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Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty

Amazon.com Price:  $28.26 (as of 02/05/2019 09:46 PST- Details)

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Before the American Revolution, no colony more assiduously safe its established church or more severely persecuted religious dissenters than Virginia. Both its politics and religion were dominated by an Anglican establishment, and dissenters from the established Church of England were subject to a large number of legal infirmities and serious persecution. By 1786, no state more fully safe religious freedom.
This profound transformation, as John A. Ragosta shows in this book, arose not from a new-found cultural tolerance. Quite, as the Revolution approached, Virginia’s political establishment needed the toughen of the religious dissenters, primarily Presbyterians and Baptists, for the mobilization effort. Dissenters seized this opportunity to insist on freedom of religion in return for their mobilization. Their demands led to a complex and extended negotiation in which the religious establishment slowly and grudgingly offered just enough reforms to take care of the an important toughen of the dissenters.
After the war, when dissenters’ toughen was no longer needed, the establishment leaders sought to recapture keep an eye on, but found they had seriously miscalculated: wartime negotiations had politicized the dissenters. Because of this dissenters’ demands for the separation of church and state triumphed over the establishment’s efforts and Jefferson’s Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom was adopted.
Historians and the Supreme Court have repeatedly noted that the foundation of the First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty lies in Virginia’s struggle, turning primarily to Jefferson and Madison to be aware this. In Wellspring of Liberty, John A. Ragosta argues that Virginia’s religious dissenters played a seminal, and previously underappreciated, role in the development of the First Amendment and in the meaning of religious freedom as we comprehend it today.

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