said colonies to promote religious liberty in years prior.
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