Don't forget John Leland. (Letters).

I was pleased to see mention of John Leland in Rob Boston's article, "Priority Mail: Why President Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists is Still Being Read By Americans After 200 Years" (January Church & State). It was disappointing, however, to read only of Leland's part in delivery of the giant cheese to President Jefferson.

Leland's contributions to church-state separation are substantive and deserve much more attention. At age 21, John Leland went from his native Massachusetts to Virginia where he found immigrants from England (Separatists) in a struggle for religious liberty. Church and state were then united in Virginia, and civil authority was used to enforce rules of the Established Church. Preaching by other than Established Church clergy was viewed as "disturbing the peace." In 1768, four of these preachers were arraigned and imprisoned in Fredericksburg on charges of disturbing the peace by preaching. Leland also observed preachers being threatened, beaten and their religious services disrupted.

A strong proponent of liberty of conscience, Leland objected: "Government should protect every man in thinking, and speaking freely, and that one does not abuse another ... all should be equally free, Jews Turks, Pagans and Christians" (p. 118 in Writings of Elder John Leland). Supporting the Virginia State Constitution provision, he opposed any religious test to hold public office: "If a man merits the confidence of his neighbors in Virginia -- let him worship one God, twenty Gods, or no God -- be he Jew, Turk, Pagan, or Infidel, he is eligible to any office in the state" (p. 106).

Leland wrote in 1790: "The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever...." (p. 107). His source for the liberty of conscience doctrine with church and state separation was his understanding of the Bible, i.e., that the state is created by human beings, and the church is created by God, not by the state: "... if all the souls, in a government were saints of God, should they be formed into a society by law, that society could be not a Gospel Church, but a creature of the state" (p. 107). Leland's view could be known as faith-based liberty of conscience, which cannot exist without separation of church and state.

Additionally, while many preachers at the time of Leland and long after were supporting slavery based on the Bible, in 1791 Leland held that slavery "is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature, inconsistent with republican government, destructive of every humane and benevolent passion of the soul and subversive to that liberty absolutely necessary to ennoble the human mind" (p. 174). He pled for "the blessing of freedom" (emphasis in original) upon the blacks.

Those who are today saying that founders of the country intended a Christian nation and therefore did not intend separation of church and state advocate a revisionist history and are ignoring champions of liberty of conscience like the Baptist minister, John Leland.

--Eugene May, Ph.D. Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.