Before the Revolution, there was no separation of church and state in the American colonies. Many colonies supported established churches with tax dollars. Others imposed religious restrictions on voting or holding office.
In Virginia, the most populous colony, the Church of England was the established church. Everyone paid taxes to support it, even non-members: Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Lutherans, and other religious dissenters. For most, the church tax was the largest tax they paid. The Anglican Church also controlled marriage, poor relief, care of orphans, and enforced laws regarding profanity and church attendance. If dissenters with young children died, Anglican officials would often place the orphaned children in a good Anglican home. Religious dissenters who failed to attend Anglican services regularly were frequently fined, while a blind-eye was turned to Anglican members’ absences.
But in spite of this discrimination, religious dissent grew rapidly in the mid-18th century, led by evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists. In response, Anglicans turned from legal discrimination to outright persecution.
Establishment supporters chased dissenting ministers with dogs, threw rocks and occasionally fired a shot. Men on horseback whipped gathered worshippers. A hornets’ nest was thrown into one prayer meeting. A communion table was desecrated with “the most slovenly things,” Baptist minister Morgan Edwards reported.
By the time of the American Revolution, over half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia suffered jail time on trumped-up charges of disturbing the peace or preaching without a license. Many countered that their license came from “King Jesus.” Even in prison, ministers were attacked: James Ireland was urinated on as he preached from a ground-level window in a Culpeper County jail; John Weatherford, with arms outstretched in prayer from his cell in Chesterfield County, had his arms cut with knives.
Despite these attacks, when the Revolution began, dissenters accounted for as much as one third of Virginia’s population, and patriot leaders quickly realized that their support was desperately needed in the fight against Britain. Dissenters saw their chance and demanded religious freedom as their price for supporting the war.
An extended negotiation ensued. Dissenters flooded the General Assembly with petitions listing needed reforms—ending church taxes, making poor relief a civil matter, and giving dissenting ministers the right to perform marriages. “These things granted,” they would support the fight. If religious freedom was guaranteed, internal “animosities may cease,” they offered—an implicit threat. Noting the desperate need for unanimity, a newspaper letter demanded restrictions be removed, closing portentously, “a word to the wise is enough.”
In what Jefferson described as “the severest contests” he ever fought, the General Assembly slowly lifted restrictions on dissent. But by War’s end, reforms were incomplete.