James Madison may be “the Father of the Constitution” and George Washington “the Father of our Country,” but Thomas Jefferson is the Founding Father most often identified with America's commitment to religious freedom. When the Supreme Court issued its first significant interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause in Reynolds v. United States (1878) and its first significant interpretation of the Establishment Clause in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), it turned to Jefferson. This is not to say that Jefferson's views have been universally accepted or even commonly understood. Scholars who study him and judges who invoke him disagree about how Jefferson sought to separate church from state. That we disagree about Jefferson today should not be surprising. Even in his own lifetime, his ideas about religion and religious freedom were controversial and sharply contested. In his autobiography, Jefferson described the early battles to disestablish the Anglican Church in revolutionary Virginia as “the severest contests” in which he had ever been engaged.