"In the Hands of a Good Providence": Religion in the Life of George Washington

1: Controversy: A Man of Many Questions

wo hundred years after the deaths of the men and women who founded the United States, the question of their religious faith still elicits strong opinions.1 The issue has become quite heated and sometimes even strident. Particularly in the last few decades, what the Founding Fathers believed has been a bone of contention between the political left and right. What would otherwise have been just a matter for those interested in history has broader implications when applied to things like the interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. At least in the case of George Washington, however, this speculation is nothing new, for the subject of his personal religious beliefs has been a matter of some controversy for many years. Washington has been called a near-atheist by some and an extremely religious man by others. His onetime colleague and later political adversary, Thomas Jefferson, once described him in rather harsh terms to a young Englishman, closing with the remark that Washington “has divines [ministers] constantly about him because he thinks it right to keep up appearances but is an unbeliever.” Jefferson’s views have been seconded in recent years by a site on the Internet, which has sought to get out the message that Washington was not only neither a communicant of the Episcopal nor any other church, but was not even a “believer in the Christian religion.”2 Conversely, a eulogy delivered shortly after Washington’s death extolled that, “The virtues of our departed friend were crowned by piety. He is known to  controversy A Man of Many Questions “In the Hands of a Good Providence” 2 have been habitually devout. To Christian institutions he gave the countenance of his example; and no one could express, more fully, his sense of the Providence of God, and the dependence of man.” These same views have recently been expounded by a contemporary member of the clergy, who has used his television ministry to spread the word of Washington’s “STERLING CHARACTER . . . CHRISTIAN HERITAGE . . . FERVENT PRAYERS . . . DEVOTIONAL LIFE . . . CHRISTIAN WALK . . . ,” and his life as “A TRULY DEVOUT CHRISTIAN.”3 To muddy the waters further, still other sources, as disparate, and mainstream, as the popular Encyclopaedia Britannica, along with prominent Washington biographer James Thomas Flexner, indicate that George Washington was a “Deist” rather than a Christian. Deism developed in the late seventeenth century, growing out of several centuries of discovery in the sciences (for example, astronomers’ contention that the earth revolved around the sun, which challenged the teachings of the church that the earth was the center of the universe), as well as geography, as explorers from Europe traveled to other parts of the world and brought back news of other cultures, with vastly different religious traditions. In an attempt to reconcile these new ideas, Deists propounded the notion that knowledge of God is either born into each person or can be found through reason, rather than through revelation or the teachings of any specific religious group. This system flowed from a strong belief in the human ability to reason, a disenchantment or repugnance with religious teachings based solely on revelation, which it was thought led to dogmatism and intolerance, and an image of God as the rational creator of a logical and ordered universe. One well-known example of the latter is the idea that the universe was a watch, which God (the watchmaker) had constructed , set properly, and then walked away from, allowing his creation to tick away without divine interference.4 It has been suggested that Deist thought can be reduced to five main propositions: first, that “all men possess the faculty of reason adequate to all the important needs of human life”; second, that “reason, the image of God in man, can know God and God’s will”; third, that “man’s duty is to do God’s will”; fourth, that “man has always had this possibility of knowledge of the good, or natural religion”; and last, that “no religion can be higher than natural religion.”5 That last point, of course, put the Deists at odds with the Christian establishment, which said that Christianity is controversy 3 definitely superior to both natural religion and any of the other religions found in this world. The Anglo-American church fought back against the Deists in the eighteenth century. Puritan cleric and theologian Jonathan Edwards wrote scathingly that they had “wholly cast off the Christian religion...