On this episode of Our American Stories, religious persecution had become the norm by the time of the American Revolution. It took the unorthodox Thomas Jefferson and Christian Fundamentalists to bring about a change.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love hearing listeners stories. Send them to our
American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites, and
you don't have to write them down at length. You
can send a link. You can send the story from
a local newspaper or a local TV show. Send them
(00:33):
to our American Stories dot com. Click the your Story's
button and the rest is easy. Up next. The idea
of religious freedom is a relatively new and American invention.
It was first written as a principle in the Colony
of Maryland in sixteen thirty four, but it wasn't until
Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom for it to become
(00:56):
the principle of our entire nation. Here to tell the
story worry of how religious freedom became a guiding American
idea is John Regosta at Monticello. Take it away, John.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
As the revolution is coming on, the Anglican Church is
still the established church, and there have been revivals, so
we're seeing more and more dissenters would be the term
they would use. Quakers, New Light Baptists, Presbyterian. This is
a growing part of the population. Now we don't know
exactly how much, but the estimates run from anywhere from
(01:33):
twenty percent to even more than a third of the
population is dissenting from the Anglican Church. Well, as that
population increases, the Anglican Church establishment start to support persecution
of those dissenters, violent persecution. There's cases where they're dunked
in lakes, where rocks are thrown at them. There's a
(01:54):
case where the hounds are released on a dissenting minister.
The time of the American Revolution, over half of the
Baptist ministers in Virginia have been jailed. And this is
not a country club jail. They're thrown into eighteenth century
jail cells for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace,
(02:17):
which is a trumped up charge because they're not Anglican.
Their churches were not churches, they were meeting houses. The
only church is the Anglican Church, and Jefferson says, we
can tolerate everyone. You want to understand American religious freedom,
Thomas Jefferson the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom. He
(02:40):
is hatched, matched and dispatched. Anglican baptized, He is married,
and he is buried by an Anglican minister. His granddaughters
talk about remember hearing him around the house humming old
Anglican hymns and so on. But importantly for Jefferson, that
tradition is not the same as belief. He's asked by
(03:03):
a friend of the family to be the godfather for
an infant that was going to be baptized. Now, I
don't know if you've done that. I've done it. You know,
the family friends ask you to be a godparent. You say,
of course, I'd be happy to do that. It's a
happy occasion and one doesn't want to fuss about it
too much. Jefferson refused, and he refused. He said, if
(03:24):
I was the godparent, I would have to stand up
in the Episcopal Church and swear fidelity to the thirty
nine doctrines of the Church. Most godparents sort of ignore.
Jeffer says, I can't do that. Religion is very serious
for him. He takes it very seriously. He studies religion.
When he's a student at William and Mary. He buys
(03:44):
a Koran because he's interested in Islamic law. He starts
out in a very traditional Church of England. He ends
up with his own personal religion. He's very much a theist.
He believes in a creator God. He believes that God
deserves worship, and that's a lifelong belief for Jefferson and
it's really central for Jefferson. But then we get into
(04:07):
the non traditional things. He concludes that Jesus is not divine,
he rejects the Resurrection, he rejects the Trinity, he rejects
original sin. So by no means a traditional Christian and
he also believes and this is interesting and it leads
(04:28):
very much into Jefferson and religious freedom in the founding
of the country. He believes that it is critical that
everybody be able to think for themselves and come to
their own decisions about religion. And he also believes that
Christianity is going to be good for the country because
(04:48):
Christianity tells you not only to love your neighbor, love
your family, but to love your enemy. And so he
says we're going to have a multi ethnic, multi geographic,
multi religious country that we think of a melting pot.
And Jefferson says, in that kind of a country and
a republic, we all need to get along. And the
way to do that is to keep government out of it.
(05:10):
Let everybody have their own religious beliefs, which we're going
to protect and be tolerant of everyone else. By the
time of the American Revolution, every one of the colonies
had some religious restrictions. We sometimes think that, you know,
(05:31):
Rhode Island had religious freedom, Pennsylvania had religious freedom, not completely.
They still had requirements in their laws. If you wanted
to be an official, if you wanted to vote, if
you wanted to testify in court, you had to swear
on the Old and New Testament for example. So Jews
are going to be excluded, you know, swear you believe
in God. Most of the states still have an established religion.
(05:52):
And by established religion, I mean the government's going to
support this religion. First of all, probably with tax money.
