We begin this story before the Revolutionary War, where we find Washington serving in the House of Burgesses, having been elected to the new Committee on Religion. The very fact that Washington was on this committee, as well as being a sincere Low Churchman, not only meant that he would be opposed to Bishop Seabury’s views and the claims of the High Church, but it also meant he was not a Deist, because the purpose of the Committee on Religion was to check the growing menace of Deism in Anglican Virginia.

WASHINGTON WAS A CHURCHMAN FROM THE LOW CHURCH TRADITION

To understand Washington’s religion, we need to appreciate the Virginian Low Church tradition of which he was a part. The Low Church’s dominance in Virginia was a natural result of America having no bishop of its own. It was not just that America had no bishop, but New England as well, as Virginia had strenuously resisted having an American Episcopate. The original Congregationalists had, in large part fled England for New England to escape Episcopal persecution. On the centennial of the end of the Revolutionary War, Reformed Episcopalian clergyman, Reverend Mason Gallagher explained:

In divine Providence, we owe to the tyranny of [Anglican Archbishop] Laud and the Stuarts [the English royal family], the freedom and the independence which now we so greatly enjoy.

If the noble men whom these tyrants subjected to prison, to fine, to mutilation, and other forms of persecution, even to death, had not been driven from the mother country, and their ecclesiastical home, never would there have been reared in this land, a people willing and able to fight for seven years [in the American Revolution] as the descendants of the Pilgrims did, for the privileges of civil and religious liberty, which, thanks to God and to these patriots, we are privileged now to possess.²

Since there was no bishop in America, Washington grew up without being confirmed.³ As a vestryman, he had helped manage the parish churches and called pastors without the immediate aid of a bishop.⁴ He was active in the House of Burgesses that oversaw Virginia’s Anglican state church that had no resident bishop.⁵ This meant that Washington and his fellow Virginians were not only relatively independent, by historical experience, but Washington was also quite knowledgeable in Anglican life and teaching. Washington, by faith and practice, was a Low Church Anglican.

WASHINGTON’S PERSPECTIVE ON ANGLICANISM THROUGH HIS SERVICE IN THE VIRGINIA HOUSE OF BURGESSES

Washington served for many years as a member of the House of Burgesses. His initial plans to run for office brought him into consultation with his pastor, Reverend Green.⁶ With his fame from military service, as well as his close connection with the influential Fairfax family,⁷ Washington was elected on his second run for office and began his service in May 1759, just four months after marrying Martha Custis,⁸ thereby following the family tradition of serving in government. He occupied his seat as a Burgess in the Virginia Assembly, which held its sessions at Williamsburg.⁹

A Christian sermon preached for the Virginia House of Burgesses that Washington had in his library

The Burgesses reflected Virginia’s Christian tradition, in part because Virginia had an established church. Washington’s knowledge of the Anglican tradition was deepened by serving on the Committee on Religion for several years in the Virginia House of Burgesses. On occasion, they even published sermons. One such sermon has George Washington’s signature on the cover page, entitled, “The Nature and Extent of Christ’s Redemption.”

The sermon was presented before the House of Burgesses by the Reverend Stith, president and professor from the Anglican William and Mary College in Williamsburg in 1753.¹⁰ The theme of the sermon addressed the evangelical doctrine of salvation through faith in “the death of Christ.”¹¹ President Stith argued for what theologians have called the “unlimited atonement” of Christ, or that Christ’s death on the cross was intended by God for all humans, not only for his elect. He also wrestled with the perennial Christian missions question of whether the unreached are responsible for not believing in a Gospel they’ve not yet heard, and how they can gain salvation under such circumstances. In his introduction, Professor Stith suggested that he was at least in part influenced by Christian enlightenment philosopher and theologian John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity.

The date of Stith’s sermon was six years before Washington entered the House of Burgesses. We do not know when Washington signed the sermon, nor the occasion of his securing it. He did, however, include it in his sermon collection that was bound during his life and kept in his library.¹²

From his position in the Virginia House of Burgesses, Washington had opportunity to consider many religious matters that concerned the established Anglican Church of Virginia. These included matters such as: The Two Penny Act and the Parson’s Cause,¹³ which unveiled Patrick Henry’s legal skills,¹⁴ as well as a clergyman’s defense against a heresy charge of violating the Anglican confession of faith by a teaching that seemed to deny the deity of Christ.¹⁵ This concern over heretical teaching, by the way, demonstrates that the open denial of Christ’s deity was not an acceptable position in English Anglicanism, and would have been even less so in the colonial context. Since Deism by definition denies the deity of Christ, this further supports the incongruity of claiming that Washington was a Deist.

About the time that Washington became a vestryman, he bought An Exposition of the XXXIX Articles of the Church of England by Gilbert Burnet Bishop of Sarum,¹⁶ a deeply theological and soundly orthodox statement of Anglican theology, in what was to become known as the broad church or Low Church theology.

Another evidence of Washington’s Anglican heritage was that he was offered the position of Chancellor of the Anglican William and Mary College. The school, although not always living up to its purposes in Washington’s mind,¹⁷ had very explicit religious duties:

There are three things which the Founders or this College proposed to themselves, to which all its Statutes should be directed. The First is, That the Youth of Virginia should be well educated to Learning and good Morals. The Second is, That the Churches of America, especially Virginia, should be supplied with good Ministers after the Doctrine and Government of the Church of England; and that the College should be a constant Seminary for this Purpose. The Third is, That the Indians of America should be instructed in the Christian Religion, and that some of the Indian Youth that are well-behaved and well-inclined, being first well prepared in the Divinity School, may be sent out to preach the Gospel to their Countrymen in their own tongue, after they have duly been put in Orders of Deacons and Priests. . . .¹⁸

