ABSTRACT
“FOR THOSE WHO like to speak of an ‘Age of Constantine’ that began in the fourth century,” Martin Marty observes, “there is reason to regard [Jefferson’s Virginia Bill for Religious Liberty] as the key moment of the end of that age and the beginning of a new age.” 1 And even more than Jefferson, James Madison was the principal prophet of that new age. Madison authored perhaps the most powerful brief for religious disestablishment that has ever been written, he pushed Jefferson’s bill through the Virginia legislature, and his common sponsorship of that measure and of the First Amendment provided the pretext on which the modern Supreme Court read the Virginia provision into the Constitution. If the era before the 1780s was the “Age of Constantine,” then the period since then can with even greater justification be called the “Age of Madison.”