So in Virginia, everybody is paying tax to support the minister.
It doesn't matter if you're Baptist, Presbyterian, Quaker. You're paying
a tax to support the Anglican Church. And the second
thing is the government is going to support you by
giving you certain privileges. So in Virginia, the Anglican Church
(06:16):
is going to be responsible for orphans, and that sounds
like a good thing, except that if a Baptist family
or Presbyterian family died and left orphan children, the Anglican
vestry would make sure that those children were raised in
a good Anglican household. We're going to get them out
of that Baptist in Presbyterian religion. So this is what's
(06:36):
going on. And these deeply religious Evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists
absolutely joined with Jefferson and Madison for a strict religious
freedom and a strict separation of church and state. The
real birth of American religious freedom is that battle in
the context of the American Revolution, when Jefferson and Madison
(06:57):
and the Evangelicals come to the fore.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
And you're listening to John Regasta of Monticello tell the
story of Jefferson's unlikely alliance with Evangelical Christians to protect
churches from the power of the state. When we come back,
more of the remarkable story of Thomas Jefferson and how
the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom came to be here
(07:25):
on our American story. Folks, if you love the stories
we tell about this great country, and especially the stories
of America's rich past, know that all of our stories
about American history, from war to innovation, culture and faith
are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College,
a place where students study all the things that are
(07:45):
beautiful in life and all the things that are good
in life. And if you can't cut to Hillsdale, Hillsdale
will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.
Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we
(08:09):
returned to our American stories and our story on Thomas
Jefferson and religious freedom in our country. When we last
left off, we learned about the religious prosecution of Baptists
and other so called dissenters by the Anglican Church on
the eve of the American Revolution, something that upset Thomas Jefferson,
(08:30):
despite his unorthodox religious beliefs that stood totally opposed to
those thrown in jail. Let's return to the story here
again is John Regusta.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Over half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia have been jailed.
But the leaders those same Virginia families we know of realized,
if we're going to battle the greatest power on earth,
the British Empire, we need those people on our side.
Madison one of his earliest letters that we have preserved,
(09:05):
he writes to his best friend from college about the diabolical,
hell conceived notion of religious persecution, and he's talking about
the fact that Culpeper County, he's in Orange County, Virginia,
there were four Baptist ministers in jail for preaching. Patrick Henry,
the first governor of Virginia, actually exchanges letters with his
cabinet and basically saying, we need those Presbyterians from the
(09:28):
Shenandoah Valley. And the reason we need those Presbyterians from
the Shenandoah Valley is those are the guys with the
long rifles that can hit a squirrel at one hundred yards.
We want those guys on our side. And it's Shenandoah
Valley Presbyterians are to take a critical role in the
war and in the Battle of Saratoga. So there's a
very practical political reason. And then you add to that
(09:51):
the Thomas Jefferson James Madison views about religious freedom and
separation of church and state. That's what results in the
real birth of American religious freedom. And it doesn't happen
overnight before he comes governor. He comes back and to
put this in context, we need to remember he just
(10:12):
came back from the Continental Congress and writing the Declaration
of Independence. Okay, So he comes back to Virginia and
he's elected to the new legislature because we have a
new state constitution in seventeen seventy six. And the legislature
realizes we've got a lot of laws on the books
that are British Empire laws. They only make sense in
a British colony. And so Jefferson and George Witt and
(10:36):
I believe it's Edmund Pendleton are given the job of
taking the entire statue book for Virginia and redrafting it
for a new independent state. And number eighty two is
the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom. And it's a
beautiful bill. I urge your listeners to read.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
It well aware that the opinions and leaf of men
depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the
evidence proposed to their minds that Almighty God half created
the mind free and manifested his supreme will, that free
it shall remain, by making altogether insusceptible of restraint, that
(11:16):
all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens
or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of
hypocrisy and meanness in our departure from the plan of
the Holy Author of our religion, who, being lowered both
of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it
by coercions on either, as was in his almighty power
(11:38):
to do so, but to extend it by its influence
on reason alone, that the impioused presumption of legislatures and rulers,
civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible
and uninspired man, have assumed domain over the faith of others,
setting up their own opinions in modes of thinking as
(11:59):
the only true, through and infallible, and as such, endeavoring
to impose them upon others, have established and maintained false
religions over the greatest part of the world and through
all time.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Jefferson, of course, is so good with the pen. It's
so beautiful. The preamble to this statue. It's introduced in
the legislature in seventeen seventy nine, just as he's becoming
the second governor of Virginia. But it languishes, and it
doesn't come back until seventeen eighty four when Patrick Henry,
the first governor of Virginia who's now back in the legislature,
(12:34):
introduced the General Assessment Bill, and the idea was they
all agreed that the system before the Revolution had to change.
