Madison, Jefferson & Religious Liberty | Dr. David Bobb | BRI’s Constitutional Conversations

0:00 can you can you tell us the story of how Madison and Jefferson came to to the belief that liberty religious liberty the concept of a religious liberty should be embedded into the Constitution yes it’s a great story it’s I think an example of that prudence and that courage that that was so much a part of

0:20 the the founding of this country so Madison saw grave injustice in the area around which he grew up and and where he had returned to after after college he saw that Baptists were not being treated in a way that was worthy of human

0:42 dignity and they were they were sometimes find even imprisoned some of them were beaten up because they had the audacity to practice their religious beliefs as their conscience was telling them and again this was not contrary to the common good it wasn’t running afoul

1:02 of anything but the Anglican establishment and so taxpayer dollars propped up the Anglican Church in the Commonwealth of Virginia and Madison saw that as a real problem and he said I want to do something about that and what he figured out is that he could in that with the aid of Thomas Jefferson who was eight years his senior craft a piece of

1:24 legislation Jefferson drafted it they introduced it and the idea was that gradually they would lift the established religion from the backs of all taxpayers in the Commonwealth of Virginia in other words there wouldn’t be one official sect that would dominate and that would be able to receive

1:44 taxpayer funding and what happened is they faced some opposition because people like Patrick Henry said you know what we really need this kind of taxpayer supported religious establishment because kids were really not towing the moral line and Madison

2:05 said well that may be true but is it really going to be an effective thing for the state to force people against their will to practice a particular faith is that going to get to the place where we all want to be is that going to conduce in other words to the common good to the unum because you can beat people out of being Baptist you

2:27 can beat people out of being a particular faith or beat them into having some sort of faith right but what have you done in the process you’ve lost your Liberty and you’ve imposed tyranny so the question then is how do we have an accommodation of the multiplicity of interests of professions of belief or non-belief how do we do that in a in a

2:48 plural context and Jefferson and Madison came together hatched a plan and it took a lot of courage to do that because the key political forces in the Commonwealth of Virginia were arrayed against them you know it got so bad at one point Jefferson’s overran in Paris he had

3:08 proposed the legislation it had languished because Henry was was was very powerful and could keep the legislation from from passing okay and Jefferson writes his friend Madison and says what we need to do here I’m quoting Thomas Jefferson is quote devoutly pray

3:28 for Patrick Henry to die Wow yes so anytime you think that the founding fathers agreed on everything it wasn’t the case there were big disagreements but what they did Jefferson and Madison was continue that fight laying the groundwork trying to persuade their fellow citizens and issuing these really

3:51 interesting what we would see kind of now as as blog postings these these circulars that were that were put all around the Commonwealth that argued we need to have religious liberty not where a majority just merely puts up with the minority and when they get tired of

4:11 putting up with them they kick them out or do whatever they want because they have the power we need real religious liberty and it took seven eight years before that legislation finally was adopted but when it did what they said in motion was really the idea the you can’t use the state to exercise tyranny over the human mind and heart

4:32 and that was really an amazing accomplishment because not only did it take a lot of courage but think of all of the different steps in that process right they could have given up right but they what they did is they were prudent because they saw a just end and they figured out these are the means that it’s going to take this is the coalition that we’re gonna have to pull together because by the end of it they had not only Baptists but they had lots of other

4:55 denominations they had free thinkers they had folks that were not part of any religious establishment at all and they’d come together to say that this is something that’s so important because we value we esteem our fellow citizens who are religious we esteem those who are not and we want to write into the law of

5:15 the Commonwealth of Virginia this idea that all human beings are created equal