The passage of the statute for Establishing Religious Freedom made Virginia a beacon of religious freedom and later the central focus of America’s story of religious freedom. There has been push back against placing Virginia and her famous statesmen, Jefferson and Madison, at the center of the American story of religious freedom. They argue that the focus on these statesmen ignores the central role of the dissenters, who had a different vision of religious freedom. Unlikely Allies demonstrates that the dissenters were as fully committed to the separation of church and state as their rationalist allies. They understood that it was the optimal way to protect religion, their freedoms, and secure religious harmony. The allies’ theory of religious freedom may not have been the sole vision for the nation’s religious settlement, but it is the most compatible with our pluralistic democracy. And it was this version of religious freedom that Madison took with him to the First Federal Congress, where he was the leading figure in securing the First Amendment of the Constitution in 1789.