How An Unlikely Alliance Between Thomas Jefferson and Christian Fundamentalists Brought About Religious Freedom

00:00:10 Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, and we love hearing listeners’ stories. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites, and you don’t have to write them down at length. You can send a link. You can send the story from a local newspaper or a local TV show. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. Click the Your Stories button, and the rest is easy. Up next: The idea of religious freedom is a relatively new and American invention. It was first written as a principle in the Colony of Maryland in 1634, but it wasn’t until Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom for it to become the principle of our entire nation. Here to tell the story of how religious freedom became a guiding American idea is John Regosta at Monticello. Take it away, John.

00:01:11 Speaker 2: As the Revolution is coming on, the Anglican Church is still the established church, and there have been revivals, so we’re seeing more and more dissenters, would be the term they would use: Quakers, New Light Baptists, Presbyterians. This is a growing part of the population. Now, we don’t know exactly how much, but the estimates run from anywhere from 20% to even more than a third of the population were dissenting from the Anglican Church. Well, as that population increases, the Anglican Church establishment started to support persecution of those dissenters, violent persecution. There are cases where they’re dunked in lakes, where rocks are thrown at them. There’s a case where the hounds are released on a dissenting minister. At the time of the American Revolution, over half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia have been jailed. And this is not a country club jail. They’re thrown into 18th-century jail cells for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace, which is a trumped-up charge because they’re not Anglican. Their churches were not churches; they were meeting houses. The only church is the Anglican Church. And Jefferson says, ‘We can tolerate everyone.’ You want to understand American religious freedom? Thomas Jefferson. The Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. He is hatched, matched, and dispatched. Anglican baptized, he is married, and he is buried by an Anglican minister. His granddaughters talk about remember hearing him around the house humming old Anglican hymns, and so on. But, importantly for Jefferson, that tradition is not the same as belief. He’s asked by a friend of the family to be the godfather for an infant that was going to be baptized. Now, I don’t know if you’ve done that. I’ve done it. You know, family friends ask you to be a godparent. You say, ‘Of course, I’d be happy to do that.’ It’s a happy occasion, and one doesn’t want to fuss about it too much. Jefferson refused. And he refused. He said, ‘If I was the godparent, I would have to stand up in the Episcopal Church and swear fidelity to the 39 doctrines of the Church.’ Most godparents sort of ignore. Jeffer says, ‘I can’t do that.’ Religion is very serious for him; he takes it very seriously. He studies religion. When he’s a student at William and Mary, he buys a Quran because he’s interested in Islamic law. He starts out in a very traditional Church of England. He ends up with his own personal religion. He’s very much a theist. He believes in a Creator God. He believes that God deserves worship, and that’s a lifelong belief for Jefferson, and it’s really central for Jefferson. But then we get into the nontraditional things. He concludes that Jesus is not divine; he rejects the Resurrection, he rejects the Trinity, he rejects original sin. So, by no means a traditional Christian. And he also believes — and this is interesting, and it leads very much into Jefferson and religious freedom in the founding of the country — he believes that it is critical that everybody be able to think for themselves and come to their own decisions about religion. And he also believes that Christianity is going to be good for the country because Christianity tells you not only to love your neighbor, to love your family, but to love your enemy. And so he says we’re going to have a multiethnic, multigeographic, multireligious country that we think of, a melting pot. And Jefferson says, ‘In that kind of a country and a republic, we all need to get along.’ And the way to do that is to keep government out of it. Let everybody have their own religious beliefs, which we’re going to protect, and be tolerant of everyone else. By the time of the American Revolution, every one of the colonies had some religious restrictions. We sometimes think that, you know, Rhode Island had religious freedom, Pennsylvania had religious freedom — not completely. They still had requirements in their laws. If you wanted to be an official, if you wanted to vote, if you wanted to testify in court, you had to swear on the Old and New Testaments, for example. So Jews are going to be excluded. You know, swear you believe in God. Most of the states still had an established religion. And by established religion, I mean the government’s going to support this religion. First of all, probably with tax money. So in Virginia, everybody was paying a tax to support the minister. It doesn’t matter if you’re Baptist, Presbyterian, or Quaker. You’re paying a tax to support the Anglican Church. And the second thing is, the government is going to support you by giving you certain privileges. So in Virginia, the Anglican Church was going to be responsible for orphans. And that sounds like a good thing, except that if a Baptist family or Presbyterian family died and left orphaned children, the Anglican vestry would make sure that those children were raised in a good Anglican household. We’re going to get them out of that Baptist and Presbyterian religion. So this is what’s going on. And these deeply religious Evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists absolutely joined with Jefferson and Madison for strict religious freedom and strict separation of church and state. The real birth of American religious freedom is that battle in the context of the American Revolution, when Jefferson, Madison, and the Evangelicals come to the fore.

