Almost from the beginning of English settlement in Virginia, the Anglican Church, or Church of England, was the official church in the colony. In 1609, for example, when the Virginia Company laid out plans for settlements at Henrico, Charles City, and James City, it directed that a new church be constructed at each site. Articles from the martial laws imposed on the colony in 1610-1611, Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, etc., required regular attendance at divine service and prescribed severe penalties, including the possibility of a sentence of death, for those who failed to attend worship or violated a strict moral code.

With the beginnings of the House of Burgesses, state support of the church took on a new direction. In the legislative sessions of 1623/24, 1632, 1642, and 1661/62, the Assembly passed laws on ecclesiastical matters ranging from church construction and parish formation to ministers’ salaries and vestries’ duties, thereby establishing the church as an official, tax-supported institution of colonial life. From this point to near the end of the eighteenth century, church and state were inexorably linked in Virginia.

By the late 1730s and early 1740s, however, forces emerged which began to challenge the authority of the Anglican Church and its traditional place in Virginia society. As part of the larger movement in the colonies known as the Great Awakening, Presbyterian dissenters, led by charismatic men like Samuel Davies, set up meetinghouses in several counties which attracted Virginians dissatisfied with what they perceived as degeneration in both the morality and religious doctrines of many Anglican clergymen. In the 1760s, Baptists began to offer Virginians a worship experience vastly different from that of Anglicanism. More emotional and communal in nature, Baptist beliefs and practices stood in direct opposition to the formalized ceremonies and hierarchies which characterized the established church. At the same time, the Baptists also advocated an alternative view of life that rejected the ostentation explicit in the culture of the gentry.

The outbreak of the Revolution created a new political culture in Virginia, one that helped bring about unprecedented liberties for dissenters and the subsequent end to the established church there. In May 1776, in one of its first steps to forming a new government, Virginia drafted the Declaration of Rights, Article 16 of which guaranteed citizens “free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” That fall, the new commonwealth’s General Assembly exempted dissenters from paying taxes to support the Anglican church while also suspending parish levies for clergymen’s salaries, a suspension that would become permanent three years later.

Though these acts disestablished the Anglican Church, the debate over the role of state-supported religion resurfaced in 1784. This time, the issue centered on a “general assessment,” or a tax aimed at creating a religious establishment (through the support of “Teachers of the Christian Religion”) that included all denominations, an idea first considered when the Assembly exempted dissenters from taxation in October 1776. Renowned orator Patrick Henry led the camp in support of the general assessment, while Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others opposed the assessment and favored a complete separation of church and state in Virginia. Although the House initially resolved in favor of the general assessment, support for it rapidly eroded. Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” helped turn public opinion away from the assessment, and by 1786 the Assembly had passed Jefferson’s “Statute for Religious Freedom,” a landmark event in Virginia’s as well as the nation’s history.

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