Religious Liberty?

You may or may not know, but being anything but Anglican in Virginia used to be illegal. Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists were all persecuted, run out of their towns, arrested, forced to pay fines and generally made to feel that they were not equal unless they were Anglican.
This is why most of the virginian founding fathers were anglican (i.e.. Patrick Henry, George Washington, and others), because being another religion was often disastrous to your life and prosperity.

 But then in the 1740's a minister was dispatched from the New York area to come to the Richmond border counties to preach as an evangelist and soon became the first legal pastor of a dissenting group in virginia. A true picture of the desire for religious freedom that was stirring in the county in which we now live. This preacher evangelized the neighborhood in which I lived 300 years before I ever set foot on it's soil. Brought the truth in all it's glory to the religious anglicans in the south who knew nothing of the true gospel of grace and became the first truly free preacher in virginia. His name was Samuel Davies and we went to the site of his church.

Unfortunately the church no longer exists, a victim of the civil war where the southern defenders of Richmond intentionally burned it down and as a result of reconstruction it was never rebuilt. But sadder even than the first truly free church built in the virginia colony is the fact that even today Davies has slipped into obscurity. He was the president of princeton, after the untimely death of Jonathan Edwards and two are buried side by side. He was the man who inspired Patrick Henry, not to follow the truths of the gospel unfortunately, but to borrow Davies' oratory skills and to give the famous speech "Give me Liberty or Give me death!" He was a pastor of more than 7 churches in the area during his 11 year tenure and a true beacon of the gospel for them in the past and even us today. Imagine that 300 years later the current tenor of the church system would be similar to the same religiosity of the Anglican forced religion of the day. That the house churches that Davies started would look alot like the current house church plants that we are today seeing crop up in our midst here in virginia and across the nation. Amazing how is 300 short years we can see religious freedom become similarly minimalized in our current status quo! I know I cannot expect everyone to enjoy history as I do, but I certainly hope people begin to see the need of reaching back towards our past in search of encouragement for the future we now find ourselves a part of.