But Henry and others had this great idea. They said, look,
the government should support religion because religion's good for society.
And so we're going to tax everybody. But unlike the
(12:54):
old system where we taxed everybody and gave all the
money to the Anglican Church, we're going to do this fair.
We'll tax everybody and then we'll ask people, well, who
do you want us to give your money to, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker, Methodist?
You just tell us Anglican, and we'll go to everybody,
and that's how we're divvy the money up. So that's fair, right. Jefferson's,
(13:17):
of course, Minister to France at that time. But Madison
has his Bill for religious Freedom in his hands, and
Madison and the Evangelicals launch a massive political campaign, a
mail in campaign. They're sending petitions to the General Assembly
saying you can't do that. We need to keep government
out of religion entirely. That it's none of the government's business.
(13:39):
We want a separation of church and state. So Henry's
General Assessment Bill is defeated, and Madison says, I've got
this wonderful bill, Jefferson's Bill for the Establishment of Religious Freedom,
and he drops that on the table. Within a month,
by January seventeen eighty six, it's adopted. This is really
(14:02):
one of the great original thoughts in America, because in Europe,
even a progressive would have thought of religious toleration at
the time. We have an established church in England, we
have an established church in France, we have an established
church in Germany. We might tolerate other religions. American religious
freedom goes much further than that, because toleration suggests there's
(14:25):
a right and a wrong. The government knows the right
and will allow you to be wrong. Jefferson's idea, the
evangelical idea, is no, it's a personal decision. Government stays out.
And he not only translates the Virginia Statute into several
foreign languages, he also translates his version rather than the
edited version that was actually adopted by the Virginia legislature,
(14:48):
because he thought his version was better so he translates
this and he sends it around and it becomes part
of how Europeans understand America. So when Kentucky becomes a state,
I actually found a a booklet that Kentucky had printed
trying to get people to emigrate from Europe, telling all
of the wonderful things you can have in Kentucky. We've
got land, got opportunity. And the back of the pamphlet
(15:11):
is Jefferson's statue. Word for word, this is religious freedom
in America. Jefferson later in life says that American religious
freedom in that statue is intended to encompass the jew
and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu
and the Infidel, of every denomination. That's Jefferson's vision. And
(15:33):
I always point out to people there's not a lot
of Hindus in America at the end of the eighteenth
century the beginning of the nineteenth century, but Jefferson understood
there would be. We're creating a republic, and it's got
to be for all people at all time. Religious freedom
is for all people at all time. That idea is
so fundamentally the melting pot eploribus unum the Latin what
(15:56):
used to be our motto, the Latin model out of
many one that what makes America strong is not that
we're all Presbyterian, or we're all Baptists, or we are
a Republican, 're all Democrat, or we're all Federalist, we're
all Whig. But in America we fundamentally support essential principles.
(16:17):
Jefferson said. Anybody should be American who comes to this
country and takes an oath of fidelity to American principles.
Other countries are based on where you're born, what your
religion is, who your parents are. In America, we're based
on principles. Jefferson famously his tombstone. You might think he
(16:37):
would mention that he was president, that he was a
vice president, that he was ambassador to France. He doesn't
mention any of that, doesn't mention that he's a loving father,
devoted grandfather, gardiner, paleontologist, inventor. None of that he tells us.
He said, I want my tombstone to read. Here was
buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence,
(16:58):
of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and father of
the University of Virginia, and not a word more political freedom,
religious freedom, public education. He was talking to us, He's
talking about the foundation of a functioning democracy. We'll fight
about how to do them, but those three things are
(17:19):
the foundation.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monte Montgomery. A special thanks to John
Rogasta at Monticello. One of the most beautiful parts of
this great country, the Shenandoah Valley, tucked away in Charlottesville, Virginia,
not far from UVA, the aforementioned UVA of which Thomas
Jefferson was not just the father but the chief architect.
