Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia's Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty (review)

Abstract

Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia's Religious Dissenters Helped Win American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty. By John A. Ragosta. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 261. Cloth, $34.95.)In what is primarily a work of advocacy, John Ragosta argues that religious dissenters, principally Baptists and Presbyterians, bear most conspicuous responsibility for transformation of during and immediately after Revolution from a British colony where Church of England was legally established to a state with an essentially modern separation of church and state. While he acknowledges that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson contributed important writings, Ragosta insists that was dissenters who bargained for, and fought for, religious (11). He wants their voices represented both in history and current legal and . . . judicial decisions on church and state (170).Perhaps author's legal background has sensitized him to importance of negotiations between adversaries, because he reiterates this theme throughout book. In one camp he locates supporters of Anglican establishment who controlled assembly and keenly desired to mobilize all Virginians to wage Revolution. In other are religious dissenters. They favored independence from Britain yet asked in effect what's in it for us if retained a polity that privileged one church and its clergy and discriminated against all others. The well-spring for liberty in book's title is the Whigs' need for broader that required political leaders to enlist evangelicals in (70). By negotiating with them, Ragosta claims that they pulled dissenters into military and increasingly politicized them . . . contributing to republicanization of Virginia (99).The process began at outset of Revolution when free exercise of religion guaranteed in Declaration of Rights of 1776 stopped legal persecution. Later that year Assembly ended taxation imposed on dissenters to support established church. Both measures certainly helped mobilization of dissenters and author makes a good case for support dissenting clergy offered cause. But his further claim that the war years were marked by intense negotiations and dialogue among establishment and dissenters with regular liberalizations on multiple fronts to satisfy dissenter demands is less persuasive (125). Only minimal changes in church polity benefited dissenters during war years. Jefferson's proposed statute for religious freedom was introduced and quickly shelved in June 1779. The bulk of petitions that year supported passage of a religious assessment bill, which also failed. By reducing wartime contest to a prolonged negotiation between dissenters and state's leadership, this study misses complexity within struggle for religious freedom. Members of renamed Protestant Episcopal Church of dominated government and religious rationalists among them typically supported views of Jefferson and Madison in opposition to more traditional Episcopalians who sought state support for religion. Unfortunately Ragosta largely ignores this quarrel within established church as well as genuine differences between and among Baptists and especially Presbyterians over proper relationship between church and state.Only after peace rendered mobilization unnecessary, and a benevolent assembly appeared to favor Episcopal Church by an incorporation act that fixed that church's polity, did dissenters unite to mount barricades against a revised assessment proposal. …