Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

by Denise A. Spellberg

  The evangelical minister Leland, arguably the most significant if unsung Baptist political activist of his generation, preached a new American gospel about the inalienable rights of conscience and political equality, not just for persecuted Baptists, but for all believers, including Muslims. In following Leland’s remarkable ministry in the next chapter, from Virginia into New England through the mid-nineteenth century, we see combined the reverberations of key Jeffersonian precedents and the pleas of the earliest Baptists in England for the protection of all spiritual beliefs from government control.

  7

  Beyond Toleration

  John Leland, Baptist Advocate for the Rights of Muslims, 1776–1841

  The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest, to grant indulgence; whereas, all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians. Test oaths and established creeds, should be avoided as the worst of evils.

  —John Leland, “Virginia Chronicle,” 1790

  THE BAPTIST EVANGELICAL MINISTER John Leland (d. 1841) considered the “established creeds” of his native Massachusetts to be “the worst of evils” because they sanctioned religious and political inequality long after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and the passage of the First Amendment in 1791.1 Leland would return to New England from Virginia, where he had first fought for religious liberty and political equality; now he would champion those rights in Connecticut and Massachusetts not just for his fellow Baptists but for all believers, including Muslims.2 But Leland’s principled insistence on citizenship for American Muslims was based, like Jefferson’s, on an imagined rather than a real population.

  Leland’s dedication to the cause of Muslim rights echoed repeatedly in the sermons he preached and the editorials he published from 1790 until the end of his life. What he sought would not be fully realized until passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which explicitly forbade any state to “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens” or “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” making good on what was already promised by the Constitution and the First Amendment. But Leland did live long enough to witness the end of Protestant Congregational religious establishments in Connecticut in 1818 and in Massachusetts in 1833. His writings and his election in 1811 to the Massachusetts legislature would contribute mightily to those developments.3

  Leland deemed toleration a “despicable” concept insofar as it compromised the “liberty,” or complete political equality, he advocated for Jews, Catholics, Baptists, Deists, and Muslims.4 His Virginian ally James Madison had already replaced the phrase “all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion” in the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights with the more egalitarian “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion.”5 Madison too realized that, unlike equality, “toleration” could be extended or withdrawn at whim, depending on the degree of government tolerance.6 He believed, as Leland would write, that “religious liberty is a right and not a favor.”7 It was not something the government could infringe or limit to select believers.

  John Leland, a Baptist minister and a champion of religious freedom, became one of Jefferson’s staunchest allies. (illustration credit 7.1)

  Leland vocally championed the rights of Muslims as well as Catholics and Jews at a time when such inclusiveness was unusual and unpopular.8 And unlike Jefferson and Madison, the two famed Virginian political leaders whom he supported, Leland had himself suffered persecution because of his faith. Ultimately, he would surpass Jefferson in the absolutism of his insistence on the separation of church and state, and as an abolitionist, he would further develop his belief in the universality of civil rights to reach logical conclusions about slavery that Jefferson could never have approved.9

  “The notion of a Christian commonwealth,” Leland thundered, “should be exploded forever.”10 Emphasizing that the kingdom of Jesus had initially been “not of this world,” Leland condemned “all state establishments of Christianity” as “ANTI-CHRISTOCRACIES,” by which he meant regimes antithetical to true Christianity.11 “The fondness of magistrates to foster Christianity,” he argued, “has done it more harm than all the persecutions ever did.” Unlike Thomas Jefferson, who wished to protect government from religion, Leland sought to preserve his cherished faith from state control, which he believed “corrupts Christianity and reduces it to a level with state policy.”12 Most of his fellow Baptists expressly limited their hope for the extension of civil rights to all Protestants, but not Leland. He thought they were naturally owed to all believers—among whom he consistently included Muslims.

  POSSIBLE ROOTS OF LELAND’S THOUGHT ABOUT THE SEPARATION OF RELIGION FROM GOVERNMENT AND ABOUT MUSLIM RIGHTS

  Where did Leland’s universalism come from? Certainly not from the Congregational sermons he heard as a child. He recalled how “every Sunday afternoon,” for nearly an hour, he’d listen to the minister repeat the same prayer: “Pity Mahomedan imposture—pagan idolatry—Jewish infidelity—papistry and superstition: bring the downfall of anti-Christian tyranny to a period.” By the age of twelve, he had committed these prejudices to memory.13

  There were only three books in his father’s house: the Bible, Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, and a volume of Protestant sermons.14 With his father refusing support, Leland’s formal education advanced no further than his local grammar school.15 He seems, however, to have found his way eventually to certain other important influences from the seventeenth century.

