Next to the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson took greatest pride in his authorship of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, which, as his friend James Madison said, "extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind."

Jefferson wrote this statute in 1777, when he had returned from the Continental Congress to begin a wholesale revision of Virginia's laws that would eradicate every trace of aristocratic privilege hidden in them. At the time, "the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience" was an established right in Virginia. Yet Jefferson's statute was bitterly opposed and led to what he later called "the severest contest in which I have ever been engaged." The statute finally passed in 1786. this was important because it let people express there religous freedom and it also let other cultuers come to the U.S.A. this lead to the first amendment.