Appendix E: Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom (drafted in 1777; passed in 1786)

• Author: Arthur Rizer
• Profession: Director of Justice Policy and a senior fellow at the R Street Institute
• Pages: 229-231

229

APPENDIX E

Virginia’s Statute for

Religious Freedom (drafted

in 1777; passed in 1786)

A model for and forerunner to the First Amendment, Virginia’s Statute for

Religious Freedom secured the rights of Virginians to follow the faith of their

choosing, without fear of coercion or retribution from their government.

Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will,

but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty

God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it

shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all at-

tempts to inuence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil inca-

pacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a

departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord

both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either,

as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its inuence on reason

alone; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as

ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have

assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and

modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to

impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over

the greatest part of the world and through all time: at to compel a man to

furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he

disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to

support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him