From 1776 to 1786 a loose coalition of Virginia’s dissenting community and Enlightened statesmen, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, united to establish religious freedom in Virginia. Most scholarship on this subject focuses on either the dissenters or the famous founding statesmen. This chapter emphasizes their common goal in disestablishing religion for the sake of religious freedom. One rationale for focusing either on the dissenters or the founding statesmen is the belief that they had distinct views of religious freedom, leading them to advocate for distinct church-state arrangements. Unlikely Allies refutes this view and instead argues that they shared a common theory of religious freedom, which in turn required a strict separation of church and state. To understand why, this chapter provides an overview of the historical context leading up to Virginia’s Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776, when Madison, by altering one of the articles of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, set the stage for the struggle to disestablish religion in Virginia.