(17:44):
The story of religious freedom in America, the story of
Thomas Jefferson's legacy. In the end, here on our American
Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love hearing listeners stories. Send them to our
American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites, and
you don't have to write them down at length. You
can send a link. You can send the story from
a local newspaper or a local TV show. Send them
(00:33):
to our American Stories dot com. Click the your Story's
button and the rest is easy. Up next. The idea
of religious freedom is a relatively new and American invention.
It was first written as a principle in the Colony
of Maryland in sixteen thirty four, but it wasn't until
Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom for it to become
(00:56):
the principle of our entire nation. Here to tell the
story worry of how religious freedom became a guiding American
idea is John Regosta at Monticello. Take it away, John.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
As the revolution is coming on, the Anglican Church is
still the established church, and there have been revivals, so
we're seeing more and more dissenters would be the term
they would use. Quakers, New Light Baptists, Presbyterian. This is
a growing part of the population. Now we don't know
exactly how much, but the estimates run from anywhere from
(01:33):
twenty percent to even more than a third of the
population is dissenting from the Anglican Church. Well, as that
population increases, the Anglican Church establishment start to support persecution
of those dissenters, violent persecution. There's cases where they're dunked
in lakes, where rocks are thrown at them. There's a
(01:54):
case where the hounds are released on a dissenting minister.
The time of the American Revolution, over half of the
Baptist ministers in Virginia have been jailed. And this is
not a country club jail. They're thrown into eighteenth century
jail cells for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace,
(02:17):
which is a trumped up charge because they're not Anglican.
Their churches were not churches, they were meeting houses. The
only church is the Anglican Church, and Jefferson says, we
can tolerate everyone. You want to understand American religious freedom,
Thomas Jefferson the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom. He
(02:40):
is hatched, matched and dispatched. Anglican baptized, He is married,
and he is buried by an Anglican minister. His granddaughters
talk about remember hearing him around the house humming old
Anglican hymns and so on. But importantly for Jefferson, that
tradition is not the same as belief. He's asked by
(03:03):
a friend of the family to be the godfather for
an infant that was going to be baptized. Now, I
don't know if you've done that. I've done it. You know,
the family friends ask you to be a godparent. You say,
of course, I'd be happy to do that. It's a
happy occasion and one doesn't want to fuss about it
too much. Jefferson refused, and he refused. He said, if
(03:24):
I was the godparent, I would have to stand up
in the Episcopal Church and swear fidelity to the thirty
nine doctrines of the Church. Most godparents sort of ignore.
Jeffer says, I can't do that. Religion is very serious
for him. He takes it very seriously. He studies religion.
When he's a student at William and Mary. He buys
(03:44):
a Koran because he's interested in Islamic law. He starts
out in a very traditional Church of England. He ends
up with his own personal religion. He's very much a theist.
He believes in a creator God. He believes that God
deserves worship, and that's a lifelong belief for Jefferson and
it's really central for Jefferson. But then we get into
(04:07):
the non traditional things. He concludes that Jesus is not divine,
he rejects the Resurrection, he rejects the Trinity, he rejects
original sin. So by no means a traditional Christian and
he also believes and this is interesting and it leads
(04:28):
very much into Jefferson and religious freedom in the founding
of the country. He believes that it is critical that
everybody be able to think for themselves and come to
their own decisions about religion. And he also believes that
Christianity is going to be good for the country because
(04:48):
Christianity tells you not only to love your neighbor, love
your family, but to love your enemy. And so he
says we're going to have a multi ethnic, multi geographic,
multi religious country that we think of a melting pot.
And Jefferson says, in that kind of a country and
a republic, we all need to get along. And the
way to do that is to keep government out of it.
(05:10):
Let everybody have their own religious beliefs, which we're going
to protect and be tolerant of everyone else. By the
time of the American Revolution, every one of the colonies
had some religious restrictions. We sometimes think that, you know,
(05:31):
Rhode Island had religious freedom, Pennsylvania had religious freedom, not completely.
They still had requirements in their laws. If you wanted
to be an official, if you wanted to vote, if
you wanted to testify in court, you had to swear
on the Old and New Testament for example. So Jews
are going to be excluded, you know, swear you believe
in God. Most of the states still have an established religion.
(05:52):
And by established religion, I mean the government's going to
support this religion. First of all, probably with tax money.
So in Virginia, everybody is paying tax to support the minister.
