870
Souter, J., dissenting
led not only to the defeat of Virginia's tax assessment bill, but also directly to passage of the Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, written by Thomas Jefferson. That
Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776-1787, p. 133 (1977) ("The assessment had been carefully drafted to permit those who preferred to support education rather than religion to do so"); T. Curry, The First Freedoms 141 (1986) ("[T]hose taxes not designated for any specific denomination [were] allocated to education"). It is beside the point that "there was no system of public education in Virginia until several decades after the assessment bill was proposed," ante, at 854, n. 1 (Thomas, J., concurring); because the bill was never passed, the funds that it would have made available for secular, public schools never materialized. The fact that the bill, if passed, would have funded secular as well as religious instruction did nothing to soften Madison's opposition to it.
Nor is it fair to argue that Madison opposed the bill only because it treated religious groups unequally. Ante, at 854-855 (Thomas, J., concurring). In various paragraphs of the Remonstrance, Madison did complain about the bill's peculiar burdens and exemptions, Everson, supra, at 66, but to identify this factor as the sole point of Madison's opposition to the bill is unfaithful to the Remonstrance's text. Madison strongly inveighed against the proposed aid for religion for a host of reasons (the Remonstrance numbers 15 paragraphs, each containing at least one point in opposition), and crucial here is the fact that many of those reasons would have applied whether or not the state aid was being distributed equally among sects, and whether or not the aid was going to those sects in the context of an evenhanded government program. See, e. g., Madison's Remonstrance, reprinted in Everson, 330 U. S., at 64, ¶ 1 ("[I]n matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society, and . . . Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance"); id., at 67, ¶ 6 (arguing that state support of religion "is a contradiction to the Christian Religion itself; for every page of it disavows a dependence on the powers of this world"); ibid., ¶ 7 ("[E]xperience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation"). Madison's objections were supplemented by numerous other petitions in opposition to the bill that likewise do not suggest that the lack of evenhandedness was its dispositive flaw. L. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment 63-67 (2d ed. 1994). For example, the petition that received the largest number of signatories was motivated by the view that religion should only be supported voluntarily. Id., at 63-64. Indeed, Madison's Remonstrance did not argue for a bill distributing aid to all sects and religions on an equal basis, and the
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