Thursday, November 22, 2007

The Opening Statement for the Virginia Churches Trial on the Division Statute

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7112

[VirtueOnline] 22 Nov 2007--From the days of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, and the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, the Commonwealth of Virginia has had a long history of deferring to local control of congregational property, and in 1867 the Virginia General Assembly adopted a statute providing that the principle of majority rule should govern the ownership of such property when a religious denomination or society experiences a division or a split. The statute remains on the books today after several recodifications with only minor changes, and the question before the court is whether the CANA Congregations have satisfied the statute's requirements, whether The Episcopal Church, the Diocese of Virginia or the Anglican Communion have experienced a division and whether the CANA Congregations have joined a branch of one of those bodies in the wake of that division.

Now, to understand the answer to that question it's useful to put the statute in historical context, and that's what we intend to do. Mark Valeri and Charles Irons, two leading historians of American religious history will testify that the 19th century was a time of numerous fractures or divisions in American religious denominations. Just as earlier centuries witnessed the splits that created the three main branches of Christianity, the Roman Catholic, orthodox, and protestant traditions, the 19th century saw many further divisions into somewhat smaller branches, particularly among the nation's protestant denominations. Some of these divisions were over the issue of slavery, of course, but others were over issues like how the church should approach evangelism or how the church should be organized over its polity. But the important point for our purposes and what the evidence will show is that the phenomenon of church divisions was well known to 19th century Americans, particularly in Virginia.

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