Any scholar who has studied the religious disestablishment of the United States during the founding period has likely considered the experience in Virginia between 1776 and 1787. In fact, the Commonwealth stands out as the essential example of religious disestablishment in America for several reasons. First, several of the key figures in the revolutionary movement toward greater religious freedom—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, and Patrick Henry—were Virginians, and they developed their ideas on the subject during that state's struggle before exporting them nationwide. As is the familiar account, Madison led the fight in the Virginia legislature against reimposing religious assessments with his eloquent Memorial and Remonstrance, ultimately succeeding in having the legislature adopt Jefferson's monumental Statute Establishing Religious Freedom. Jefferson's Statute would be hailed as the exemplar of religious freedom nationwide, and Madison would go on to propose the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
A second reason why the history of Virginia's disestablishment matters is that the U.S. Supreme Court told us so. In the first seminal case interpreting the meaning of the Establishment Clause, Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the justices relied exclusively on the Virginia experience and the writings of Jefferson and Madison. That episode, and not that of any other state, became the basis for the justices’ understanding of church-state separation under law. Thus the Virginia experience, and Jefferson's Statute, stand in unparalleled significance in considerations about disestablishment in the United States.
For close to forty years, one study of revolutionary disestablishment in Virginia has stood out as an indispensable scholarly resource: Thomas E. Buckley's Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776–1787 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977). Comprehensive and balanced, Buckley's Church and State left little more to be said about the episode (although many others have added their voices to the discussion). It became and remains the essential study of the event. That being the case, one might wonder why Buckley chose to return to the subject and what more could be said. As it turns out, a lot more. Although Buckley recounts the story of Virginia's disestablishment in the book's first three chapters, that episode is not the true focus of this study. The book's sub-title, Jefferson's Statute in Virginia, indicates the book's topic—the book is not so much about the battle over disestablishment that resulted in Jefferson's Statute; rather it is about the subsequent life and meaning of the Statute itself within Virginia.
Most scholarly and polemical considerations of Virginia's disestablishment and Jefferson's Statute have concluded with the adoption of the latter in 1786. Scholars, judges, and popular writers have interpreted both events in vastly different ways, but have rarely considered how the Statute was interpreted and applied in the years following 1786. As a stakeholder in the history of Virginia's disestablishment, Buckley has apparently been troubled by some of the claims that have been made about both events. His thesis is that the Statute's significance cannot be fully appreciated without understanding how it was subsequently applied. Here is where Buckley tells us “the rest of the story,” to use radio commentator Paul Harvey's catch-phrase, and it is an interesting and revealing account.
As noted, Buckley recounts in the first three chapters the movement toward disestablishment in Virginia between 1776 and 1786. As he has in previous writings, Buckley demonstrates that the episode was more complex than is frequently told. Although Patrick Henry is often portrayed as the opponent of disestablishment based on his support for religious assessments, Buckley shows (correctly) that Henry's belief about the necessity of Christian virtue for republican government was widely shared among the people. Henry comes off as a moderate, setting out a middle position between those who wanted to reinstate the Episcopal Church as the established church and those like Madison who shared a rationalistic religious perspective. Buckley also emphasizes—again correctly—that the impetus for greater religious freedom came from many quarters and that the various groups did not agree about how far to go. But most significantly, Buckley places the debate over disestablishment and the adoption of Jefferson's Statute within the complex legacy of Virginia's long history of maintaining a religious establishment—in many ways unique among all of the colonies—and of the difficulty in disentangling the state and its people, legally and emotionally, from its previous religious arrangement.
Historians like Buckley have long sought to explain the complexity of religious establishments, in particular, how Erastian-type systems as existed in Virginia operated, with the legislature exercising considerable control over the established church. Thus disentangling the state from the church, and changing old habits, did not come easily. First, Buckley describes how the Virginia legislature, despite Jefferson's Statute now being law, continued to intermeddle in religious and church affairs. And, at least initially, the legislators had much to deal with. Disestablishment had not resolved the more practical issues of how to settle and disburse property—chiefly glebes—that the Virginian Church of England had acquired over the previous 150 years. The growing evangelical populace insisted that, because church property had been acquired through forced assessments, it should now be seized and divided. This battle, and the related one over church incorporations—which would protect church ownership of property—would embroil the Virginia legislature for decades. As Buckley demonstrates, as a result of these battles, state involvement over church affairs and property actually increased in the years following disestablishment. Despite the Statute's guarantee of religious freedom and church-state separation, Buckley notes, for many years “churches and religious groups were less free in the Old Dominion that anywhere else in the Union” (255).
Establishing Religious Freedom’s discussion of the legacy of Jefferson's Statute extends throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Buckley notes how after the Second Great Awakening, evangelicals came to interpret the libertarian language of the Statute as supporting their arguments against state restrictions in their efforts to make Virginia a Christian state. So, ironically, the growing evangelical populace did not view the Statute as standing in the way of enacting sumptuary laws and encouraging prayer and Bible reading in the public schools. Increasingly, a Christian state coexisted comfortably with Jefferson's Statute.
Establishing Religious Freedom is well-written, balanced, and carefully documented. With its focus on Virginia, chiefly during the nineteenth century, it may not receive the same attention as Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia. Nonetheless, the book presents the story of one state's efforts to balance an ideal about church-state relations with evolving popular attitudes and cultural forces. It provides an important postscript to most considerations about religious disestablishment in America.
