The Faith Of George Washington

On July 9, 1755, Colonel George Washington was traveling with General Edward Braddock’s army toward Fort Duquesne when they were ambushed by Indians and French hiding in the woods. In the ensuing massacre, hundreds of British soldiers, including Braddock, were killed or seriously wounded. Perched on their horses, officers were perfect targets. One after another, they were hit. Bullets ripped through Washington’s coat, knocked his hat off, and killed two of the horses he rode.

Rumors circulated that Washington had been killed. On July 18, he wrote his brother from Fort Cumberland, “As I have heard since my arriv’l at this place, a circumstantial acct. of my death and dying Speech, I take this early opportunity of contradicting both, and of assuring you that I now exist and appear in the land of the living by the miraculous care of Providence, that protected me beyond all human expectation.”

Two weeks later Washington wrote to Robert Jackson, “See the wondrous works of Providence! The uncertainty of Human things!”

Preaching to a volunteer company of militia, Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies declared, “As a remarkable instance” of military ardor, “I ... point ... to ... that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, whom I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a manner for some important service to his country.”

And so began the stories about Washington’s faith in God and divine selection to lead the American people.

Although the religious convictions and practices of many presidents have been ignored, Washington’s have been closely scrutinized and endlessly debated. Some authors have portrayed the Virginian as the epitome of piety, and others have depicted him as the patron saint of skepticism. The fact that Washington said almost nothing publicly or privately about the precise nature of his beliefs has evoked competing claims that he was a devout Christian, a Unitarian, a “warm deist,” and a “theistic rationalist.”

One point, however, is not debatable: Washington strongly believed that Providence played a major role in creating and sustaining the United States. In public pronouncements as commander in chief and president, he repeatedly thanked God for directing and protecting Americans in their struggle to obtain independence and create a successful republic.

Arguably, no president has stressed the role of Providence in the nation’s history more than Washington.

The Virginian planter was a giant even among the remarkable generation of America’s founders. His powerful physique, athletic prowess, stately bearing, personal magnetism, and incredible stamina impressed his contemporaries. More significantly, because of his exceptional character and extraordinary contributions, he has been deemed indispensable to the success of the patriot cause and the new republic.

Risking his reputation, wealth, and life, he commanded an undermanned and poorly supplied army to an improbable victory over the world’s leading economic and military power. He presided over the convention that produced the United States’ venerable Constitution. For nearly a quarter of a century (1775-99), Washington was the most important person in America. As president, he kept the new nation from crashing on the shoals of anarchy, monarchy, or revolution.

Washington firmly believed that God controlled human events. In both his public and private writings, he repeatedly discussed how God providentially helped the United States win its independence against incredible odds, create a unified country out of diverse and competing interests, establish a remarkable constitution, and avoid war with European powers that still had territorial ambitions in North America.

Because God created and actively ruled the universe, Washington insisted, people must revere, worship, and obey him. Although members of his staff wrote most of Washington’s public statements, he oversaw the process, and therefore they expressed what he wanted to convey. Furthermore, Washington routinely used similar language in private letters he wrote.

Throughout his life, Washington appealed to “an all-powerful Providence” to protect and guide him and the nation, especially in times of crisis. Throughout the War for Independence, he asked for and acknowledged God’s providential guidance and assistance hundreds of times.

He told Rev. William Gordon in 1776 that no one had “a more perfect Reliance on the alwise, and powerful dispensations of the Supreme Being than I have nor thinks his aid more necessary.”

“The hand of Providence has been so conspicuous” in the war, he asserted in 1778, that anyone who did not thank God and “acknowledge his obligations” to Him was “worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked.”

After the war ended, Washington declared, “I attribute all glory to that Supreme Being,” who had caused the several forces that contributed to America’s triumph to harmonize perfectly together. No people “had more reason to acknowledge a divine interposition in their affairs,” he wrote in 1792, than those of the United States.”

Scholars and ordinary Americans will continue to debate the precise nature of Washington’s faith, but clearly it became deeper as a result of his trying and sometimes traumatic experiences as commander in chief of the Continental Army and the nation’s first president, and it significantly affected his understanding of and his actions in both positions.

Gary Scott Smith chairs the History department at Grove City College, is a fellow for Faith and the Presidency with the Center for Vision & Values, and is the author of “Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush“(Oxford University Press, 2006).

“Arguably, no president has stressed the role of Providence in the nation’s history more than Washington.”

Definitely an arguable point. See Lincoln’s Second Inaugural for an equally heavy stress on the role of Providence, far more personalized.

