In The Case for Christian Nationalism, widely considered the strongest argument for this position, Stephen Wolfe contends that the “classical Protestant position is that the civil magistrate can punish external religion—e.g., heretical teaching, false rites, blasphemy, and Sabbath-breaking—because such actions can cause public harm, both harm to the soul and harm to the body politic.” Late eighteenth-century Virginia Presbyterians would have vigorously disagreed. In fact, they championed disestablishment and religious liberty because they feared the opposite—that a civil magistrate enforcing religious conformity caused harm to individuals’ souls, the church, and the body politic.
A brief review of key memorials, or petitions, that Virginia’s Presbyterians, led by the Hanover Presbytery, sent to the General Assembly between 1776—when the Virginia Convention passed the Declaration of Rights—and 1786—when it adopted Thomas Jefferson’s statute for establishing religious freedom—illustrates this point. Virginian Presbyterians gradually became enthusiastic defenders of liberty of conscience, advocated the complete separation of church and state, and resisted all state efforts to provide the Church of England with any special emoluments or benefits. The last thing they wanted to see was the civil magistrate punishing those who dared to disagree with the Anglican establishment.
A review of how the Church of England functioned as the established church in Virginia helps contextualize Presbyterian efforts to secure liberty of conscience. The Virginia colony possessed an established church and other features Wolfe admires. Virginia’s 1619 “Great Charter” made the Church of England the exclusive state-sanctioned religion of the colony. Laws required all plantations to set aside a place for worship and punished colonists who skipped weekly worship services. While Puritans were protesting the policies of King Charles I in England, the Virginia legislature made it unambiguously clear that dissent would not be tolerated. In 1642–1643, the legislature passed an act empowering the governor to compel all nonconformists “to depart the colony with all conveniencie.” In the eighteenth century, the Church of England’s role in the life of the colony was even more pervasive as counties collected taxes to finance Anglican priests’ salaries.
Cracks began to appear, however, in the Church of England’s monopoly with passage of the Act of Toleration in 1689. In England, the Act granted “toleration,” not complete religious freedom, to Presbyterians and other dissenting Protestant groups, but not to Roman Catholics. The law permitted dissenters to gather for worship, but they still had to pay taxes to support the Church of England and take oaths of allegiance to the crown.
The First Great Awakening, which swept across the American colonies between the 1720s and 1740s, exerted new pressures upon the Anglican establishment in Virginia. The evangelical revival brought thousands of people into Presbyterian and Baptist churches, which Anglicans resented. Prompted by Anglican clergy, the Virginia legislature passed laws requiring dissenting ministers to secure licenses to preach from county authorities and to restrict their work to particular parishes. Many Baptist ministers refused to comply and were sometimes beaten and placed in stocks as a result. By 1776, Virginia authorities had imprisoned at least thirty-four Baptist ministers.
Presbyterians initially accepted these burdensome provisions. For example, when the General Court proposed modifications to the Act of Toleration in Virginia in 1772–1773, the Hanover Presbytery agreed to register its churches as places of worship and to require its ministers to take oaths of allegiance. Read more»
P. C. Kemeny | “Eighteenth-Century Virginia Presbyterians on Christian Nationalism: A Threat to Souls, the Church, and the Body Politic” | Modern Reformation | June 9, 2026
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