00:07:01 Speaker 1: And you’re listening to John Regosta of Monticello tell the story of Jefferson’s unlikely alliance with Evangelical Christians to protect churches from the power of the state. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Thomas Jefferson and how the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom came to be here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history — from war to innovation, culture, and faith — are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t cut to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we returned to Our American Stories and our story on Thomas Jefferson and religious freedom in our country. When we last left off, we learned about the religious prosecution of Baptists and other so-called dissenters by the Anglican Church on the eve of the American Revolution — something that upset Thomas Jefferson, despite his unorthodox religious beliefs that stood totally opposed to those thrown in jail. Let’s return to the story. Here again is John Regosta.

00:08:44 Speaker 2: Over half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia had been jailed. But the leaders — those same Virginia families we know of — realized, ‘If we’re going to battle the greatest power on Earth, the British Empire, we need those people on our side.’ Madison, in one of his earliest letters that we have preserved, he writes to his best friend from college about the diabolical, hell-conceived notion of religious persecution. And he’s talking about the fact that in Culpeper County — he’s in Orange County, Virginia — there were four Baptist ministers in jail for preaching. Patrick Henry, the first governor of Virginia, actually exchanges letters with his cabinet and is basically saying, ‘We need those Presbyterians from the Shenandoah Valley.’ And the reason we need those Presbyterians from the Shenandoah Valley is those are the guys with the long rifles that can hit a squirrel at 100 yards. We want those guys on our side. And it’s Shenandoah Valley Presbyterians are to take a critical role in the war and in the Battle of Saratoga. So there’s a very practical political reason. And then you add to that the Thomas Jefferson, James Madison views about religious freedom and separation of church and state. That’s what results in the real birth of American religious freedom. And it doesn’t happen overnight. Before he becomes governor, he comes back, and to put this in context, we need to remember he just came back from the Continental Congress and writing the Declaration of Independence. Okay. So he comes back to Virginia, and he’s elected to the new legislature because we have a new state constitution in 1776. And the legislature realizes we’ve got a lot of laws on the books that are British Empire laws. They only make sense in a British colony. And so Jefferson and George Witt and I believe it’s Edmund Pendleton are given the job of taking the entire statute book for Virginia and redrafting it for a new independent state. And number 82 is the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom. And it’s a beautiful bill. I urge your listeners to read.

00:10:54 Speaker 3: It well aware that the opinions and leaf of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God half created the mind free and manifested his supreme will, that free it shall remain, by making altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness in our departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who, being lowered both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his almighty power to do so, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone; that the impioused presumption of legislatures and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired man, have assumed domain over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions in modes of thinking as the only true, through, and infallible, and as such, endeavoring to impose them upon others, have established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.

