John A. Ragosta argues plausibly that religious dissenters from the established Church in Virginia entered into an extended negotiation with the commonwealth's political leadership during the Revolution, trading support for the Revolution in exchange for increased religious toleration. Virginia's revolutionary leadership, overwhelmingly members of the Church of England, faced the need to solidify support for the war with Great Britain. Spokesmen for the dissenting sects used the exigency of war to press for greater religious freedom. “The necessity of gaining support and cooperation from the evangelicals required patriot leaders to include freedom of religion within the definition of what they were fighting for,” Ragosta writes. “As a consequence of the negotiations, the Virginia polity was reshaped to include the dissenters who had previously been effectively excluded” (11).
Ragosta emphasizes the political strength of the Church of England in Virginia prior to the Revolution. Following the path blazed by historian Rhys Isaac, Ragosta equates the power of the established Church with that of the late colonial Virginia political leadership, referring to both as the “establishment.” Like Isaac, Ragosta underscores the oppressiveness of the establishment, and their violent repression of dissenters. Consequently, he also emphasizes the extent of change instituted by passage of Thomas Jefferson's Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786. “Before the American Revolution, no colony more carefully protected its established church or more aggressively persecuted dissenters than Virginia,” he writes. “By 1786, no state provided protections for religious freedom nearly as broad or as eloquent as those in” Jefferson's bill (161).
Once the war concluded, Ragosta argues, the period of “negotiation” ended. With the end of the military struggle, the Virginia political elite saw little need to make further concessions. They refused to give consideration to dissenting petitions, and after 1783, initiated proposals to strengthen the new Protestant Episcopal Church. A key element in this “coordinated plan” (118) was a proposed general tax assessment for the support of Christian ministers. Patrick Henry emerges as a central actor in this effort. Religious dissenters, however, possessed political strength that they did not enjoy earlier, and with the adroit support of James Madison mobilized to reject the proposal. “The effort of Virginia's Tidewater gentry to recapture some stature for the formerly established church,” Ragosta writes, “was simply swept away” (125).
In a final chapter, Ragosta considers the content of religious dissenters' political commitment to religious liberty. The achievement of religious liberty occurred only because of their agency, and thus their understanding of what that meant is every bit as salient to constitutional law today as the more secular arguments of Jefferson and Madison. Virginia dissenters rejected the notion that Virginia should be a Christian state. “What was not accepted,” he writes, “at least in Virginia, was that the state had any necessary or even productive role in encouraging or endorsing religion or Christianity” (139). Strict separation of church and state, he suggests, properly must be understood as originating in the theological beliefs of the dissenters, who held that government must not “intervene in religion, even in a non-discriminatory manner—not simply to maintain the purity of government and protect the interests of minorities but to protect the interests of religion” (147). This, of course, was a staple of Baptist theology, but Ragosta argues that it characterized the religious convictions of many Presbyterians as well.
The book contains a number of flaws. Ragosta is interested in accounting for the actions of Baptists and Presbyterians, and does little to explain the decisions of “establishment” politicians. Only by the widest stretch, for example, can Patrick Henry (who drew significant dissenting support in the 1760s and 1770s, and again in 1788) be considered a member of the “Tidewater Gentry.” Much of Ragosta's evidence for the oppression of dissenting ministers by the revolutionary “establishment” derives from late eighteenth or nineteenth century sectarian histories, whose reliability and transparency Ragosta assumes. He offers a very brief and under-developed assessment of the historiography embodied by those sources in his epilogue (164) but never connects it to a critique of the biases they might contain, or the consequences for his own analysis.
There are times when the book reads like a lawyer's brief rather than an exercise in historical induction. In order to heighten the contrast between a powerful pre-Revolutionary establishment and religious dissenters, Ragosta ignores or dismisses evidence that Presbyterians routinely sat on Anglican vestries, especially in the counties of the Shenandoah Valley. Indeed, throughout the book Ragosta conflates Presbyterians and Baptists—dissenters, in his account, tended to speak from the same social, political, and theological commitments. The Episcopal “establishment” is similarly monolithic.
Perhaps the weakest argument in the book is Ragosta's claim that the struggle for religious liberty, and the subsequent inclusion of dissenters in Virginia's polity, republicanized the state's public life. Ragosta concludes by presenting the contest for religious liberty as a precursor of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy. “This period,” he writes, “and events surrounding the Revolution, produced a groundswell of political interest on the part of the broader populace, with common men (quickly followed by common women) regcognizing, demanding, and fighting for a place in society that was so much more distant in the colonial days of British Empire” (170). Perhaps so. Certainly the Baptist petition campaign democratized the relationship between constituents and their representatives. But there is considerable evidence for the continued vitality and strength of Virginia's gentry establishment well into the nineteenth century. Who co-opted whom?
Despite these and other problems, however, this is a timely and useful book. Ragosta's insistence on the agency of dissenters is refreshing and timely. This book makes a worthy contribution to the ongoing study of religious freedom in the United States.