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

A nice review of US presidential invocations of Providence:

http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=154

A survey of Lincoln’s views on this and other religious themes:
http://www.slate.com/id/2134450/

Lincoln’s short “Meditation on God’s Will,” a theological fragment that Lincoln wrote for his own edification, probably in 1862 (the title was later supplied by his secretary, John Nicolay). In this private document Lincoln applied his famous logical rigor to the issue of God’s purposes in permitting a gruesome Civil War. Had God’s reasons matched those of the North—extinguishing the rebellion and restoring the Union, in Lincoln’s view—it would have been easy for God to enlist his “human instrumentalities” (like the president) to defeat the Southern armies. But God obviously desired that the war “shall not end yet.” He plainly had his reasons for letting the butchery continue, but he kept those reasons hidden. As the war dragged on Lincoln appears to have concluded that God let the carnage go on so that slavery would crumble along with the rebellion. Never an abolitionist, and forthright in the early years of the war about his willingness to have ended it, if possible, without freeing a single slave, Lincoln now believed that God had effected the emancipation of 4 million African-Americans.

The president’s observation in an 1864 letter that “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me”—a secular-sounding reflection avidly cited by historians over many generations—is followed immediately by the less often quoted comment that “God alone can claim” responsibility for “the nation’s condition.” God seemed to have willed both “the removal of a great wrong” and the punishment of both North and South “for our complicity in that wrong.” If so, future “impartial history” would see in such judgment “new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”

[snip]

Thanks to Carwardine and Guelzo we can see that Lincoln, by the end of his life, had inverted Thomas Jefferson on the subject of religion. The third president, the great exponent of Enlightenment, had tried to banish mystery from religion while preserving a privileged place for Jesus as the greatest ethical teacher of all time. For his part, the 16th president dropped Jesus by the wayside while rekindling awareness of the unfathomable mysteries of religion. Lincoln resembles the ostensibly secular Benjamin Franklin more than he does the Jesus-infatuated Jefferson. The skeptical Franklin kept a place for Providence in his thinking about the ultimate fate of humanity, while dismissing the pleas of his friend the Rev. George Whitefield that Franklin “close with Christ.” Lincoln transformed Franklin’s Providence into a vigorous historical actor but, like Franklin, he found little use for Jesus.

Carwardine concludes with a brief reflection on the post-assassination “deification” of Lincoln, in which the martyr shot on Good Friday (the anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion) experienced “instant elevation” to the national “pantheon.” This post-mortem career of Lincoln as civic-religious savior lies beyond Carwardine’s scope. But it is relevant to his theme to note that thanks to Booth’s derringer ball, the Lincoln who had let Jesus go became the Lincoln who resembled Jesus. Quickly Lincoln the icon pushed Washington upstairs: The self-made rail-splitter became the self-giving “Son” to whom Americans could attach themselves in warm companionship while the “Father” Washington hovered detachedly like a deist creator beyond the clouds.

One reason why Lincoln has endured as Americans’ prime civic icon (white Southerners having come on board in large numbers even by the late 19th century) is his straddling of the secular-religious boundary line. He can gather disciples on both sides. The 2009 commemorations will surely coincide with attempts to induct Lincoln into the ongoing American cultural tug-of-war by forcing him onto one side or the other. Pundits of faith are liable to pit a secular Darwin against a religious Lincoln. Perhaps Carwardine’s book will help shield him from such treatment. The real Lincoln remains a straddler, too religious for most secularists but too fatalistic for most religionists.

Because God created and actively ruled the universe, Washington insisted, people must revere, worship, and obey him.

I see no evidence that George Washington (or any of the other Founding Fathers) ever insisted that anyone must believe as he (or they) believed or didn’t believe.

“I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction. To this consideration we ought to ascribe the absence of any regulation, respecting religion, from the Magna-Charta of our country.” - George Washington, responding to a group of clergymen who complained that the Constitution lacked mention of Jesus Christ, in 1789

“If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mohometans, Jews or Christians of any Sect, or they may be Atheists.” - George Washington, letter to Tench Tilghman asking him to secure a carpenter and a bricklayer for his Mount Vernon estate, March 24, 1784

“Among many other weighty objections to the Measure, it has been suggested, that it has a tendency to introduce religious disputes into the Army, which above all things should be avoided, and in many instances would compel men to a mode of Worship which they do not profess”. - George Washington, to John Hancock, then president of Congress, expressing opposition to a congressional plan to appoint brigade chaplains in the Continental Army (1777),

“We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition ... In this enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States.” - George Washington, letter to the members of the New Church in Baltimore, January 27, 1793

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

THE PRAYER OF GEORGE WASHINGTON AT VALLEY FORGE