In the meantime, UVA was a working model of how Jefferson and James Madison envisioned religious freedom. UVA embodied the Virginia Statute, forerunner to Madison’s First Amendment. Jefferson bucked prevailing trends to create an Enlightenment beacon in an era of evangelical revivals. Most colleges had started as seminaries and those that experimented with ecumenical administrations (Penn, Columbia, North Carolina, Transylvania) gave way to denominational control, as would’ve been the case in Virginia had Jefferson not managed to circumvent the will of the people -- ironically, given his republican commitment. The only other school that put the premium on science he sought was West Point, which Jefferson started as president in 1802. The university should stress how innovative his curriculum was when they contextualize Jefferson’s statue, as they plan to soon.
Non-denominational UVA had no divinity professors or compulsory worship. The Rotunda library, inspired by the Roman Pantheon, symbolically displaced a traditional gothic chapel at the heart of campus, with a spare room in its basement set aside for ecumenical worship and a proposed planetarium with the dome as its easel. Science and ethics courses supplanted orthodox indoctrination and they taught about religion so that students could think for themselves. Madison compiled a reading list of diverse theologians dating to antiquity. Said one Presbyterian: “[w]hen Satan promised all the kingdoms of the world to Christ he laid his thumb on Charlottesville and whispered, ‘Except this place, which I reserve for my own especial use.’” Whereas modern progressives protest Jefferson for owning enslaved workers, early UVA students opposed erecting their founder’s statue because he wasn’t Christian. Yet, within Protestantism at least, religion thrived at UVA precisely because it lacked sectarian control, similar to how Jefferson and Madison accurately predicted it would nationally under the First Amendment. Jefferson invited denominations to build seminaries around the campus periphery with complimentary UVA tuition for seminarians, but none accepted because, as he predicted, each wanted total control. Later, to placate criticism that UVA’s infidelity caused an 1829 typhoid outbreak, its board rotated an inter-Protestant chaplaincy. The school also set itself apart by hiring Jewish and Catholic professors, which was unheard of at the time in the Ivy League.
To see why Jefferson’s vision was win-win, compare UVA to Yale. In God and Man at Yale (1951), William Buckley, Jr. echoed UVA’s earlier critics, bemoaning that his school had strayed from orthodox indoctrination into voluntary chapel and merely teaching about religions. But Yale was originally Congregational. Had it maintained tradition, it wouldn’t have built the Catholic chapel where Buckley worshiped.