“Author of the Declaration of American Independence / of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom / & Father of the University of Virginia”: with these words, Thomas Jefferson famously wished to be remembered on his tombstone. In his new book, John Ragosta presents an in-depth analysis of the second of Jefferson's self-ascribed legacies, his vision of religious freedom. Making a strong case for the continuing relevance of this vision, Ragosta aims at correcting two major misconceptions. First, he demonstrates that the long line of commentators who have reductively identified Jefferson's position as that of an enemy of religion have tended to rely on a “false dichotomy” (3–4) between a “Christian nation” and an entirely secular one. Yet Jefferson's concept of religious freedom worked differently: “While Jefferson demanded a firm wall of separation of church and state,” Ragosta argues, “he neither feared nor opposed a flourishing religious society beyond that wall” (30). In a second and methodologically somewhat more complicated step, Ragosta seeks to resituate this Jeffersonian vision at the center of the interpretation of the First Amendment. Deeply critical of recent attempts to marginalize Jefferson and the Virginia experience in this context, he maintains that Jefferson's notion of religious freedom was crucial both for the genesis of the Amendment itself and for more than one and a half centuries of Constitutional history afterwards. It is because of this doubly important place in American history, Ragosta concludes in a move that may be described as Jeffersonian in more than one respect, that we should continue to turn to Jefferson's vision in our approaches to the relationship between church and state in the twenty-first century.

Religious Freedom: Jefferson's Legacy, America's Creed begins with a careful reading of Jefferson's religious reasoning (no contradiction in terms, for Jefferson). In its claim that his ideas on the separation of church and state actually emerged from his deep religious beliefs, the first chapter provides the ground for the book's larger argument for the continuing attractiveness of Jefferson's legacy in today's America. In its thorough investigation of the sources and its nuanced modes of explanation, moreover, Ragosta's examination of Jefferson's religious views is emblematic of the quality of the following chapters, which evolve in roughly chronological order, from a discussion of the Virginia experience (building on Ragosta's 2010 book, Wellspring of Liberty) and Jefferson's and James Madison's roles in the history of the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom and the First Amendment (read as a “broad restriction on the power of the federal government” (130)) to the impact of Jeffersonian views on the debates about religious freedom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The first chapter may also be useful here to suggest two possible shortcomings of Religious Freedom: Jefferson's Legacy, America's Creed. In his emphasis on the consistency of Jefferson's vision, Ragosta may sometimes overstate his case. Can we be certain, for instance, that Jefferson “believed” in divine intervention and should therefore be classified as a theist rather than a deist (23–24)? It does not seem compelling to go that far, not only because of Jefferson's virtual excision of supernatural events from the Bible, but also because a striking number of his statements on the topic were made on occasions when the move to downplay his personal agency by a conventional appeal to an active providence served identifiable political ends, whether in his inaugural addresses or in his arguments on slavery. Jefferson was under little pressure to decide for or against “supernatural interference” on theological grounds, but he certainly recognized a rhetorical opportunity when he saw one.

Another aspect of Jefferson's worldview that might have been treated with even more care than Ragosta devotes to it is the relationship between Jefferson's vision of religious freedom and his conception of historical progress. This would also have been important for the discussion of originalism in the concluding chapter, which is dominated by terms that are essentially Jeffersonian, also in Ragosta's own prose. In an argumentative overlap that often becomes a problem in Enlightenment studies, Ragosta draws a Jeffersonian circle in which a “break with history” can usher in the need to “start with history” (213), describing the task of today's historians as a matter of distinguishing “principles” (a favorite term of Jefferson's) from the contingent realm of “history.” Jefferson's vision of religious freedom, thus understood as a (trans-historical) “American/Jeffersonian principle” in Ragosta's conclusion, appears at the center of a “truly exceptional American doctrine” (217), as America's greatest “contribution” to universal civilization and as “a beacon for others to emulate” (221). Since Jefferson's exceptionalist narrative of American progress was fraught with highly problematic implications, it remains questionable whether a revival of his self-serving historical claims really helps illuminate the many important insights on religious freedom that Ragosta's valuable book has to offer.