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Interesting and Irrelevant, the Religion of the Founders
“The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.”
— George Washington circular, June 8, 17833
“Washington, you know is gone!”4 announced Mason Locke Weems, an Episcopal priest, to his Philadelphia publisher. The indecent glee of Weems’s exclamation point was matched by the unseemly haste with which he wrote, penning his note in mid-January, a month after Washington’s death on December 14, 1799.
In that exclamatory note, Weems told his publisher: “Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am very nearly prim[e]d & cock[e]d for ’em.”5 In an earlier exchange, Weems proposed publishing biographies of the American Revolution’s military stars, which would “without doubt, sell an immense number.”6 Weems had reason to know. In addition to preaching, Weems sold schoolbooks, almanacs, and popular literature as he wandered the new United States.7 He also published salacious tracts on gambling and masturbation: “God’s Revenge Against Gambling” and the apparently ribald tract entitled “Onania.”8 Historian Sylvia Neely has observed that Weems “recognized the money-making potential of schoolbooks and wanted to produce exciting stories of adventure and romance that young people would devour.”9 Weems was interested in profit, not accuracy.
When Weems published A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington in 1800, it was a commercial venture. He wrote what people wanted to read. And it worked. Far more sensationalist than truthful, the book sold well, going through some eighty editions.10 Weems expanded the initially small pamphlet in those subsequent editions. One addition is the book’s most well-known story—that Washington couldn’t tell a lie about a cherry tree. Ironically, given its moral, the story is untrue.11
By the seventeenth edition, another Weemsian fable was added: General Washington praying in the Valley Forge snow.12 According to Weems’s story, “in a dark natural bower of ancient oaks,” Washington was discovered praying aloud, “on his knees at prayer.”13
The story was repeated and reprinted with no regard for truth; its proliferation accelerated during the nation’s religious revival from 1820 to 1860. That revival, referred to as the Second Great Awakening, was itself an indication that the founding generation was not as religious as Christian nationalists often argue: only those who are asleep can awaken.
For decades, America’s best-selling school textbooks, the McGuffey Readers, edited by educator William Holmes McGuffey (and later reprinted by Henry Ford), included the Valley Forge story, ensuring that it would be read by millions of children.14 McGuffey was also an ordained Presbyterian minister and used his textbooks to inculcate religion. For McGuffey, Christianity was “the religion of our country…. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions.”15 He warned teachers and parents to avoid “teaching to our pupils the crude notions and revolutionary principles of modern infidelity.”16 As Edward G. Lengel, editor of Washington’s papers, noted, “In retelling Weems’s stories, McGuffey simplified their morals and turned them into generic Sunday school lessons, putting Washington’s piety on constant display.”17 McGuffey’s work led to other displays of Washington’s conjured piety.
The Valley Forge prayer scene has been painted by Lambert Sachs (c. 1854); Henry Brueckner (c. 1866); J. C. Leyendecker (1935); and Arnold Friberg (1975). It appeared on stamps in 1928 and in 1977. The George Washington Memorial Chapel was founded in Valley Forge in 1903 partly to commemorate “the inspiring image of a solitary and steadfast Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge.”18 The US Capitol’s Congressional Prayer Room, built in 1955 (see page 280), features a stained-glass window depicting the scene. Ronald Reagan called the image of Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge “the most sublime picture in American history.”19
For all its ubiquity, there is no historical evidence to support the tale. Weems designed the story to portray a devout Washington. In Lengel’s enlightening book Inventing George Washington, he writes, “Over and again, Weems emphasized Washington’s Christian upbringing, frequent prayers, and spiritual dependence on God.”20 But historical facts tell us of a different Washington. He was a man of little or no religion with a strong character that, had he been religious, would have prevented showy religious displays. Washington “avoided referring to Jesus Christ in his letters, attended religious services irregularly, did not kneel during prayer, and often dodged out of church before communion,” according to Lengel.21
On the rare occasions when Washington actually attended church (perhaps twelve times a year pre-presidency and only three times in his last three years), Washington refused to take communion, even though his wife did.22 Bishop William White officiated in some of the churches Washington occasionally attended. When asked specifically if Washington was a “communicant of the Protestant Episcopal church,” White wrote, “truth requires me to say, that Gen. Washington never received the communion, in the churches of which I am the parochial minister. Mrs. Washington was an habitual communicant.”23 The bishop concluded in another letter that no “degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which would prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”24
Washington refused to have a priest or religious rituals at his deathbed, a startling lapse if he were truly devout. As historian Joseph Ellis put it, “there were no ministers in the room, no prayers uttered, no Christian rituals offering the solace of everlasting life…. He died as a Roman stoic rather than a Christian saint.”25
If he was religious, Washington was exceedingly private about those beliefs, even in personal letters and papers. He mentions Jesus perhaps once in ninety volumes of letters and papers, and never in private correspondence.26 The ostentatious show Weems invented is simply not in keeping with Washington’s strong, silent character. As Ron Chernow, Washington’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, notes in Washington: A Life:
Some of Washington’s religious style probably reflected an Enlightenment discomfort with religious dogma, but it also reflected his low-key personal style. He was sober and temperate in all things, distrusted zealotry, and would never have talked of hellfire or damnation. He would have shunned anything, such as communion, that might flaunt his religiosity. He never wanted to make a spectacle of his faith or trade on it as a politician. Simply as a matter of personal style he would have refrained from the emotional language associated with evangelical Christianity. This cooler, more austere religious manner was commonplace among well-heeled Anglicans in eighteenth-century Virginia.27
One of the many interpretations of the Valley Forge prayer story: a lithograph by Frederick Heppenheimer titled Washington at Valley Forge, c. 1853.
