This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people.

And we love hearing listener's stories. Send them to Our American Stories.com.

They're some of our favorites. And you don't have to write them down at length.

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Click the Your Stories button and the rest is easy. Up next, the idea of religious freedom is a relatively new and American invention. It was first written as a principal in the colony of

Maryland in 1634, but it wasn't until Jefferson's Virginia statute for religious freedom for it to become the principle of our entire nation.

Here to tell the story of how religious freedom became a guiding American idea is John Regosta at Monticello.

Take it away, John.

As the revolution is coming on, the Anglican Church is still the established church,

and there have been revivals. So we're seeing more and more dissenters, would be the term they would use. Quakers, New Light Baptist, Presbyterian.

This is a growing part of the population.

Now we don't know exactly how much, but the estimates run from anywhere from 20% to even more than a third of the population

is dissenting from the Anglican Church. Well, as that population increases,

the Anglican Church establishment start to support persecution of those dissenters. Violent persecution.

There's cases where they're dunked in lakes, where rocks are thrown at them. There's a case

where the hounds are released on a dissenting minister.

By the time of the American Revolution,

over half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia have been jailed.

And this is not a country club jail.

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