  Leland’s ideas would echo those of John Smyth, an English Baptist, who in 1611 first asserted:

  That the magistrate is not by virtue of his office to meddle with religion or matters of conscience, to force or compel men to this or that form of religion or doctrine, but to leave Christian religion free to every man’s conscience, and to handle only civil transgressions (Rom. xiii), injuries, and wrongs of man against man, in murder, adultery, theft, etc., for Christ is the only king and lawgiver of the church and conscience (James iv.12).16

  Smyth enjoined the king from interfering in Christian practice. In 1612, Thomas Helwys carried this defense of the rights of conscience beyond an exclusively Protestant application, boldly declaring that the king retained no power over any believer: “Let them be heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever it apperteynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”17 It was this more expansive vision of Helwys’s that Leland would ultimately follow to its marriage with the Golden Rule, as enshrined in the Baptist confession of faith promulgated in London in 1660:

  That it is the will and mind of God (in these gospel times) that all men should have the free liberty of their own conscience in matters of religion, or worship, without the least oppression or persecution, as simply upon that account; and that for any in authority otherwise to act, we confidently believe is expressly contrary to the mind of Christ, who requires that whatsoever men would that others should do unto them, they should even so do unto others. Matt. vii, 12, and that the tares and the wheat should grow together in the field (which is the world), until the harvest (which is the end of the world), Matt. xiii. 29, 30, 38, 39.18

  Leland may have found further inspiration for his thoughts on the separation of government from religion in the work of Roger Williams. Although copies of Williams’s seventeenth-century writings remained scarce in eighteenth-century New England, Leland knew that Williams had been banished from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts “because he opposed the interference of law in matters of religion.”19 Doubtless, Leland also read that Williams had briefly been a Baptist in Rhode Island and continued to offer refuge in his Providence colony for his former coreligionists at a time when they had faced whips and prison in Massachusetts Bay.20 Leland’s advocacy for Muslims remained closer to Williams’s ideals than to any of his Baptist contemporaries.21 Like the earliest English Baptists, and n
ow Leland, Williams believed that government could legitimately enforce only the second tablet of the Ten Commandments, which proscribed sins against others, such as murder and theft. In 1644, he had asked whether Muslims might be “peaceable and quiet Subjects, loving and helpful neighbours, faire and just dealers, true and loyall to the civill government?” Answering a resounding yes, he concluded that “Turkes” indeed might live harmoniously among Christians, based on “all Reason and Experience in many flourishing Cities and Kingdomes of the World.”22

  Admittedly, direct evidence of any connection between Leland and Williams is nonexistent. Suggestive, though by no means conclusive, is Leland’s choice to refer to Muslims typically as “Turks,” a term also preferred by all the English Baptists, as well as Williams, in the seventeenth century. He would refer to “Mahometans” only twice, once that term had become too dominant to avoid in eighteenth-century America.23

  LESSONS LELAND DERIVED FROM THOMAS JEFFERSON, JAMES MADISON, AND JOHN LOCKE, 1776–91

  Leland, who underwent a personal conversion to the Baptist faith in 1774 in Massachusetts, resettled in Virginia, where he remained from 1776 to 1791, preaching and converting many during those pivotal fifteen years. There he also learned the art of active protest against the Anglican establishment. When he arrived in Virginia, Baptist ministers were often whipped, fined, and imprisoned.24 Though spared such treatment, Leland was once accosted by a man wielding a sword, who attempted to stop him from preaching. Leland’s daring wife, Sally, saved his life by locking the assailant’s hands together in her iron grasp.25

  However ambiguous his debt to seventeenth-century religious precedents, Leland found verifiable political inspiration in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom received early support among Baptists in 1779, despite failing to become law at the time. Leland closely studied Jefferson’s proposed legislation as well as his later published observations about religion and government in Notes on Virginia. The Baptist preacher would later reproduce many of Jefferson’s ideas nearly verbatim in his own writings in New England. Leland would not, however, make personal contact with the man he referred to as “my hero” until 1801.26 In Virginia, he caught the notice of James Madison, who continued the fight against the Anglican establishment of religion when Jefferson left for France in 1784. Leland and Madison may have met as early as the spring of 1785, during the campaign to garner support for Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, which protested state taxes on non-Anglicans to support Anglican ministers and churches.27 It was no surprise that Leland supported the measure; what is interesting is that some of its opponents nevertheless had doubts about the extent of religious liberty. Richard Henry Lee, for instance, despite believing fervently in religious taxes to “secure” what he termed “our morals,” nevertheless wrote in a letter to Madison that “true freedom [of religion] embraces the Mahomitan and the Gentoo [Hindu] as well as the Christian religion.”28

  Leland studied Madison’s Memorial as closely as he had Jefferson’s legislation, and via the two Virginians he admired, he discovered the thought of John Locke, which would eventually find its way throughout his later writing. By then Leland would also be looking to Locke’s work directly. In these years, the sparely educated preacher read extensively, impressing his contemporaries with his “retentive” memory and “the energetic vigor of his mind.”29

