When Jefferson was born, on April 13, 1743, the Church of England was the established church in colonial Virginia, and Jefferson’s early religious upbringing was relatively conventional. He was baptized, married, and buried in the Anglican or Episcopal Church. Anglican ministers provided his early education, and, as was common for a member of the gentry, he was elected as a young man to an Anglican vestry, both a civil and religious post in pre-revolutionary Virginia.
While attending the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg (1760–1762), Jefferson began to question traditional religion. Studying under William Small, a Scottish Enlightenment professor and the only member of the faculty who was not an Anglican minister, Jefferson developed an affinity for John Locke, Viscount Bolingbroke, and other Enlightenment thinkers who did not profess standard religious doctrine.