It doesn't matter if you're Baptist, Presbyterian, Quaker. You're paying
a tax to support the Anglican Church. And the second
thing is the government is going to support you by
giving you certain privileges. So in Virginia, the Anglican Church
(06:16):
is going to be responsible for orphans, and that sounds
like a good thing, except that if a Baptist family
or Presbyterian family died and left orphan children, the Anglican
vestry would make sure that those children were raised in
a good Anglican household. We're going to get them out
of that Baptist in Presbyterian religion. So this is what's
(06:36):
going on. And these deeply religious Evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists
absolutely joined with Jefferson and Madison for a strict religious
freedom and a strict separation of church and state. The
real birth of American religious freedom is that battle in
the context of the American Revolution, when Jefferson and Madison
(06:57):
and the Evangelicals come to the fore.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
And you're listening to John Regasta of Monticello tell the
story of Jefferson's unlikely alliance with Evangelical Christians to protect
churches from the power of the state. When we come back,
more of the remarkable story of Thomas Jefferson and how
the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom came to be here
(07:25):
on our American story. Folks, if you love the stories
we tell about this great country, and especially the stories
of America's rich past, know that all of our stories
about American history, from war to innovation, culture and faith
are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College,
a place where students study all the things that are
(07:45):
beautiful in life and all the things that are good
in life. And if you can't cut to Hillsdale, Hillsdale
will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.
Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we
(08:09):
returned to our American stories and our story on Thomas
Jefferson and religious freedom in our country. When we last
left off, we learned about the religious prosecution of Baptists
and other so called dissenters by the Anglican Church on
the eve of the American Revolution, something that upset Thomas Jefferson,
(08:30):
despite his unorthodox religious beliefs that stood totally opposed to
those thrown in jail. Let's return to the story here
again is John Regusta.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Over half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia have been jailed.
But the leaders those same Virginia families we know of realized,
if we're going to battle the greatest power on earth,
the British Empire, we need those people on our side.
Madison one of his earliest letters that we have preserved,
(09:05):
he writes to his best friend from college about the diabolical,
hell conceived notion of religious persecution, and he's talking about
the fact that Culpeper County, he's in Orange County, Virginia,
there were four Baptist ministers in jail for preaching. Patrick Henry,
the first governor of Virginia, actually exchanges letters with his
cabinet and basically saying, we need those Presbyterians from the
(09:28):
Shenandoah Valley. And the reason we need those Presbyterians from
the Shenandoah Valley is those are the guys with the
long rifles that can hit a squirrel at one hundred yards.
We want those guys on our side. And it's Shenandoah
Valley Presbyterians are to take a critical role in the
war and in the Battle of Saratoga. So there's a
very practical political reason. And then you add to that
(09:51):
the Thomas Jefferson James Madison views about religious freedom and
separation of church and state. That's what results in the
real birth of American religious freedom. And it doesn't happen
overnight before he comes governor. He comes back and to
put this in context, we need to remember he just
(10:12):
came back from the Continental Congress and writing the Declaration
of Independence. Okay, So he comes back to Virginia and
he's elected to the new legislature because we have a
new state constitution in seventeen seventy six. And the legislature
realizes we've got a lot of laws on the books
that are British Empire laws. They only make sense in
a British colony. And so Jefferson and George Witt and
(10:36):
I believe it's Edmund Pendleton are given the job of
taking the entire statue book for Virginia and redrafting it
for a new independent state. And number eighty two is
the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom. And it's a
beautiful bill. I urge your listeners to read.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
It well aware that the opinions and leaf of men
depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the
evidence proposed to their minds that Almighty God half created
the mind free and manifested his supreme will, that free
it shall remain, by making altogether insusceptible of restraint, that
(11:16):
all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens
or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of
hypocrisy and meanness in our departure from the plan of
the Holy Author of our religion, who, being lowered both
of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it
by coercions on either, as was in his almighty power
(11:38):
to do so, but to extend it by its influence
on reason alone, that the impioused presumption of legislatures and rulers,
civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible
and uninspired man, have assumed domain over the faith of others,
setting up their own opinions in modes of thinking as
(11:59):
the only true, through and infallible, and as such, endeavoring
to impose them upon others, have established and maintained false
religions over the greatest part of the world and through
all time.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Jefferson, of course, is so good with the pen. It's
so beautiful. The preamble to this statue. It's introduced in
the legislature in seventeen seventy nine, just as he's becoming
the second governor of Virginia. But it languishes, and it
doesn't come back until seventeen eighty four when Patrick Henry,
the first governor of Virginia who's now back in the legislature,
(12:34):
introduced the General Assessment Bill, and the idea was they
all agreed that the system before the Revolution had to change.