00:12:12 Speaker 2: Jefferson, of course, is so good with the pen. It’s so beautiful — the preamble to this statute. It’s introduced in the legislature in 1779, just as he’s becoming the second governor of Virginia. But it languishes, and it doesn’t come back until 1784 when Patrick Henry, the first governor of Virginia who’s now back in the legislature, introduced the General Assessment Bill. And the idea was, they all agreed that the system before the Revolution had to change. But Henry and others had this great idea. They said, ‘Look, the government should support religion because religion’s good for society.’ And so we’re going to tax everybody. But unlike the old system where we taxed everybody and gave all the money to the Anglican Church, we’re going to do this fairly. We’ll tax everybody, and then we’ll ask people, ‘Well, who do you want us to give your money to — Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker, or Methodist?’ You just tell us Anglican, and we’ll go to everybody, and that’s how we’ll divvy the money up. So that’s fair, right? Jefferson’s, of course, Minister to France at that time. But Madison has his Bill for Religious Freedom in his hands, and Madison and the Evangelicals launch a massive political campaign — a mail-in campaign. They’re sending petitions to the General Assembly saying, ‘You can’t do that.’ We need to keep government out of religion entirely. That it’s none of the government’s business. We want a separation of church and state. So Henry’s General Assessment Bill is defeated, and Madison says, ‘I’ve got this wonderful bill, Jefferson’s Bill for the Establishment of Religious Freedom,’ and he drops that on the table. Within a month, by January 1786, it’s adopted. This is really one of the great original thoughts in America, because in Europe, even a progressive would have thought of religious toleration at the time. We have an established church in England. We have an established church in France. We have an established church in Germany. We might tolerate other religions. American religious freedom goes much further than that, because toleration suggests there’s a right and a wrong. The government knows the right and will allow you to be wrong. Jefferson’s idea — the Evangelical idea — is, ‘No, it’s a personal decision. Government stays out.’ And he not only translates the Virginia Statute into several foreign languages, he also translates his version rather than the edited version that was actually adopted by the Virginia legislature, because he thought his version was better. So he translates this, and he sends it around, and it becomes part of how Europeans understand America. So when Kentucky becomes a state, I actually found a booklet that Kentucky had printed trying to get people to emigrate from Europe, telling all of the wonderful things you can have in Kentucky: ‘We’ve got land, got opportunity.’ And the back of the pamphlet is Jefferson’s statute. Word for word, this is religious freedom in America. Jefferson later in life says that American religious freedom in that statute is intended to encompass the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu and the Infidel, of every denomination. That’s Jefferson’s vision. And I always point out to people there’s not a lot of Hindus in America at the end of the 18th century, the beginning of the 19th century, but Jefferson understood there would be. We’re creating a republic, and it’s got to be for all people at all times. Religious freedom is for all people at all times. That idea is so fundamentally the melting pot. E pluribus unum, the Latin what used to be our motto, the Latin model, ‘Out of many, one,’ that what makes America strong is not that we’re all Presbyterians, or we’re all Baptists, or we’re all Republicans, or we’re all Democrats, or we’re all Federalists, or we’re all Whigs. But in America, we fundamentally support essential principles. Jefferson said: ‘Anybody should be American who comes to this country and takes an oath of fidelity to American principles.’ Other countries are based on where you’re born, what your religion is, who your parents are. In America, we’re based on principles. Jefferson famously his tombstone. You might think he would mention that he was President, that he was a Vice President, that he was Ambassador to France. He doesn’t mention any of that; doesn’t mention that he’s a loving father, devoted grandfather, gardener, paleontologist, inventor. None of that, he tells us. He said, ‘I want my tombstone to read: Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.’ And not a word more. Political freedom, religious freedom, public education. He was talking to us. He’s talking about the foundation of a functioning democracy. We’ll fight about how to do them, but those three things are the foundation.

00:17:22 Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monte Montgomery. A special thanks to John Regosta at Monticello. One of the most beautiful parts of this great country, the Shenandoah Valley, tucked away in Charlottesville, Virginia, not far from UVA — the aforementioned UVA — of which Thomas Jefferson was not just the father but the chief architect. The story of religious freedom in America, the story of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy. In the end, here on Our American Stories.