[Vision2020] George Washington's Religion Revisited

[Joe Campbell]

Nick,

You should change the last line to something like: "Nick Gier has been *
teaching* religion and philosophy on the Palouse for (more than) 31 years."
Thanks!

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 9:23 AM, <nickgier at roadrunner.com> wrote:

> 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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