But Henry and others had this great idea. They said, look,
the government should support religion because religion's good for society.
And so we're going to tax everybody. But unlike the
(12:54):
old system where we taxed everybody and gave all the
money to the Anglican Church, we're going to do this fair.
We'll tax everybody and then we'll ask people, well, who
do you want us to give your money to, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker, Methodist?
You just tell us Anglican, and we'll go to everybody,
and that's how we're divvy the money up. So that's fair, right. Jefferson's,
(13:17):
of course, Minister to France at that time. But Madison
has his Bill for religious Freedom in his hands, and
Madison and the Evangelicals launch a massive political campaign, a
mail in campaign. They're sending petitions to the General Assembly
saying you can't do that. We need to keep government
out of religion entirely. That it's none of the government's business.
(13:39):
We want a separation of church and state. So Henry's
General Assessment Bill is defeated, and Madison says, I've got
this wonderful bill, Jefferson's Bill for the Establishment of Religious Freedom,
and he drops that on the table. Within a month,
by January seventeen eighty six, it's adopted. This is really
(14:02):
one of the great original thoughts in America, because in Europe,
even a progressive would have thought of religious toleration at
the time. We have an established church in England, we
have an established church in France, we have an established
church in Germany. We might tolerate other religions. American religious
freedom goes much further than that, because toleration suggests there's
(14:25):
a right and a wrong. The government knows the right
and will allow you to be wrong. Jefferson's idea, the
evangelical idea, is no, it's a personal decision. Government stays out.
And he not only translates the Virginia Statute into several
foreign languages, he also translates his version rather than the
edited version that was actually adopted by the Virginia legislature,
(14:48):
because he thought his version was better so he translates
this and he sends it around and it becomes part
of how Europeans understand America. So when Kentucky becomes a state,
I actually found a a booklet that Kentucky had printed
trying to get people to emigrate from Europe, telling all
of the wonderful things you can have in Kentucky. We've
got land, got opportunity. And the back of the pamphlet
(15:11):
is Jefferson's statue. Word for word, this is religious freedom
in America. Jefferson later in life says that American religious
freedom in that statue is intended to encompass the jew
and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu
and the Infidel, of every denomination. That's Jefferson's vision. And
(15:33):
I always point out to people there's not a lot
of Hindus in America at the end of the eighteenth
century the beginning of the nineteenth century, but Jefferson understood
there would be. We're creating a republic, and it's got
to be for all people at all time. Religious freedom
is for all people at all time. That idea is
so fundamentally the melting pot eploribus unum the Latin what
(15:56):
used to be our motto, the Latin model out of
many one that what makes America strong is not that
we're all Presbyterian, or we're all Baptists, or we are
a Republican, 're all Democrat, or we're all Federalist, we're
all Whig. But in America we fundamentally support essential principles.
(16:17):
Jefferson said. Anybody should be American who comes to this
country and takes an oath of fidelity to American principles.
Other countries are based on where you're born, what your
religion is, who your parents are. In America, we're based
on principles. Jefferson famously his tombstone. You might think he
(16:37):
would mention that he was president, that he was a
vice president, that he was ambassador to France. He doesn't
mention any of that, doesn't mention that he's a loving father,
devoted grandfather, gardiner, paleontologist, inventor. None of that he tells us.
He said, I want my tombstone to read. Here was
buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence,
(16:58):
of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and father of
the University of Virginia, and not a word more political freedom,
religious freedom, public education. He was talking to us, He's
talking about the foundation of a functioning democracy. We'll fight
about how to do them, but those three things are
(17:19):
the foundation.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monte Montgomery. A special thanks to John
Rogasta at Monticello. One of the most beautiful parts of
this great country, the Shenandoah Valley, tucked away in Charlottesville, Virginia,
not far from UVA, the aforementioned UVA of which Thomas
Jefferson was not just the father but the chief architect.
(17:44):
The story of religious freedom in America, the story of
Thomas Jefferson's legacy. In the end, here on our American
Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com