The Weemsian myth is disrespectful, particularly when one understands how Washington worked ceaselessly to perfect his own character, because the fable reflects Weems’s character, not Washington’s. As W. W. Abbot, another editor of Washington’s papers, explains, “More than most, Washington’s biography is the story of a man constructing himself.”28 Washington worked tirelessly to better himself. He woke early, studied etiquette and sought to improve his own manners, deliberately mastered elegant penmanship, fastidiously attended to his personal appearance, and carefully weighed options before deciding. He personified measured self-control, silence, and thoughtful deliberation, though he was apparently a sight to behold when he lost his temper. The character Weems portrays is a shade. Those who would honor Washington ought to condemn these myths and remember what Abigail Adams said on his death: “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.”29
The prayer story, as historian François Furstenberg notes, “almost certainly sprung from Weems’s imagination.”30 But Weems was not writing to capture Washington’s true character.31 He wanted to capitalize on the name and death of
a greater man, to write about what people wanted to buy. But the story survives for reasons other than Weems’s initial pecuniary interest: by imbuing Washington’s hard-won character with the kind of ostentatious piety he shunned, it dragged the incomparable leader down to an imitable level. “Perhaps sensing something too stern and difficult about the real Washington, Weems tried to humanize him through treacly fables,” suggests Chernow.32 This facile, reflected glory is why the fraudulent scene hangs in the Capitol prayer room, why Reagan gushed over a lie, and why all a politician need do is claim to be a prayerful Christian and he is suddenly Washington’s equal.
Weems’s salvo began a long written war between authors and historians over the founders’ religiosity. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and others are invoked in the attempt to claim this nation as Christian because they were Christian. This spiritual wrangling has a checkered history, with each generation repeating the falsehoods of the earlier, including Weems’s.33
Though interesting, the battle over what the founders personally believed is irrelevant to the claim that our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. That the founders had personal beliefs about religion and god does not prove that they used those principles to found a nation. Nor should we make the mistake of assuming that their religious beliefs were static throughout their lives. People’s beliefs change. Two of my good friends, authors Dan Barker and Jerry Dewitt, were once preachers and are now atheists. It is unlikely that at age fifty-eight Washington had the same beliefs he’d held at eighteen. Even were we to concede, for the sake of argument, that the founders were all Christian, the logic required to prove the Christian nationalist argument is flawed:
Major Premise The founders were all devout, Jesus-has-risen Christians.
Minor Premise The founders established this nation.
Conclusion Therefore, this nation is a Christian nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles.
