The answer was complete religious freedom, including the freedom not to believe. “It does me no injury,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yet it was also Jefferson who wrote, “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gift of God?” Later he added, “No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be.”
