As Jefferson warms to his task, the modern reader can feel the indignation and contempt rising in him for all those who needed to support their views, religious or otherwise, with anything other than the pure force of their truth and wisdom. Jefferson was addressing something more than the cramped and timorous prejudices of the day. He was steaming ahead into dark modernity with a coda that was imperishably connected to what America stood for over the long haul of history. “Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself,” wrote Jefferson, encapsulating the proper meaning of the nation’s existence in a statement that schoolchildren ought to recite each day instead of the mindlessly reverent Pledge of Allegiance. “She is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

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Truth did not prevail, left to itself, at least not immediately. When Jefferson penned his first draft of the statute in 1779, it was shelved by the Virginia Assembly for the duration of the Revolutionary War, largely due to the vocal opposition of the man who had postured rhetorically, “give me liberty or give me death”: Patrick Henry. Jefferson doubtless took some comfort from the fact that the assembly also denied Henry his motion to support religious teachers from public funds. Ironically, it took Henry’s obstinate postwar revival of his “general assessment” scheme for Jefferson’s less glamorous, but more politically astute colleague James Madison to successfully steer the Statute of Religious Freedom through the Virginia Assembly. And it was the passion of backcountry Baptists and Presbyterians, dissenters who had a strong interest in making sure that what had been the favored British-dominated ecclesiastical order disappeared with the Revolution, that made the difference. More than 100 petitions, bearing 11,000 signatures against Henry’s proposal, poured into the assembly toward the end of 1785 and bolstered Madison’s argument that religious pluralism was “the best and only security for religious belief in any society, for where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to persecute and oppress the rest.”

For both Madison and Jefferson, moreover, that “variety” extended beyond Christians. In his autobiography Jefferson made it clear when referring to those who had wanted to insert before the words “author of our holy religion” the qualifier “Jesus Christ,” that the protection offered by the statute “was meant to comprehend…the Jew, the Gentile, the Christian, the Mahometan, the Hindu and infidels of every denomination.” Remarkably, this pluralism was reaffirmed during the administration of John Adams, when a treaty made with the bey of Tripoli in November 1796 affirmed that “as the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion it has no character of enmity against the laws, religion and tranquillity of Mussulmen.” In retrospect, it’s a pity that apparently the translation into Arabic failed to convey the forthrightness of that profession. Nonetheless, the treaty passed muster in Congress with no votes against it, and the religiously inclined President Adams signed it in 1797.

Three years later, however, Adams was happy enough to run for re-election with the help of a smear campaign designed to represent Jefferson as a Jacobinical atheist. “GOD or JEFFERSON AND NO GOD” ran the flyers. Jefferson won a three-way contest anyway after a protracted count in the Electoral College. But what is often overlooked is that the forgotten third man in the election, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, had himself steered one of the most tolerant statutes on religious liberty through the legislature of South Carolina, making that one of the few states where Jews could indeed hold public office, not an academic point given the presence of a lively community and handsome synagogue in Charleston.

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