Thomas Jefferson:  Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Jefferson once summarized his religious views by saying that he belonged to a sect that had just one member. He was raised in the Church of England, which was the established church of Virginia and as such received tax money. Additionally, Virginia law made it an offense to deny the existence of God or the Trinity, punishable, on the third offense, with imprisonment. Anyone seeking to hold public office was required to swear that he rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (the belief that the bread and wine of Holy Communion are transformed into the body and blood of Christ).

At the College of William and Mary, though, Jefferson studied the work of such Enlightenment philosophers and scientists as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon, and under their influence he adopted the views of deism. Deism was more a religious philosophy than a religion. It posited the existence of one God, a set of moral laws, and an afterlife, but it rejected notions of ongoing spiritual revelation and the belief that Christ was an incarnation of God. A common metaphor for expressing the deist view was that God was a divine watchmaker who constructed the world and set it in motion and then withdrew from involvement in human affairs. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson incorporated some of the common terminology of deism when he used such words and phrases as Creator and Nature's God.

Jefferson was a firm believer in the separation of church and state, having come to the belief that an established religion was a form of tyranny that denied people freedom of conscience. He used the now-famous phrase “wall of separation between church and state” in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists. After stating his belief that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, … that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions,” Jefferson added: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.” In his Notes on the State of Virginia he famously said: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (qtd. in Peterson, 1993, p. 59). Two hundred years later the courts continue to struggle with the precise meaning of this “wall of separation.”

Jefferson became a leader of reform in Virginia after the Revolution. In 1779 he drafted and submitted to the Virginia General Assembly the bill for establishing religious freedom. In 1786, while Jefferson was out of the country, James Madison guided a slightly revised version of the bill through the Virginia legislature. The bill is not easy reading, for the first sentence consists of 547 words. In clause upon clause Jefferson explains his justification for the bill and his opposition to any form of state-sponsored religion. He states that people have “free minds” and that efforts to make the holding of civil offices dependent on religious beliefs caused “hypocrisy and meanness.” He calls civil and religious leaders who attempted to impose their religious beliefs on others “impious” because they themselves were “fallible and uninspired men” who propagated “false religions.” He objects to any requirement that people's tax money be used to support a religion to which they did not belong and adds that even if they did belong to the religion, forcing them to contribute to religious institutions deprived them of their liberty and freedom of conscience. He asserts that people have natural civil rights and that to make such rights dependent on religious belief was to deny those rights. Jefferson continues by developing the theme of hypocrisy, stating that when the state provided privileges and salaries (“emoluments”) to people based on their adherence to a particular form of religion, doing so constituted a form of “bribery” and encouraged people to make an external show of religion. He notes that the civil government should concern itself only with “overt acts” that are destructive of peace and order, not with private religious beliefs. And finally, as was typical with Jefferson, he argues that if anyone held mistaken religious beliefs, “free argument and debate,” not civil law, would defeat the error.

The next sentence contains the essence of the bill:

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

Jefferson concludes the bill by once more citing the Enlightenment concept of “natural rights”; he asserts that any later law that infringed on religious liberty would violate a natural right.