[Vision2020] George Washington's Religion Revisited

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Greetings:

This is past week's column/radio commentary celebrating Washington's BD. I was really prepared for this book review.  Tom Hansen gifted me a copy of Peter Lillback's book "Sacred Fire," and Lillback sent me an autographed copy.  Only a month-long beach vacation in Mexico gave me enough time to read this huge tome.

Lillback was a keynote speaker at Moscow’s own Trinity Festival sponsored by Doug Wilson’s Christ Church.  I wrote to Lillback warning him that he risked his reputation associating with a pastor who had written a discredited book defending Southern slavery.  He answered saying that this was no reason for him to cancel his trip.  Now that I have read Lillback’s book I can say that was right in my warning: Pastor Lillback is a much better scholar than Pastor Wilson, but still he utterly fails to prove that Washington was an orthodox, trinitarian Christian.

Now back to my temporarily neglected duties as IFT president.  Next week's topic: a defense of America's public sector unions.

To the barricades!  Make every town square a Tahrir Square!

Nick


GEORGE WASHINGTON’S RELIGION REVISITED

As a fellow minister in Peter Lillback's denomination [conservative Presbyterian], I can tell you that a large number of us are embarrassed by his poor historical methodology.

—Anonymous posting to a review of Lillback’s Sacred Fire

Thanks to Glenn Beck’s fawning promotion, an obscure self-published book on George Washington’s religion has become a best seller among conservatives. On his show Beck enthused: “It so discredits all of the scholars.  It’s the best book on faith and the founding fathers I've ever read.”  

Did Beck actually read this huge tome? Running almost 1,200 pages with 500 pages of endnotes and indices, conservative Presbyterian minister Peter Lillback’s George Wasghinton’s Sacred Fire certainly gives the impression of thorough scholarship. 

The book is indeed thorough but far too repetitive, and Lillback does score some points against previous scholars who produced insufficient evidence for some of their claims. His strongest argument is an alternative explanation of why Washington refused to take Communion at two churches while he was president.

On the question of Washington’s alleged deism, I came to the same conclusion that Lillback did nearly 40 years ago when I first researched the religion of the founders.  Using standard definitions of deism none of the major American thinkers of that time—except Thomas Paine, Elihu Palmer, and Ethan Allen—could be called deists.

Using Lillback’s methods and assumptions, however, one would be forced to conclude that even Unitarians such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, regardless of their beliefs, were by their actions orthodox Christians. 

Here is the essence of Lillback’s argument in the form of a syllogism: major premise: Anglicans are orthodox Christians; minor premise: Washington was an Anglican; therefore, Washington was an orthodox Christian.
Lillback surely must know that 12 million people in the United Kingdom are members of the Anglican Church and only half them bother to attend. But 8 percent do attend weekly, which is more than Washington ever did. 

Thomas Jefferson was also a vestryman in the Anglican Church, but Lillback would never draw the conclusion that Jefferson was an orthodox Christian. (His argument that Jefferson was not a good churchman simply fails to persuade.) This fact leads us to reject the major premise as obviously false. 

When Washington became president his diaries show that his church attendance rose dramatically from 4 percent to 68 percent, soon dropping back down to 21 percent, and ceasing after retirement. These are percentages of Sundays that Washington recorded that he went to services. Lillback’s claim that our first president was a great churchman simply cannot be supported by the facts. Giving lots of money and showing up on occasion does not make a person either devout or orthodox.

The weakest arguments in the book are the ones devoted to proving that Washington believed in the deity of Christ and the Trinity.  In his voluminous writings Jesus is mentioned once and there are no references to Christ or the Trinity, so Lillback is forced to make some very indirect and dubious inferences.  For example, he thinks that Jesus is the referent in phrases such as “the divine author of our blessed religion,” when in fact it most likely means God not Christ. 

The only argument that Lillback can make that Washington believed in a triune deity is that as an Anglican he would have affirmed church creeds, which contain that doctrine, and he would have read from the trinitarian Common Book of Prayer. 

Jefferson attended church more often than Washington did, and he, too, would have joined the congregation in reciting the trinitarian creeds.  Witnesses also noticed that he always put his prayer book in his pocket as he rode off to church— even in his 70s and 80s— in Charlottesville three miles away.

Pastor Lillback admits that one could never say that Washington was an evangelical Christian, but he did once rise to the level of evangelism  when he supported the Anglican mission to the Indians. But that would make Jefferson a Christian evangelist as well, because he signed bills from 1802-04 financing missionaries to the Indian tribes.

Lillback’s response to my using Jefferson as a counter to his argument is that we know from their writings that as Unitarians Jefferson and John Adams rejected the deity of Christ and the Trinity. But Washington’s silence in this regard does not indicate orthodoxy at all; it only shows that he was not particularly interested in theology. 

If Washington was a Christian, he was one that fit John Adams’ very liberal definition: “I believe all the honest men among you are Christians, in my sense of the word." 

Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. 
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