  By February 1788, James Madison would have renewed cause to take notice of Leland. While in New York, Madison learned by letter from Virginia that Leland, by now a powerful Baptist leader in Orange County, was “exceedingly averse to the adoption of the constitution.”30 His popularity among Baptists in Virginia had grown with his reputation as a compelling and humorous preacher,31 who would baptize three hundred souls in the year 1788 alone, his lifetime tally eventually to exceed fourteen hundred.32 In the letter to Madison, however, he was described as among those who “had much weight” with those people who “are opposed” to the state’s ratification of the Constitution.33 Indeed, the many Virginia Baptists under his influence seemed initially disinclined to support either the Constitution or Madison’s quest to become a delegate to the state’s convention. While supporting the new charter’s abolition of a religious test, they worried that without an explicit protection of their rights of conscience, as affirmed in Virginia only in 1786 with the passage of Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, they might once more be subject to religious and political oppression by the federal government. Without the Baptist vote, Madison could not be elected as a delegate, and without the formidable Madison, the chances for ratification in Virginia were bleak.

  The same letter of February 1788 enclosed a transcription of Leland’s point-by-point objections to the Constitution, which remain his earliest surviving statements on the subject of religious liberty. The first and the tenth go to the heart of his concerns:

  1st. There is no Bill of Rights, whenever a Number of men enter into a state of Society, a Number of individual Rights must be given up to Society, but there should be a memorial of those not surrendered, otherwise every natural & domestic Right becomes alienable, which raises Tyranny at once, and this is as necessary in one Form of Government as in another.…

  10ly. What is clearest of all—Religious Liberty, is not sufficiently secured, No Religious Test is Required as a qualification to fill any office under the United States, but if a Majority of Congress with the President favour one System more than another, they may oblige all others to pay for the support of their System as much as they please, and if Oppression does not ensue, it will be owing to the Mildness of Administration and not to any Constitutional defence, and if the Manners of People are so far Corrupted, that they cannot live by Republican principles, it is Very Dangerous leaving Religious Liberty at their mercy.34

  Leland’s first written political assertions demonstrate his understanding of Locke’s notion of government as a compact among the governed, as well the philosopher’s understanding of religious liberty as an inalienable right, not subject to surrender by way of entry into any compact. By this time, Leland had already served on two Baptist committees determined to lobby the Virginia General Assembly to disestablish the Anglican established creed; he would serve on one more before leaving the state.35

  Scholars dispute whether Madison and Leland actually met in March, the following month, to discuss Baptist objections to the Constitution, though to this day a plaque in Virginia commemorates the event as a momentous historical certainty.36 What is clear, however, is that Madison acknowledged the power of Baptist concerns because of the case Leland made, whether on paper or in person. Shortly after Virginia’s ratification of the Constitution, Madison would have his father bring Leland a copy of The Federalist Papers, which contained the Framer’s essays in defense of the nation’s new charter.37

  In exchange for Leland’s Baptist support, Madison pledged to back an amendment to the Constitution protecting rights of conscience.38 This would become the First Amendment, which affirms that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” But these federal assurances did not apply at the state level. They would not end the Congregational establishment that had first driven Leland from his native New England, and against which he would launch a fight when he returned north.

  Leland would never take credit for his influence, or that of his fellow Baptists, on Virginia’s ratification of the Constitution, though he would later correspond for a brief time with Madison. In February 1789, he congratulated Madison on his election to Congress, taking the opportunity to affirm happily that he had cast his own vote in Madison’s favor. Leland made one request: that Madison keep him informed about the details of legislative matters, in particular any concerning the “one thing” he needed to be warned about: “that if religious Liberty is anywise threatened, that I shall receive the earliest Intelligence.” The letter also invites Madison to “pass by” an
d visit Leland in Virginia on his way to the first meeting of Congress in New York City.39 If the two men had not met before ratification, they almost certainly did afterward.

  A few months later, in 1789, Leland wrote to President George Washington on behalf of the united Baptist churches of Virginia. He reminded Washington of the state’s persecution of his denomination, “when mobs, fines, bonds and prisons were our frequent repast.” Pressing the newly elected Washington, Leland expressed hope that “the horrid evils that have been so pestiferous in Asia and Europe,” namely “faction, ambition, war, perfidy, fraud, and persecution for conscience sake,” might never approach “the borders of our happy nation” under the direction of “our beloved president.”40

  Washington reassured Leland that he remembered the Baptists, who “have been, throughout America, uniformly, and almost unanimously the firm friends to civil liberty, and persevering promoters of our glorious liberty.” The president also reaffirmed his own defense of the universal free exercise of religion: “I have often expressed my sentiments, that any man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the Dictates of his own conscience.”41 As he had stated in 1784, Washington, like Leland, intended this protection not only for Baptists but all believers, including Muslims.42 With support from the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and dissenting Protestants on the side of religious freedom, the disestablishment of Anglicanism in Virginia had been achieved.