Religious freedom, or not...............

 

............More stuff I never learned as a history major:

     In 1768, with dissenting religion continuing to grow, the Anglican establishment—both a political and religious entity—resorted to arrests.  Baptists faced the brunt of arrests.  By the time of the American Revolution, more than half the Baptist ministers in Virginia had been jailed for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace. (Some ministers responded that they had a license from "King Jesus" and recognized no other authority over their calling.) . . .

     Facing the most formidable military of the eighteenth century, and with dissenters accounting for 20 to 33 percent or more of Virginia's white population, patriot leaders realized quickly that they needed dissenters' support in the war effort. (Government documents noted, for example, the need for support from those marksmen in the heavily Presbyterian Shenandoah Valley with the extraordinarily accurate long rifles who eventually mad up the core of Daniel Morgan's riflemen at the Battle of Saratoga.)  This recognition led to a remarkable negotiation—support for the war effort being offered by dissenters in return for religious freedom.

     Dissenters' earlier pleas for some limited relief were replaced by demands for equal treatment: an end to the church tax; an end to Anglican control of marriage, orphans, and poor relief; exemption from military service for dissenting ministers.  Religious freedom was tied to the sought-after support for the war.

-John A. Ragosta, from his essay, What Does the American Revolution Mean to Me? in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding