Today is Religious Freedom Day, proclaimed by President Obama as it was by many presidents before him. The date is chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the passage, on January 16, 1786, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, which was written by Thos. Jefferson and is one of the few state laws that is as famous as nearly any law passed by the Congress.

The Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom marked the end of the establishment of the Anglican Church in the state that gave us not only Jefferson but Washington and Madison and Monroe.* When, three years later, the United States Constitution was finally ratified, there were still three states with established religions — Connecticut, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — and one, Massachusetts, which required church membership but didn’t specify which church.

One of the astonishing things about Virginia is that the most famous law ever written to free men from efforts to enforce a religion begins with a reference to God. “Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free,” is how it commences, before laying out the predicates. It reckoned that all attempts to influence a man’s free mind “by temporal punishments” or “civil incapacitations” tend “only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness” and are therefore a departure “from the plan of the author of our religion.”

Virginia’s statute was magnificent in its radicality. It declared 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 endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.”

The law said that even to force a person “to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind.”

Its long list of predicates ends with the assertion that “Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.” Then the famous proscription:

“no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.”

Forgive the long history, but the question that vexes us today is which faction in our struggle over religion is in violation of the principles laid down in the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. Who is being compelled today or “burthened in his body or goods” or is “suffering on account of his religious opinions and beliefs”? Is it the state? Is it the secular population? Or is it the churches, synagogues, and mosques?

Is it the woman who is free to get an abortion more or less whenever she wants? Or is it, say, the Catholic Church, which is in danger of being forced to close hospitals because its religious beliefs prevent it from performing abortions? Is it the same-gender couple that wants to get married or Jewish or Catholic religious institution that may be forced to drop adoption services because its religious tenets prevent it from placing foster children with same-gender couples? Is it a disabled teacher who won’t bow to the church for which she wants to work? Or is it a church that doesn’t want to employ as a minister a former employee who won’t bow to its authority?

The Supreme Court has spoke unanimously in vouchsafing the rights of the church, Hosanna-Tabor in Michigan, that didn’t want to employ the minister. But the church had to go all the way to the highest court in the land to secure its rights — battling a federal government that seems to have a tin ear in respect of religion. This is the issue Governor Perry was speaking of when, in the debate last night at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, he spoke of the government being “at war” against organized religion. One needn’t speak in his martial terms to wonder on which side we might find the author of the Statute of Virginia for Religion Freedom that we celebrate today.

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* Also Presidents Harrison, Tyler, Tayor, and Wilson.