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I have read about half of Brooke Allen's book, "Moral Minority - Our Skeptical Founding Fathers," and was struck by her take that Washington was probably the least religious of all. Unlike Jefferson and Franklin, it is not clear that Washington believed a supreme being, perferding to use terms like "providence," ala the terminology of a pagan stoic. The word Christ only passed his lips twice, and he assiduously avoided using the word "God." In short, per the author's take, Washington is about as religious as I am.

Do you have an opinion on this?

I think it fair to say that her view is that the founding fathers were the creatures of the enlightenment, and this nation was the product thereof, with religion in the sense used today, takinig a seat way in the back, and Christianity qua Christianity, not even in the vehicle. I find her persuasive on this. How about you?

Allen is looking at some of the main figures of the Revolution, behind them, both in time and in the background of there own era, there were certainly more than a few pious and orthodox Christians, and after them there was a widespread reaction to 18th century skepticism and the French Revolution that was assumed to have been its product. She deals with all that, but I don't know if she gives those other trends their due.

I don't have a quarrel with much of what she says about the Founders. She comes closer to Washington and Jefferson than those who argue that such men were orthodox believers, but if you compare her views to those of 20th century thinkers who returned to religion, she looks rather naive about the secular prospects.

I would like to have heard more about the problems of the secular project and the disillusionment with it than Allen provides. In other words, to what extent was skepticism or deism or irreligion or secularism "a god that failed," and a turn back to a more orthodox creed inevitable? Allen does a good job in countering those who want to paint the Founding in wholly religious colors but I wouldn't want to write religion wholly out of early American history.

There's a good review of the Novaks' book about Washington in December's Liberty Magazine. Unfortunately it's not online, though a blog post is. Rowe takes the Novaks to task for arguing that if Washington wasn't a Deist, then he had to have been an Orthodox Protestant Christian.

For Rowe, Washington certainly wasn't a Deist, but Theism ("the belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe" or the "belief in the existence of a god or gods") doesn't necessarily imply acceptance of Orthodox Christian dogmas. It was similar with Jefferson, who was neither a Deist, nor an unbeliever, nor a Christian in the doctrinally orthodox sense of the word. Washington, though, was cooler towards Christianity and the figure of Jesus, than Jefferson was.

Rowe argues that Washington's reference to Jehova in his letter to the Hebrew congregation of Savannah, Georgia doesn't imply a belief in the biblical deity any more than his mentioning the "Great Spirit" in letters to the Cherokee is an endorsement of Native American religion.

I don't have any authoritative answer to this, but there is a parallel between Washington and Lincoln: both believed in a "Providence" that ruled the universe, and both maintained a distance from Christianity as a belief in Christ's divinity. For Lincoln, a strongly Calvinist background colored his thinking. Washington's heritage was 18th century Anglican, and thus quite different in its emotional coloring, but both men stood outside Christianity as it's usually understood.