Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution

Written by John A. Ragosta Reviewed By Brent J. Aucoin

The American Revolution secured political liberty for the United States, but according to John Ragosta, it is also the wellspring of religious liberty in America. The war, he argues, provided the unique conditions that enabled religious dissenters to demand and finally secure the liberty they had long sought. This development occurred almost exclusively in the Anglican-dominated colony of Virginia, but it propelled Virginia's leaders, especially James Madison, to enshrine religious liberty not only in state law, but also in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Consequently, as is indicated in the book's subtitle, Virginia's religious dissenters are responsible for the establishment of religious freedom in America.

Virginia's dissenting population consisted of Lutherans, Quakers, Mennonites, Methodists, German Reformed, Presbyterians, and Baptists, but Ragosta focuses on the latter two groups as they were the largest in number and the most influential. While all dissenters made up about one-third of the colony's population on the eve of the revolution, Virginia was governed by members of the Church of England, who did everything in their power to suppress non-Anglican religious activity. No group suffered at the hands of Virginia's Anglican elite more so than the Baptists. Anglicans targeted the rapidly-growing Baptist population not only because they tended to be poor and uneducated, but also because they actively evangelized both blacks and women. By 1774, more than half of the Baptist preachers in the colony had been imprisoned for violating one or more of the many laws supporting the Anglican monopoly. Only Anglicans could be licensed to preach in Virginia, and only Anglicans were authorized to perform baptisms and weddings. Anglican hegemony, Ragosta argues, was alive and well in Virginia when the revolution began.

However, when the revolution began, the new patriot leaders of Virginia, who were Anglicans, realized they would need the assistance of the dissenters they previously persecuted in order to militarily defeat the British. Consequently, the members of the Virginia House of Delegates began considering the previously ignored petitions sent to that body by dissenting churches and associations. Likewise, Ragosta shows, the petitions from the dissenters increasingly included statements expressing a willingness to fight for political liberty in exchange for religious liberty. As a result, between 1776 and 1780, Virginia lawmakers rescinded many of the laws that discriminated against the dissenters. In turn, the dissenters recruited and volunteered for the war effort and were instrumental in keeping the British from conquering Virginia. With Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown (1781) and American victory all but assured, the Anglican (Episcopalian) elites in Virginia sought to reverse the advances made by dissenters during the war and restore the church to its privileged position. But by this point, Ragosta argues, the growing dissenter population had been politicized, and Virginia politics had been republicanized. While Jefferson, Madison, and others were sympathetic to dissenter arguments, they and others also recognized that dissenters were a political force to be reckoned with. Consequently, Madison led the narrowly successful effort to defeat the general assessment bill (taxes to support Christian denominations) in 1785 and to pass Jefferson's Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom the following year. In the course of a decade (1776-1786) Virginia went from having one of the most entrenched established churches in the colonies to being the state with the broadest protection of religion freedom in the country. This amazing transformation occurred because of the dissenters and the leverage they gained against their oppressors because of the demands of the war.

Ragosta's book is worth reading for his telling of this story alone. At a time when American culture typically depicts evangelical Christianity as a hindrance to freedom and democracy, Ragosta shows that evangelical Virginians, especially Calvinistic Baptists and Presbyterians, were essential to winning the American Revolution in the South, to democratizing Virginia politics, and to establishing religious freedom in America. The latter is true, Ragosta asserts, because Madison used Virginia's version of religious liberty as the basis for the religious components of the First Amendment. Upon making this point, Ragosta then turns his attention, in the last chapter, from the story of Virginia's dissenters in the revolutionary period to the meaning of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In short, he argues that since the Virginia dissenters shaped Madison's thinking and Madison in turn crafted the First Amendment, it is therefore reasonable to conclude that the meaning of the Establishment clause can be found in the arguments of the Virginia dissenters. Because the “dissenters fought for a strict disestablishment and clear separation of church and state” (p. 138), Ragosta says that the First Amendment does not simply mandate that the federal government could not establish a state church, but rather demands complete separation of church and state.

This portion of the book proves to be the most problematic. In attempting to identify the original intention or meaning of the Establishment Clause, would it not make more sense to examine the first Congress that wrote and debated the clause than what dissenters in Virginia argued a decade earlier during the revolution? If so, it is difficult to argue that the First Amendment demands strict separation of church and state when the same Congress that wrote the amendment appropriated funds for Christian missionaries and allowed worship services to be held in the capitol. Second, while it is true that some of dissenter petitions seemed to advocate complete separation-particularly those penned by Baptists-there is evidence that Baptists and other dissenters did not object to the government issuing proclamations of thanksgiving to God or calling upon the citizenry to pray. In other words, it appears-contrary to what Ragosta asserts in his last chapter-that while Virginia dissenters demanded religious liberty they did not champion a strictly secular state completely devoid of religious influence.


Brent J. Aucoin

Brent J. Aucoin
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Wake Forest, North Carolina, USA

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