Why No One Can Agree on What George Washington Thought About th... about:reader?url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-george...

smithsonianmag.com

Why No One Can Agree on What

George Washington Thought About the
Relationship Between Church and
State
Sam Wineburg, Zócalo Public Square
8-11 minutes

To commemorate the end of a bloody Revolutionary War, George

Washington issued what might be considered the first executive
order, setting aside the last Thursday of November as a day of
thanksgiving and prayer. His 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation was
short, a mere 456 words, punctuated by references—“Almighty
God,” “the Lord and Ruler of Nations,” “the great and glorious
Being,” “the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or
that will be”—to a Supreme Being.

Pointing to sources like the proclamation, today’s religious leaders

often count Washington as one of their own. The late evangelical
writer Tim LaHaye, whose Left Behind series sold over 11 million
copies, cast Washington as a “devout believer in Jesus Christ” who
had “accepted Him as His Lord and Savior.” David Barton, founder
of WallBuilders, an evangelical Christian advocacy organization,
and the former vice chairman of Texas’s Republican Party, pictured
a reverent Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge on the
cover of his book, America’s Godly Heritage. And many politicians

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look to texts like Washington’s proclamation as proof that America

was founded as a Christian nation.

But what did Washington’s talk of this “glorious Being” really mean
at the time? Are these references proof that Washington would, in
LaHaye’s words, “freely identify with the Bible-believing branch of
evangelical Christianity?” Or do they mean something else—
something that would have been clear to Washington’s audience in
1789—but which eludes us today?

To find out, research psychologist Eli Gottlieb and I conducted a

study in which we asked people with varied levels of historical
knowledge and religious commitment to read Washington’s
proclamation and tell us what they thought. At one end of the
spectrum were members of the clergy; at the other were agnostic
and atheist scientists. We also questioned professional historians,
religious and nonreligious alike.

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Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

Historical thinking, Wineburg shows us, has nothing to do with test

prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to
the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned
skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to
confirm our biases.

Clergy and scientists agreed that Washington was deeply pious, but
where they parted ways was about whether his piety should be
applauded—or denounced. A Methodist minister found support in
Washington for the claim that the United States was founded on a
“general Christian faith” and that “religion and spirituality played a
significant role” in American life, more so than people are willing to

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admit today.

For their part, scientists chaffed at Washington’s “violation of church

and state.” A biologist compared the president to a “country
preacher” who arrogantly assumed “that everybody believed the
same thing.”

And the historians? They reacted so differently that it seemed as if

they had read a different document entirely.

Regardless of their religious leanings, historians focused less on

what was in Washington’s address than on what wasn’t. One
historian remarked that the proclamation would “depress Pat
Robertson,” the evangelical media mogul and chairman of TV’s
Christian Broadcasting Network, who would fume at the fact that
the proclamation made “no mention of Jesus Christ.” In lieu of
recognizable markers of Christian piety—Jesus, Son of God, the
cross, the blood of salvation, the Trinity, eternal life, the
Resurrection—one finds airy and nondescript abstractions like
“great and glorious Being” or “the Lord and Ruler of Nations.”

Historians were not deaf to Washington’s religious references.

While the clergy and the scientists saw them as evidence of
Washington’s devotion, the historians stressed the president’s
precision in crafting a vocabulary that would unite the dizzying array
of Protestant denominations in post-revolutionary America without
alienating the small but important groups of Catholics, Jews, and
freethinkers dotting the American landscape. It was precisely
because he understood that Americans did not believe the same
thing that Washington was scrupulous in choosing words that would
be acceptable to a wide spectrum of religious groups.

In his own time, Washington’s reluctance to show his doctrinal

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cards dismayed his Christian co-religionists. Members of the first

Presbytery of the Eastward (comprised of Presbyterian churches in
Massachusetts and New Hampshire) complained to the president
that the Constitution failed to mention the cardinal tenets of
Christian faith: “We should not have been alone in rejoicing to have
seen some explicit acknowledgement of the only true God and
Jesus Christ,” they wrote. Washington dodged the criticism by
assuring the Presbyterians that the “path of true piety is so plain as
to require but little political direction.”

Similarly, a week before his 1789 proclamation, Washington

responded to a letter from Reverend Samuel Langdon, the
president of Harvard College from 1774-1780. Langdon had
implored Washington to “let all men know that you are not ashamed
to be a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Once again, instead of
affirming Christian tenets, Washington wrote back offering thanks to
the generic “Author of the Universe.”

Even historians who have spent a lifetime studying Washington find

his religious beliefs difficult to pin down. (John Adams once
remarked that Washington possessed the “gift of silence.”)
According to historian John Fea, himself an evangelical Christian,
Washington’s Christianity took a back seat to his republicanism,
believing that personal interests and commitments of faith should
be, as Fea put it, secondary to the “greater good of the nation.”

The last state to ratify the Constitution was Rhode Island, and only
after they had done so did Washington agree to visit the state.
Arriving in Newport on August 17, 1790, Washington listened to the
town’s notables offer greetings, among them a representative from
Yeshuat Israel, Newport’s Hebrew congregation. Moses Seixas
thanked Washington for “generously affording” the “immunities of

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Citizenship” to a people “deprived as we heretofore have been of

the invaluable rights of free Citizens.”

Moved by these words, Washington responded four days later by

making clear to the members of Yeshuat Israel that citizenship in
this new country was not a matter of “generosity” or the “indulgence
of one class of people” by another. America was not Europe, where
tolerance of religious minorities, where it occurred, was an act of
noblesse oblige. In the United States, Washington explained, “all
possess alike liberty of conscience and the immunities of
citizenship.”

Today, George Washington has been conscripted into the culture

wars over the religious underpinnings of this country. The stakes
are high. As one prominent theologian put it, if Washington can be
shown to be an “orthodox Trinity-affirming believer in Jesus Christ”
then “Christianity today is not an interloper in the public square” but
can be mobilized to counter “the secular assault against the historic
values and beliefs of America.” But those who summon the first
president to the contemporary battlefield must pay a price: They
must scrub Washington of the ambiguity, prudence, nuance, tact,
and caution that so defined his character.

In the rare moments when Washington was forthcoming about

religion, he expressed fear about using faith as a wedge to
separate one American from another. He understood how religious
disputes tear at civic union. “Of all the animosities which have
existed among mankind,” Washington wrote Sir Edward Newenham
in the midst of the bloodletting between Ireland’s Protestants and
Catholics, “those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in
religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing.”

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Washington dreamed of a nation, as he wrote to Newport’s Hebrew

Congregation, that gives “bigotry no sanction … persecution no
assistance.” What makes Americans American, he believed, is not
the direction they turn to in prayer. Rather, it is the respect they owe
fellow citizens who choose to turn in a different direction—or in no
direction at all.

Sam Wineburg is a professor of education at Stanford University.

His latest book is Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your
Phone).

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