A Century and a Half of Establishment and the Statute That Ended It

The Church of England was Virginia's established religion for a century and a half, funded by taxes levied on every colonist regardless of their own denomination, a system that dated to the Anglican parish founded alongside the Jamestown settlement itself in 1607. Dissenting congregations, Baptist and Presbyterian above all, grew steadily through the eighteenth century despite the tax burden and occasional legal harassment, building the popular pressure that made disestablishment possible once the Revolution had already broken the colony's political ties to England.

Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted in 1777 but not enacted until 1786 after a fight James Madison led through the legislature in Jefferson's absence, went further than simply ending the Anglican tax. It declared that no person could be compelled to support any religious worship at all and that opinions in matters of religion could never be a proper object of civil government, language scholars of the establishment clause treat as the direct model for the First Amendment's own religion clauses three years later. Jefferson himself considered the statute one of his three great achievements, alongside writing the Declaration of Independence and founding the University of Virginia, important enough that he had it listed on his tombstone while his presidency was not. Williamsburg's First Baptist Church, organised around 1776 by enslaved and free Black worshippers before the statute even passed, is among the oldest Black congregations in the country and its own founding predates the religious liberty Virginia law would soon guarantee it.