Reverend Peter Marshall's Commentary Archive

Was George Washington a Christian? – Part One    

"Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Luke 12:56)   

     Much of the decades-old cultural battle over whether America was founded as a Christian nation has centered on the question of the Founding Fathers’ Christian faith – or lack of it.  Were the men that we have come to call Founding Fathers Christians?  And, because the best-known Founding Father is George Washington, much of the controversy about them has focused on him: Was George Washington a Christian?   

The accusation that Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers were Deists, and not believing Christians, has been endlessly repeated by academics and historians to the point that it has become an accepted article of faith about American history – akin to the “of course” status awarded to the doctrine of Darwinian evolution.  Except that it simply isn’t true.  The historical evidence, when it is carefully and properly examined, will not allow the label of Deist to be pinned on the huge majority of the Founding Fathers.   

The reason all this matters is that the secularists would love to prove that the Christian faith did not influence the Founding Fathers during the time of the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the establishment of our Constitution.  This is a hugely important element of their campaign to try and convince modern Americans that our nation was not founded on the Christian faith.   

I am writing on this subject today because I have been spending the entire winter working on a major revision and updated version of our first book, The Light and the Glory.  The publisher has wanted a second edition of the book for some time, and it now looks as if that will become a reality by the spring of 2009.  In the course of adding sizeable chunks of material I have been doing quite a bit of new research into the life of George Washington, and particularly the issue that furnishes the title for this commentary – was he a Christian?   

I thought it might be of interest to my readers to share a bit of what is involved in the kind of research and writing I do on the subject of God’s hand in American history.   

When researching the question of George Washington’s Christian faith, the first issue that emerges is whether or not he was a Deist.  What was a Deist?  Noah Webster (who was an evangelical Christian believer) defined a Deist in his original 1828 American dictionary as “one who believes in the existence of a God, but denies revealed religion; one who professes no form of religion, but follows the light of nature and reason, as his only guides in doctrine and practice; a freethinker.”  Deists emphatically rejected the divinity of Jesus Christ, the authority and inspiration of Holy Scripture, and the personal nature of God, among other things.  They believed that God created the world but then ignored it, and was never involved in human affairs.  In 1963 Paul Boller, Jr. published a major work entitled George Washington & Religion in which he accused our first President of being a Deist.  But, does this fit what we can discover about George Washington?  Hardly! 

George Washington was a low-Church Virginia Anglican, who subscribed in all points to orthodox Christian doctrines.  His mother, Mary Ball Washington, was a devout Christian who taught her son by example and word the importance and efficacy of prayer.  In our 1977 work, The Light and the Glory, David Manuel and I quoted some prayers supposedly written by Washington in his own handwriting which were titled “Daily Sacrifice.”  They had turned up in Philadelphia in 1891 among some items offered for auction by descendants of Washington.  These prayers were couched in orthodox Christian language – for example, “Wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the Lamb” – and were made up of whole sentences from the original Anglican prayer book.  We had used these as proof of Washington’s Christianity, since Deists didn’t believe in the blood atonement of Christ.  However, these prayers will not be in the new edition of The Light and the Glory, because Peter A. Lillback, in his recent magnificent study of Washington’s spirituality, entitled Sacred Fire, quotes historian Rupert Hughes’s point that the tone of these prayers is quite contrary to Washington’s writing style, “as foreign as if they were written in Greek.  There is not a misspelled word, not a touch of incorrect grammar, not a capitalized noun or other emphatic word except the titles of the deity.”  (This is unlike Washington in every respect).  Of greatest importance is the fact that the handwriting doesn’t match Washington’s.  Rupert gives the details, saying “The impossibility of the work being in Washington’s hand should be apparent to the most casual comparison.”   

But the fact that George Washington didn’t write these prayers has no bearing on the question of whether he was a man of prayer.  He was.  Lillback has counted more that one hundred written prayers from his public and private letters!  It is true that some of the public prayers were composed by aides, but Washington would never have signed them unless he agreed with their sentiments.  Further, they express Christian beliefs.  

By the way, never once, in all of his voluminous writings, did George Washington ever use the words Deist or Deism. 

During the five years of the War for Independence the Continental Congress issued at least sixteen separate calls for days of prayer and humiliation or thanksgiving, depending on how the war was going.  (There were more of the former than the latter!)  And they were explicit in their Christian doctrine.  The one dated November 27, 1779 includes “our gracious redeemer,” the “light of the gospel,” “the light of Christian knowledge,” and the “Holy Spirit.”  None of these phrases would have been used by Deists, yet this language was employed by the supposedly Deist Founding Fathers of the Continental Congress!  As a matter of fact, Deists never saw any value in prayer, since they believed that God was impersonal and uninvolved with His creation anyway.  Washington happily signed these and passed them on to the army’s chaplains to be put into practice.  

