The past two years, we have celebrated Religious Freedom Day with a week of posts commemorating one of the great advances in the liberation of the human mind, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and shepherded through the Virginia legislature by James Madison in 1786, it is widely regarded as the forerunner to the Framers’ approach to the relationship between religion and government and the rights of individuals, in both the Constitution and the First Amendment.
Anyway, there is a Religious Freedom Day group here on Daily Kos, and we invite people interested in participating to join us. We expect that there will be relevant diaries every day Monday January 9th through Friday, January 13th. The Day itself, is January 16th, which is also Martin Luther King Day this year, so we are focusing our efforts on the week before.
All week there will be social media efforts sponsored by the Coalition for Liberty and Justice, which has been concerned about the Christian Right’s efforts to seek exemptions from civil rights and labor laws and regulations under the rubric of religious freedom. We can reasonably expect that these battles will be a feature of the Trump era. We would all be wise to bring ourselves up to speed on these matters.
The Coalition will be organizing tweet storms this week
Use the hashtag #ReligiousFreedomIs
Tuesday January 10 Reproductive Health
Wednesday January 11, LGBTQ Rights Thursday January 12 Separation of Church and State Friday
January 13 General celebration of Religious Freedom Day
To get ready for Religious Freedom Day, you might consider my most recent essay, Religious Freedom is a Progressive Value, which was posted online last week, and will appear in the winter issue of The Public Eye magazine. Here are a few excerpts:
Religious freedom is a powerful idea—the stuff from which revolutions are sometimes made. It includes the right of individual conscience—to believe or not believe as we choose, without undue influence from government or powerful religious institutions, and to practice our beliefs free from the same constraints. It’s no surprise that the first part of the First Amendment guarantees freedom of belief. The right to believe differently from the rich and powerful is a prerequisite for free speech and a free press. Grounding our politics, journalism, and scholarship in a clear understanding of what it means and where it came from could serve as both an inoculation and an answer to the distorted, self-serving claims of the Christian Right.
Religious freedom advocates of the colonial era faced powerful entrenched interests who actively suppressed religious deviance and dissent that might upset their privileges. In the Virginia colony attendance was required at the Sunday services of the Church of England, and failure to attend was the most prosecuted crime in the colony for many years. Members of these Anglican church vestries were also empowered to report religious crimes like heresy and blasphemy to local grand juries. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy planters and business owners who comprised the Anglican vestries were able to limit access to this pipeline to political power. Dissenters from these theocratic dictates were dealt with harshly. In the years running up to the Revolution, Baptists and other religious dissidents in Virginia were victims of vigilante violence. “Men on horseback would often ride through crowds gathered to witness a baptism,” historian John Ragosta reports. “Preachers were horsewhipped and dunked in rivers and ponds in a rude parody of their baptism ritual… Black attendees at meetings––whether free or slave––were subject to particularly savage beatings.”
This was the context in which Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777, which took nearly a decade to become law. The statute effectively disestablished the Anglican Church as the state church of Virginia, curtailing its extraordinary powers and privileges. It also decreed that citizens are free to believe as they will and that this “shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.” The statute was the first in history to self-impose complete religious freedom and equality, and historians as well as Supreme Court justices widely regard it as the root of how the framers of the Constitution (and later the First Amendment) approached matters of religion and government.
The principle of religious equality under the law was a profoundly progressive stance against the advantages enjoyed and enforced by the ruling political and economic elites of the 18th Century. Then, for example, as John Ragosta writes in Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, “Marriages had to be consecrated by an Anglican minister, making children of dissenters who failed to marry within the Church of England (or pay the local Anglican priest for his cooperation) subject to claims of bastardy, with potentially serious legal consequences.”
We have come a long way since the revolutionaries who founded our country introduced one of the most powerfully democratic ideas in the history of the world. The struggle for religious freedom may never be complete, but it remains among our highest aspirations. And yet the kinds of forces that struggled both for and against religious freedom in the 18th Century are similar to those camps today. We are the rightful heirs of the constitutional legacy of religious freedom; the way is clear for us to find our voices and reclaim our role.