Hornets, Snakes, and Virginia’s Religious Freedom

Before the American Revolution, the Anglican Church was the established church of Virginia, the largest and most populous of the English colonies. While historians often describe that establishment as mild, that is not the way that Virginia’s dissenters saw it. Religious dissenters – primarily Presbyterians and Baptists – paid a tax to support Anglican ministers and suffered legal discrimination on multiple fronts. As the number of dissenters increased, Virginia’s leaders turned from discrimination to persecution and eventually incarceration. By the time of the Revolution, over half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia had been jailed on trumped-up charges. The Revolution changed all that. 

Dr. Ragosta will discuss the relatively unknown role of Virginia’s religious dissenters both in winning the American Revolution and in establishing religious liberty, including a strict separation of church and state.