When aide Alexander Hamilton drafted a letter for Washington’s signature to the Comte de Rochambeau on February 26, 1781, he wrote: “This repetition of advices justifies a confidence in their truth” to which the General added “which I pray God may be confirmed in its greatest extent.” 

One fairly reliable testimony to Washington’s prayer life comes from a letter from a General Lewis of Augusta County, Virginia, dated December 14, 1855, relating a conversation with former Continental Army General Robert Porterfield shortly before his death.  In recounting some of his experiences during the New Jersey campaign and the army’s crucible of suffering at Valley Forge, he had said that his duties as a brigade-inspector brought him in frequent contact with General Washington.  In an emergency he had once gone directly to Washington’s lodgings and found him on his knees in prayer.  When he mentioned this to Alexander Hamilton, the General’s aide replied that “such was his constant habit.” 

In E.C. M’Guire’s early 1800’s biography of Washington, when some of his sources were still alive, he quotes the recollections of a Colonel B. Temple, an aide to Washington during the French and Indian War.  Temple said that in the absence of a chaplain Washington would read the Scriptures to his troops and lead in prayer.  He also said that “on sudden and unexpected visits into his (Washington’s) marquee, he has, more than once, found him on his knees at his devotions.” 

To me, one of the strongest pieces of evidence of George Washington’s Christianity is his extensive knowledge of the Bible and his frequent use of Biblical phrases.  Again, Deists had no use for the Bible – they rejected its authority.  In a personal letter to the Marquis de Lafayette (whom Washington loved as a son) he makes seven separate references to Biblical passages.  This was pure Washington – no aide wrote this.  In another letter, this one to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, he employs nine Biblical allusions.   

According to Lillback’s count, throughout Washington’s writings he uses over 200 different Biblical phrases of passages or allusions to Biblical passages.  Some of them he quoted often, such as his favorite Bible verse, Micah 4:4: “But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it.” 

He referred to the Bible as only a Christian would – as the Word of God.  In April 1789 he said: “The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institutions may be abused by human depravity…”  (Note that Deists rejected the doctrine of human depravity!) 

In one of his most famous letters, his Circular to the States, written after the end of the War for Independence, he listed several developments that had blessed America, and then he wrote: “and above all, the pure and benign light of Revelation (emphasis mine), have had ameliorating influence on mankind and increased the blessings of society.” (Remember that Deists didn’t believe in revelation). 

Boller smugly writes that “there are astonishingly few references to the Bible in (Washington’s) letters and public statements.”  But in an appendix Lillback lists about two hundred!  As he points out, perhaps Boller expected Washington to write down the Biblical chapter and verse, or perhaps Boller simply didn’t know his Bible well enough to spot Biblical references when Washington used them.  I suspect the latter.  This kind of claim from Boller shows you what we have normally been up against in academic circles. 

When Washington took the oath of office as our first President, he revealed his reverence for the Bible by kissing it.  And, he added to the oath at the end, “So help me God,” establishing a precedent which, though falling out of use for over a hundred years, was re-adopted by FDR. Every subsequent President has followed suit. 

Tobias Lear, President Washington’s secretary notes: “While President, Washington followed an invariable routine on Sundays.  The day was passed very quietly, no company being invited to the house.  After breakfast, the President read aloud a chapter from the Bible, then the whole family attended church together.”  In the afternoon Washington tended to his personal correspondence, “while Mrs. Washington frequently went to church again, often taking the children with her.  In the evening, Lear read aloud to the family some sermon or extracts from a book of a religious nature and everyone went to bed at an early hour.” 

In these short commentaries I cannot do more than present some of the evidence on different subjects that proves Washington’s Christian faith.  Today, we’ve considered the question of whether Washington was a Deist; we’ve also looked at his prayer life, and his belief in the Bible as the Word of God.   

Next week I will take up the secularists’ claim that the Father of our country never used the names “God” or “Jesus,” and we will examine the issues of his church attendance and his admittedly infrequent partaking of Holy Communion.  Additionally, we’ll examine Washington’s intensely private personality, and the problem that creates for those trying to discover his Christian faith.  Finally, there are some eyewitness testimony stories that are very interesting that I want to share.  If all of this proves to be too long for one more commentary, I shall continue into a third one the following week.  

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