18th century style waterboarding of Virginia Baptist minister David Barrow by Anglican Officials in 1778.

Since religious freedom has become one of the central issues of our time, was featured in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and will very likely be part of the debate in the next Congress and beyond, this is an opportune moment for us to reflect on the meaning of religious freedom in our history.

The Christian Right’s efforts reframe or recast many of their issues in terms of religious freedom has been a project many years in the making, as the Christian Right has experimented with redefining religious freedom to their advantage. They have done this in an effort at what we might call philosophical judo. Since it is an idea that is singularly threatening to their visions of theocratic Christian politics -- they are using it against us.

Indeed, if you Google Religious Freedom Day, the first thing you see is ReligiousFreedomDay.com -- which is a front for a group called Gateways to Better Education -- which seeks to use the public schools as an opportunity to proselytize. (But they did not manage to grab every social media opportunity. For example, there was no Facebook Group for Religious Freedom Day. But there is now!)

Suffice to say that the Christian Right has a big head start in their efforts to use and abuse religious freedom to achieve their goals by any means necessary.

This week here at Daily Kos, we have been discussing religious freedom and why we commemorate Religious Freedom Day. This post is adapted from my presentation on a webinar, hosted by Political Research Associates and the Coalition for Liberty and Justice — which has sponsored a social media campaign in the run up to Religious Freedom Day. You can join in at #ReligiousFreedomIs ).

It is long past time that everyone to the left of the Christian Right reclaim the narrative about religious freedom in history and law. It is integral to how we hold a diverse nation together. Figuring out how to regain religious freedom as a powerful source of liberation and democracy and the center of an innoculatory set of related ideas (religious pluralism and separation of church and state) is one of the urgent tasks of our time.

Its a big and powerful story that some of us are working hard to learn to tell. But the short of it is that Religious Freedom Day commemorates the enactment of The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom on January 16, 1786. It was written by Thomas Jefferson in 1777, and was eventually shepherded in to law by his protégée, James Madison almost a decade later. The legislation is widely considered to be a forerunner to the approach to the matters of religion and government found in both the Constitution and the First Amendment. The Day was established by an act of Congress in 1991 and it has been commemorated with an annual presidential proclamation ever since.

As impressive as that may sound, there is much more to the story. And understanding what that is, may make a decisive difference in the politics – and political outcomes in our time.

Consider this.

Thomas Jefferson viewed his authorship of the Virginia Statute as one of three accomplishments for which he most wished to be remembered -- along with writing the Declaration of Independence and founding the University of Virginia. He asked that these three accomplishments be carved into his tombstone, and they were.

The reason he highlighted this seemingly obscure piece of state legislation from a lifetime of remarkable accomplishments?

He knew what a tremendous leap forward the Statute was — for one of the most liberatory and democratic ideas in all of human history. An idea that is as vital today as when it was central to the American Revolution that threw off the British Empire and its religious arm, the Church of England.

Just 6 months after authoring the Declaration of Independence Jefferson joined with several others in January 1777, to discuss what later became the Virginia Statute. The moment was a matter of some political urgency as well as philosophical urgency. The success of the Revolution would depend on being able to cobble together a coalition of stakeholders, and the religious dissidents of Virginia, the Baptists, the Presbyterians and the Methodists would be necessary if there was to be any chance of defeating what at the time, was the greatest military power in the history of the world.

Let’s consider a bit of the religious and political context of the times in which Jefferson wrote the Statute. The Anglican Church enjoyed special privileges throughout the colonial era. Attendance at an Anglican church on Sunday was compulsory. Failure to attend was the most prosecuted crime in colonial Virginia in the years before the Revolution. Historian John Ragosta writes that members of these Anglican Church vestries were also empowered to report religious crimes like heresy and blasphemy to local grand juries. Violators were dealt with harshly. And Baptists were often victims of vigilante violence. “Men on horseback would often ride through crowds gathered to witness a baptism. Preachers were horsewhipped and dunked in rivers and ponds in a rude parody of their baptism ritual… Black attendees at meetings––whether free or slave––were subject to particularly savage beatings.”

(This is why when the American Christian Right whines about “persecution” it rings so hollow compared to the actual religious persecution that takes place around the world, and which was a source of why the Founders build religious freedom into our approach to the constitution and the law. The power of the idea of religious freedom is an existential threat to the agenda of the Christian Right and that is why they are working overtime to co-opt it.)

It was the recent memory of abuses like the torture of Baptist ministers that helped to create the political moment that made Virginia the first government in the history of the world to self-impose complete religious freedom and equality. The statute effectively disestablished the Anglican Church as the state church of Virginia, curtailing its extraordinary powers and privileges. It also decreed that citizens are free to believe as they will and in the key phrase of the legislation, that this “shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

Put another way, one’s religious identity was irrelevant to one’s standing as a citizen. Counting neither for or against you.

Even late in life, when he was writing his autobiography, Jefferson wanted to make sure that no one would later be able to reinterpret the intent of the legislation. He wrote that the legislature had rejected a suggested reference to “Jesus Christ,” and that this proved that the legislation sought to protect, as he put it, “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

Historians as well as Supreme Court justices widely regard it as the root of how the framers of the Constitution (and later the First Amendment) approached matters of religion and government.

The idea that citizens could think freely without regard for the views of the rich and the powerful was unprecedented.

Jefferson and his colleagues were well aware of the history of religious persecution and war in Europe and the religious persecutions in New England – most famously the Salem witch trials. (But these were not limited to Salem.) Among the formative experiences of the young revolutionaries Jefferson and Madison, were witnessing the beatings and jailings of Baptist preachers.

These were well educated men faced with an historic opportunity wondering -- how could they inoculate the new nation they were hoping to create against the ravages of religious persecution and warfare? And later, how could they stitch together a fractious group of colonies with different interests, religious histories and demographics -- into a unified nation? They chose to take religious identity off the table. There would be no official religion, no state supported clergy, and religious equality under the law would be the standard of justice. This was the approach taken by the Constitution, which made no mention of religion, God, or Christianity except to bar religious tests for public office. During the debates in the states over ratification, this absence of any religious content was one of the main sources of opposition.

A few years later, the First Amendment sought to clarify the matter even further.

But they also knew that for all of this, religious freedom was hardly a settled matter. The opposition would never entirely recede. And that their experiment in religious freedom might not last.

They were not wrong about any of this.

The principle entered our culture and laws only in fits and starts. It took the states a long time to bring their state constitutions and laws into conformity with the national constitution. As recently as the 1940s, it was still against the law for Catholics to hold public office in New Hampshire. To be sure, the law was no longer in force, but it was technically still on the books. The Supreme Court finally declared all such laws unconstitutional in the 1960s.

The results of our ongoing experiment have been imperfect.

It fair to say we are still working on it. And of course, freedom of religion in the founding era did not mean freedom for all and in all respects, as African and Native American slaves, women, and people who were not landowners could attest. Nor did the principle of religious freedom eliminate religious prejudice and discrimination.

But what religious freedom did do was to facilitate every struggle for advances in human and civil rights ever since.

I see Religious Freedom Day as an opportunity to reconnect with authentic understandings of our history and our most deeply held values -- the values that bind us together as a community of communities and equal standing as citizens. And to remind ourselves that the theocrats and the plutocrats can only prevail by dividing and setting the rest of us against one another. (You can retweet that point here.)