Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (46 page)

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.”
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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.”
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As he had stated in 1784, Washington, like Leland,
intended this protection not only for Baptists but all believers, including Muslims.
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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.

Leland knew, however, that he could expect no such support from local political leaders when he began a similar effort in New England in 1791. The struggle against religious repression there would consume him into the nineteenth century.

Leland, born in Grafton, Massachusetts, had begun his own spiritual quest in 1772 when, at the age of eighteen, he heard a voice from the skies telling him, “You are not about the work which you have got to do.”
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Two years later he became a Baptist and a “volunteer for Christ.”
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When he began his life’s evangelical ministry in 1774, he heard that the eminent minister
Isaac Backus, among other Baptists, had journeyed to Philadelphia to meet with John and Sam Adams, their representatives to the First Continental Congress. The delegation’s aim was to protest not only their unjust taxation by George III, but that forced on them by the Bay State’s Congregational establishment.
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Baptists could avoid paying for the support of Congregational ministers and churches only by acquiring a certificate of spiritual dedication and economic contribution to their own faith, which document had to be sought annually from town authorities. The Baptists considered these requirements an infringement on their rights of conscience as well as a civil inequity.
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Those who refused to pay taxes or produce the certificates were fined, imprisoned, and sometimes had their property confiscated.
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John Adams’s recorded response to this Philadelphia meeting with Baptist and Quaker constituents in the same bind suggests a rather different outlook on religious persecution than that of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison during the 1770s: He privately notes that he was “somewhat indignant” at being “thus summoned before a self-created tribunal, which was neither legal nor constitutional,”
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and he suspected the Baptists of treacherously wishing to “break up the [Continental] Congress” with their protests. Adams defended his state’s maintenance of “the most mild and equitable establishment of religion that was ever known in the world, if indeed they could be called an establishment,”
and he concluded that he would “not deceive” the Baptists of his state “by insinuating the faintest hope” that the Congregational Protestant majority would ever end their ascendancy in Massachusetts.
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After visiting his family in New England in 1790, Leland resettled there the following year as minister of
Cheshire, Massachusetts, a town founded by Baptists from Rhode Island a few years before the Revolution.
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His duties in this small settlement in the western part of the state did not keep him from joining the public fight over religious and political equality elsewhere. Like other Baptists, he immediately objected to particularly onerous new certificate laws in neighboring
Connecticut, which required applicants to get the signatures of two government officials or, if there were only one, that of the justice of the peace. These local officeholders, then, had complete discretion, without means for appeal, to decide whether non-Congregationalists would be granted exemption from being taxed to support an established religion from which they dissented.
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“I am not a citizen of Connecticut—the religious laws of the state do not oppress me, and I expect never will personally,” Leland preached. “But a love of religious liberty in general induces me thus to speak.”
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In a powerful sermon, “The Rights of Conscience Inalienable and, therefore, Religious Opinions Not Cognizable by Law,” first published in New London, Connecticut, in 1791, and later reprinted in Virginia and throughout New England, he outlined the historical evils of state-mandated religion.
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Leland might have protested as a Baptist, or solely in defense of other Protestants, but he elected to speak on behalf of non-Protestants as well. He argued that “heathens, deists, and Jews, are not indulged in the certificate law; all of them, as well as Turks, must therefore be taxed for the standing order” of the state’s established Congregational faith.
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In other words, the greatest unfairness was toward those not even acknowledged to be believers of a legitimate faith. There were no known Muslim residents, but there were minuscule Jewish and Catholic populations. If they had clergymen to support their claims of affiliation (and often there were none), those rabbis and priests had no standing in the eyes of state authorities, and thus “Jews, Turks, heathens, and deists, if such there are in Connecticut, are bound and have no redress.”
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Leland had earlier argued that “forcing all to pay some preacher, amounts to an establishment,” and such was an affront to the sanctity of religion by making the preacher beholden to civil authority:

Notably, the plea he made on behalf of non-Protestants reveals a certain basic understanding of their traditions:

Then Leland asked “for an instance, where Jesus Christ, the author of his religion, or the apostles, who were divinely inspired, ever gave orders to, or intimated, that the civil powers on earth, ought to force people to observe the rules and doctrines of the gospel.” He proceeded, with recourse to a common notion, to appeal to the better nature of his Christian listeners: “Mahomet called in the use of the law and the sword, to convert people to his religion; but Jesus did not—does not.”
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George Sale, translator of Jefferson’s Qur’an, had been among the earliest to refute the idea that conversion to Islam had been by force, but Leland’s awareness did not extend that far. Unlike other contemporaries, however, he did propagate the misconception in defense of Islamic believers against a Christian regime.

In the same spirit he indicted all governments that presumed to dictate religion, from the first Christian emperor, Constantine, whom he charged with persecuting pagans and heretics; to the pope, who “exalts himself above all who are called gods (i.e., kings and rulers,) and where no Protestant heretic is allowed the liberty of a citizen”; to the Ottoman Empire, “where it is death to call in question the divinity of Mahomet, or the authenticity of the Alcoran.”
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Again, Leland’s
imperfect knowledge of Islam partially failed him: He did not understand that the Prophet’s humanity is a tenet of the faith, though he was right about the consequence of a Muslim’s questioning the divine authorship of the Qur’an.

Seeking to establish a historical foundation for rights of conscience, Leland explained that there were four forms of government on earth, one of which (the third) he distinguished for requiring “a religious test to qualify an officer of the state, proscribing all nonconformists from civil and religious liberty.”
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He then cited the Lockean notion of government as compact to describe the American system, asking “does a man, upon entering into a social compact, surrender his conscience to that society, to be controlled by laws thereof.” Leland answered, “I judge not.”
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The idea of inalienable rights Leland knew from both Madison and Jefferson’s Virginia legislation. Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia described any infringement on a citizen’s “civil capacities” as interference with “the natural rights of mankind,”
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while Madison’s
Memorial and Remonstrance
of 1785 held:

Leland would himself express the same sentiment this way:

Of course, Locke preceded all these Americans when he wrote a century earlier that “the care of souls does not belong to the magistrate.”
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Madison would render the idea somewhat more prosaically,
denying that “the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy.” Not unlike Leland, he believed that the Christian religion flourished “not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them.”
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Jefferson had argued in his
Notes on Virginia
that any attempt to institute
conformity in religion was the error of “fallible men” and their “coercion.”
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Leland mentioned those same “fallible men” in his tract on the rights of conscience to describe their coercive “tests of orthodoxy.”
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He also borrowed from his hero a reference to the legendary Greek robber Procrustes, who habitually chopped or stretched the limbs of his victims to fit the size of his bed. Jefferson argued, “Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there is a danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter.” He concluded, “Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion.”
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Leland presses the image further, making the “iron bedstead” of his villain “Pocrustes” analogous to the state’s coercive rack “to stretch and measure the consciences of all others by.”
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Jefferson reminded his readers, “Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”
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Leland expresses the same idea this way: “Millions of men, women, and children, have been tortured to death to produce uniformity, and yet the world has not advanced one inch towards it.” He writes, “Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of mathematics,”
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just as Jefferson had done earlier in his Virginia legislation, saying that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
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In fact, Leland would express more hyperbolically the very sentiment that had branded Jefferson an infidel. Following the latter’s infamous and incendiary proclamation of 1784—“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”
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—Leland’s tract of 1791 adds more faith options and explicitly sets monotheism on a par with the worshipping multiple gods or none: “Let every man speak freely without fear, maintain the principle that
he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God, or twenty Gods; and let government protect him in so doing.”
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