The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

Thomas Jefferson drafted the bill in 1777 and it was introduced in 1779. It did not pass for seven more years, and what happened in between is the substance of the story.

Virginia had an established church. Anglican clergy were paid from a general levy, dissenting preachers had been jailed for preaching without a licence within living memory, and the Revolution had suspended the levy without settling the question. The compromise proposed in 1784 was a general assessment: a tax for the support of teachers of the Christian religion, with each taxpayer naming the denomination his share should go to. Patrick Henry led it and it very nearly passed.

James Madison answered in 1785 with the Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, arguing that religion is a duty owed to the Creator that can be directed only by reason and conviction, that it lies outside the cognizance of civil society altogether, and that a legislature able to establish Christianity in preference to other religions may with the same ease establish one sect in preference to the rest. Petitions bearing thousands of signatures, many of them from Baptist and Presbyterian congregations that had felt the licensing laws, came in against the assessment. It died in committee, and Madison brought Jefferson's nine year old bill forward in its place. It passed on 16 January 1786.

The statute is short and its structure is deliberate. A long preamble argues the case: that God made the mind free, that attempts to influence it by punishment beget habits of hypocrisy, that the civil magistrate intruding his powers into the field of opinion destroys all religious liberty, and that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself. The enacting clause then does the work in one sentence. And the third section, unusually, admits that no assembly can bind its successors, but declares that the rights asserted are of the natural rights of mankind and that any act to repeal the present or to narrow its operation would be an infringement of natural right.

Two features shaped what came after. The statute protects opinion in matters of religion without limiting itself to Christians, and Jefferson recorded in his autobiography that an attempt to insert the name of Jesus Christ in the preamble was rejected, which he took as proof that the protection was meant to cover the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination. And it separates civil capacity from belief: a man's standing in law is not affected by what he professes.

Jefferson had three achievements cut on his tombstone. This is one of them, and the presidency is not.