One’s personal theistic beliefs do not “own” the other ideas generated by one’s mind. By that same logic, blue jeans would be “Jewish Blue Jeans” because the inventors of the pants, Jacob W. Davis and Levi Straus, happened to be Jewish. If we follow this illogic—that a person’s religion informs all their other ideas—why limit it to religion? Why not argue that America is a nation of hair-powderers and wig-wearers? And why limit the logic to suggesting that religion informs the nation? Why not claim that the founders built a Christian outhouse or planted a Judeo-Christian vegetable garden? Of course, designing a nation is different from designing a pair of jeans, but religion cannot be assumed to influence either. Those religious beliefs must be examined and compared against the principles that informed the design. To argue that the founders were Christian is irrelevant because it does not answer the ultimate question about Christianity’s influence on America’s founding. And even if the founders were all Christian and this fallacious logic held, we know that they never cited biblical principles during the constitutional convention and ratifications, as we’ll see in Chapter Six.34
The religious faith of the founders is irrelevant for another reason: they made it irrelevant when they erected a “wall of separation” between religion and the government they created.35 The Constitution deliberately rejects commingling religion and government. The Constitution severed religion’s power from the government to limit the danger it would pose; separates church and state;36 prohibits a religious test for public office;37 and, as Alexander Hamilton put it, gives the president “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.”38 The same is true of Congress; it has limited, enumerated powers, no scintilla of which are religious.39
Two facts illustrate the founders’ intentions to build this wall. First, our Constitution is deliberately godless. There are no references to gods, goddesses, or divine intervention.40 The omission was not an oversight. Supernatural power was rejected in favor of the natural power contained in the first three words: “We the People.” Civil War colonel, author, and orator Robert Ingersoll best captured the deliberate beauty of this omission:
They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship, or not to worship; that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality and liberty of all, to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.41
The second fact is that our Constitution’s only references to religion are exclusionary. It excludes the state from involving itself in reli-gion (the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause) and excludes religion from involving itself in the state (the First Amendment’s “establishment” clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”). The separation of state and church was woven into the constitutional design even before the First Amendment was drafted. The prohibition on religious tests in Article VI, Clause 3—“No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”—was the only mention of religion in the original document. The Constitution often uses malleable language, but this prohibition is “the most emphatic statement in the document.”42
“No…shall…ever…any.” These words are a mandate. Joseph Story, Supreme Court Justice from 1812 to 1845, wrote the first definitive commentaries on the Constitution. He explained that the clause was “not introduced merely for the purpose of satisfying the scruples of many respectable persons, who feel an invincible repugnance to any religious test.” According to Story, “It had a higher objective: to cut off for ever every pretence of any alliance between church and state in the national government.”43
Divorcing religion from government offices was so important that the US Congress edited the word god out of its oath of office. The first bill Congress passed under the Constitution that President George Washington signed into law in June 1789 was “An Act to regulate the Time and Manner of administering certain Oaths.” As originally proposed, it had two clauses mentioning god: “in the presence of Almighty GOD” and “So help me God.”44 Neither made the final cut, and the oath remains godless until 1862 (see chapter 24).
The federal experiment with state-church separation was so successful that the states began to follow along. Other than New York and Virginia, arguably the two most important, the original states had religious tests for public office, and none had godless constitutions.45 But they also all predated the federal Constitution. As they updated and amended those constitutions, the states began to follow the federal model of state-church separation, abolishing religious tests for public office, prohibiting taxpayer funds from flowing to churches and houses of worship, and, with this separation and secularization, guaranteeing the freedom of religion. There is no freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion.
The idea of government separate from religion was floating around during the Enlightenment. John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and the greats of the day discussed it. But while other ideas in political science had real-world antecedents on which the founders could rely, there was no example of a truly secular government. No other nation had sought to protect the ability of its citizens to think freely by separating the government from religion and religion from the government. Until the theory was put into practice, true freedom of thought and even freedom of religion could not have existed. The United States realized those concepts because it embarked “upon a great and noble experiment…hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent—that of total separation of Church and State,” according to President John Tyler.46 America was the first nation to try this experiment; it invented th
e separation of state and church. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Garry Wills put it nicely:
That [separation], more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth, setting new tasks for religion, offering it new opportunities. Everything else in our Constitution—separation of powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism—had been anticipated both in theory and practice…. But we invented nothing, except disestablishment. No other government in history had launched itself without the help of officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers.47
Americans should celebrate this “great American principle of eternal separation.”48 It’s ours. It’s an American original. We ought to be proud of that contribution to the world, not bury it under myths.
The founders’ private religious beliefs are far less important to the Judeo-Christian question than their views on separating state and church and the actions they took to divorce those two institutions. They were as close to consensus on separating the two as they were on any subject. In the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published the same year that America declared independence, historian Edward Gibbon wrote that “the various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”49 Most of the founders agreed with Gibbon and recognized that religion can be exploited for political gain and that religion, when it has civil power, is often deadly. These beliefs were common among the founders, but not universal. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration, believed that “the Christian religion should be preferred to all others” and that “every family in the United States [should] be furnished at public expense…with a copy of an American edition of the BIBLE.”50 However, in spite of, or likely because of, their divergent religious beliefs and backgrounds, the founders thought that separation made sense.
The Founding Myth Page 5
