Capping a decade-long effort, Thomas Jefferson (pictured) finally succeeded in getting Virginia to enact a
statute of religious freedom that would later serve as a model for the First
Amendment guarantee of freedom of conscience. But the measure only passed in
January 1786 with the help of the younger man who steered it through the
legislature, James Madison.
Jefferson regarded the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom as so key to his legacy that
it was one of only three achievements he wished carved on his gravestone on the
grounds of his Monticello estate.(The others were writing the Declaration of Independence and founding the University of Virginia--not serving as America's first Secretary of State, or its third President.)
If Jefferson was the architect of religious freedom
in the new republic, then Madison was the contractor engaged in translating his
blueprint into reality. The latter would play a similar role over the next two
decades, assisting Jefferson in forming an opposition party to the economic
plans of Alexander Hamilton, in secretly co-writing the Virginia and Kentucky
Resolutions against the Federalist-sponsored Alien and Sedition Acts, and in
acting as Secretary of State through Jefferson’s two terms as President.
Their collaboration began in the 1770s, at a time
when religious agitation was echoing the larger mercantile and political unrest
convulsing Virginia. In 1774, “Dissenting” ministers—at that point,
Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist sects—had been harassed, even beaten and jailed, in the colony.
In
what became Madison’s first important cause, petitions began to arrive at the legislature calling for the
“Disestablishment” of the Anglican Church. Two years later, at Virginia’s
revolutionary convention, Jefferson joined with Madison in trying to excise all
“emoluments and privileges” from religion. But they could only succeed in
replacing the phrase “fullest toleration in the exercise of religion” with
“free exercise of religion.”
Jefferson particularly felt at a loss in debating
the measure, because his weak voice could not advance his powerful words. (For
the rest of his career, he tried, whenever possible, to avoid public
speaking—even sending the State of the Union summary to Congress in written
form, a practice continued by other Presidents until Woodrow Wilson broke with
tradition more than a century later.) Thus was joined what he would call
"the severest contest in which I have ever been engaged."
The impetus for the eventually successful
legislation came in 1784, when Governor Patrick Henry called for taxing
Virginians to support the promotion of Christianity. His proposal, which soon
garnered widespread support (including from the likes of "Light-Horse Harry" Lee and George Washington), called for individuals to designate the
denomination, or even the specific church, that their tax dollars would fund.
Those who didn't want to support religion could even elect to put their tax
dollars toward education in general.
Madison felt that, seemingly as liberal as this
seemed, it was still too intrusive, because the same state authority that could
direct funds to any Christian sect could later turn around and designate a
particular Christian sect. He lost the original fight in the legislature
against Henry, but in the hiatus that followed, rallied opposition to the plan
with a powerfully argued “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments." With Henry’s proposal now allowed to quietly die in the legislature, Madison
seized the moment to reintroduce Jefferson’s measure.
Even then, much like his first draft of the
Declaration of Independence, some clauses were stripped away from the three-paragraph
statute, including:
*“Well aware that the opinions and belief of men
depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to
their minds”;
*[God] “manifested his supreme will that free it [the
mind] shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint”;
*[God chose] “but to extend it [his plan] by its
influence on reason alone”; and that
*“the opinions of men are not the object of civil
government, nor under its jurisdiction.”
The deletions revolve around the notion that
religious belief depends on reason, an idea that perhaps, to many, smacked too
much of Jefferson’s deism. One passage that survived the cuts, in fact, would
have been understood by the Protestant legislators as a not-so-subtle jab at
Roman Catholicism: “the impious presumption of legislators...[who] have assumed
dominion over the faith of others...hath established and maintained false
religions over the greatest part of the world.”
Jefferson is not my favorite among the
Revolutionary War generation. His hypocrisy as a slaveowner is only one of a
number of ways in which his political and personal judgment was deficient. He
also recognized far too late the damage done by France’s Reign of Terror;
blustered about taking Canada with little more than a squadron of gunboats,
leaving the United States unprepared when it did invade its northern neighbor
in the War of 1812; secretly funded attacks on Hamilton and even George
Washington, then denied he had done so; and planted the seeds of secession with
his contention, in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, that states could
nullify federal legislation.
As Jefferson did so often in his political writing,
he fashioned a coherent, persuasive brief on the proper role of church and
state, only to nearly undo it all with rhetoric that his allies had to water
down. The Statute, in fact, contributed to the misperception that he was an atheist.
That did not accurately describe Jefferson’s religious
feelings, but they were complicated enough that he realized they could be
misconstrued, so he discussed his spiritual search with only a few intimates. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, another deist, he did not believe, more
or less, that virtually all religions had good points and deserved his money.
As a spiritual corollary to his notion that that government was best which
governed least, he felt that that religion was best with the least number of
priests. “There would never have been an infidel if there had never been a
priest,” he wrote to Mrs. Samuel Smith. Four years before his death, he wrote
another confidant, “I trust there is not a young man now living in the United
States who will not die a Unitarian.”
Jefferson could foresee an end to multiple religious
sects, but not a day when America could let go of slavery, the “wolf [held] by
the ears.” He was wrong on both counts. Yet he correctly saw the egalitarian
value of educational institutions and libraries, and, early on, grasped the
value and necessity of state non-interference with religion.
In one sense, Jefferson’s defense of religious
freedom ultimately helped to preserve the foremost physical embodiment of his
legacy. Each year, thousands make the pilgrimage to Monticello, his neoclassically inspired mansion in Virginia’s
Piedmont region. What hardly anyone realizes is that it was a near-run thing
whether the estate would sink into irretrievable ruin following his death in
1826—and that one of the only reasons it survived was because two of its
subsequent owners could not forget the debt of gratitude they owed the author
of the religious freedom statute for helping to create a space where they could
live out their Jewish faith without fear of harassment or persecution.
Strapped for money, Jefferson could not maintain
Monticello in the last few years before his death, leaving the grounds in what
several observers saw as “slovenly” conditions. Charlottesville druggist James
Barclay, upon buying the property from Jefferson’s daughter, allowed it to
continue to deteriorate. It took Lt. (later Commodore) Uriah P. Levy, who bought Monticello from Barclay in
1834, and his nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy, to stop the estate’s decay and restore it to at least something like
its old grandeur.
Uriah Levy’s admiration for Jefferson was
unconditional: “I consider Thomas Jefferson to be one of the greatest men in
history, the author of the Declaration and an absolute democrat. He serves as
an inspiration to millions of Americans. He did much to mold our Republic in a
form in which a man's religion does not make him ineligible for political or
governmental life."
Had Lt. Levy known of Jefferson’s private views, he
might have experienced something like the surprise I had in Providence in
mid-fall, when I discovered that that earlier champion of religious tolerance,
Roger Williams, had been scathing in his views on Catholics. In Jefferson’s
case, he regarded Jewish ideas of God and his attributes as “degrading and
injurious,” and their ethics “often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of
reason and morality” and “repulsive and anti-social as respecting other
nations.”
At the same time, Jefferson was not anti-Semitic; he
was merely submitting Judaism to the same skeptical focus he trained on all
religions, and particularly any in which a mediating minister was involved.
But he did think that any person was free to believe as exactly as they might
wish, no matter how illogical or wrongheaded he personally might regard it.
As
he put it, in most succinct and memorable form, in Notes on the State of Virginia: “The rights of conscience we never
submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. 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. ... Reason and free
enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”
No comments:
Post a Comment