The Church of England was the official church of Virginia from its founding. Catholics could not emigrate to British colonies, even Maryland, without disavowing allegiance to the Pope (In the mandatory oath of supremacy one had to swear that "no foreign prince, person, prelate, state, or potentate hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence, or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual, within this realm." Office holders had to swear that the Pope had no power to excommunicate monarchs and that there was no transubstantiation in the Lord's Supper. Quakers (especially) and other Protestant dissenters were also kept out of the colony for many decades.

The largest mandatory tax paid by Virginians was the tithe to their local parishes. In Virginia's eighty-second year, Britain's 1689 Act of Toleration finally extended limited religious freedom to other Protestants, but did not eliminate the tithe or mandatory Anglican church attendance. For security reasons, some creative accommodations and willful ignorance wer employed to encourage German (mostly Lutheran) and Scotch-Irish (Presbyterian) settlement beyond the Blue Ridge.

Mandatory tithing and attendance stopped in 1776, but the Church of England, which became the Episcopal Church, was not disestablished until 1786. The Episcopal Church collapsed after disestablishment, while Baptist, Methodist, and other churches prospered.