In his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Jefferson argues that the impulse for belief and religion comes from ____.

Question

The options are:

 

-the official Anglican Church

-the free, reasoning mind

-fallible, uninspired minds

-church emoluments and privileges

 

I have read the text of the Virginia Statute and am stuck between the last two options as the answers, as both are mentioned.  However, I am leaning toward church emoluments and privileges more-so, I just don't want to get it wrong.  Please help!

Answer 1

You're right that the words fallible, uninspired, emoluments and privileges are found in this document, but they're all in contexts that really don't have anything to do with the issue raised in your question, namely where "the impulse for belief and religion comes from." Take the first two words, for instance; these occur only in the second "resolved" clause, i.e., one of the list of premises (all beginning with That) that Jefferson uses to "set up" the statement of what is actually being enacted by the General Assembly in the final section:

• That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired [emphasis added] men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

 

So note that these two adjectives here apply to "men," not minds (though of course the distinction is a fine one, i.e., you could certainly argue that it's these men's attitudes or "minds" that make them "faillbile" and "uninspired"), and

really the emphasis is on how such "fallible and uninspired men" have unjustly imposed their own beliefs on others.

 

Similarly, privilege(s) occurs only in this clause:

• That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right

 

And here the reference of the world actually has nothing to do with religion or a church but rather it's about secular privileges, i.e., "those privileges and advantages, to which [any citizen] has a natural right."

 

The same deal with emolument; this word and its plural form occur in only two passages and in contexts, namely "offices of trust and emolument" and "worldly honours and emoluments," which clearly indicate they're about matters of government and society, not personal belief (as really this rather archaic word was mostly used in connection with).

 

And there's no specific reference to the "Anglican Church" nor the synonymous "Church of England" at all, so that leaves only your second choice, "the free, reasoning mind," and really if you look at how Jefferson begins the entire document with the statement "Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free [emphasis added]," this fits the choice very well (the additional element reasoning, which nor its root reason admittedly also do not occur anywhere in the document, would seem to be a reference to the intellectual foundation of the Enlightenment, a.k.a., the Age of Reason, one of whose tenets which Jefferson would certainly have been aware of was the importance of individual conscience particularly in matters of faith and religion).