1776 - Religion

Religion

Rhode Island Quaker Jemima Wilkinson, 23, is dismissed from her Friends meeting in August. Having offended her coreligionists by going to meetings of the late evangelist George Whitefield in his final revival tour of New England, she comes down with fever in October, recovers, announces that she has had a vision in which she died and was sent back to Earth to preach to a "lost and guilty, gossiping, dying World," and adopts the name Publick Universal Friend by which she will insist hereafter on being called (see 1784).

The Virginia General Assembly meets for the first time in October and hears petitions for the disestablishment of the Church of England and the removal of disabilities from dissenters. Church attendance has been compulsory in the colony, and (although the laws have not been enforced) heresy has been punishable by death, denial of the Trinity by 3 years' imprisonment, free speech has been treated as blasphemy, and Baptist ministers have been singled out for special persecution. Thomas Jefferson asks, "Has the state a right to adopt an opinion in matters of religion?" The Assembly repeals some of the most oppressive British statutes and exempts dissenters from taxes to support the Anglican Church, but it defers action on a proposal to levy a general tax on all citizens for the support of Christian ministers (see 1779).