The duties of the Master was to “take Care that all the Scholars learn the Church of England Catechism in the vulgar tongue; and that they who are further advanced learn it likewise in Latin. . . .let the president and Masters, before they enter upon these Offices, give their Assent to the Articles of the Christian Faith. . . .”¹⁹ While Washington ultimately decided not to accept the invitation to serve, his decision was reached because of his desire to retire²⁰ and not because he did not believe these things. The facts of his life show that he did believe them.²¹

WASHINGTON’S SERVICE ON THE COMMITTEE ON RELIGION

Washington’s responsibilities in the House of Burgesses included membership on the Committee on Religion. He was elected to the brand new committee in 1769, serving with such illustrious men as Colony Treasurer Robert Carter Nicholas (Chair), Attorney General John Randolph, Richard Bland, Benjamin Harrison, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Edmund Pendleton.²² Several of these men were the very ones who traveled to the First Continental Congress in 1774 to represent Virginia.²³

The religious faith of these men is a relevant question to consider. It is clear that they were not Deists, when we consider what Bishop William Meade records of their lives. Speaking of Virginian culture at large, Bishop Meade explains, “There were those, even then, among them [Virginia patriots], who had unhappily imbibed the infidel principles of France; but they were too few to raise their voices against those of Washington, Nicholas, Pendleton, Randolph, Mason, Lee, Nelson, and such like.”²⁴

Five of the members of the Committee on Religion are here singled out as opponents of the Deist movement in Virginia. Bishop Meade again writes, “If tradition and history and published documents are to be relied on, the patriotic, laborious, self-sacrificing, and eloquent Richard Henry Lee, of the Revolution, must have deeply sympathized with Washington, and Peyton Randolph, and Pendleton, and Nicholas, and Henry, in their religious character and sentiments.”²⁵

The Christian faith and commitment of these various members of the founding Committee on Religion is written in the pages of Virginia’s history and is recorded by Bishop William Meade.²⁶ Patrick Henry is most known for his fiery, patriotic oratory. But his patriotic fire was strengthened with biblical reflection. In May 1765, the Burgesses passed the Stamp Act Resolves. Years later, on the back of the paper, Henry wrote a note for posterity that highlighted several of the key events that led to the Revolution. His climactic statement declared in bold letters that he was not a Deist.

This brought on the war which finally separated the two countries and gave independence to ours. Whether this will prove a blessing or a curse, will depend upon the use our people make of the blessings, which a gracious God hath bestowed on us.

If they are wise, they will be great and happy. If they are of a contrary character, they will be miserable.

Righteousness alone can exalt them as a nation. Reader! Whoever thou art, remember this, and in thy sphere practice virtue thyself, and encourage it in others. P. Henry²⁷

There was concern over the entrance of Deism into Virginia through the teachers at William and Mary.²⁸ Was this one of the unspoken reasons why Washington did not want to place his grandson at William and Mary?²⁹ But there were also concerns about infidelity in the pulpit. Bishop Meade writes,

I have other reasons for knowing that infidelity, under the specious garb of Universalism, was then finding its way into the pulpit. Governor Page, Colonel Nicholas, and Colonel Bland made complaints against someone preaching in or near Williamsburg about this time for advocating the doctrine with its usual associates, and prevented his preferment. . . At such a time, when the writings of French philosophers—falsely so called—were corrupting the minds of the Virginia youth, the testimony of such men as Peyton Randolph, Mr. R. C. Nicholas, Colonel Bland, President Nelson, Governor Page, and the recovery of Edmund Randolph from the snare, has peculiar weight.³⁰

Again, the names of those openly defending historic Christianity against Deism in Virginia are Washington’s fellow members of the Committee on Religion. John Randolph who was on the original committee, left for England when war was beginning to become a possibility.³¹ But it was clear that the Randolph family was deeply committed to the defense of the Gospel, having been deeply touched by deistic thought. Bishop Meade relates:

Mr. Peyton Randolph ever showed himself the warm and steady friend of the Church as well as of his country. He went by the name Speaker Randolph, being for a long time the presiding officer in the House of Burgesses. He was also chosen Speaker of the first, second and third Congress, but suddenly died of apoplexy, during the last. He was buried for a time in Philadelphia, but afterward removed to Williamsburg. In connection with the foregoing notice of Mr. Peyton Randolph, I added something concerning his nephew and adopted son, Edmund Randolph...[the following is an] Extract from a paper written by Edmund Randolph, soon after the death of his wife, and addressed to his children.

Up to the commencement of the Revolution, the Church of England was the established religion, in which your mother had been educated with strictness, if not with bigotry. From strength of parental example, her attendance on public worship was unremitted, except when insuperable obstacles occurred; the administration of the sacrament was never without a cause passed by; in her closet, prayer was uniformly addressed to the throne of mercy and the questioning of the sacred truths she never permitted to herself or heard from others without abhorrence. When we were united, I was a deist, made so by my confidence in whom I revered, and by the labours of two of my preceptors, who, though of the ministry, poisoned me with books of infidelity. I cannot answer for myself that I should ever have been brought to examine the genuineness of Holy Writ, if I had not observed the consoling influence which it wrought upon the life of my dearest Betsey...for several years since I detected the vanity of sublunary things above; and knew that the good of man consisted in Christianity alone.³²

The Committee on Religion, in part, saw their concern to impede the advance of Deism in Virginia. In light of this, The Committee on Religion would have been a strange place for a person to serve, if his religious attitudes were actually like those described by Pulitzer-prize winner Joseph J. Ellis in his 2004 bestseller, His Excellency: George Washington. If Washington really was “A lukewarm Episcopalian, [who] never took Communion, [and] tended to talk about ‘Providence’ or ‘Destiny’ rather than God”³³ he would not have been very effective for the Committee’s work.³⁴ Given the purpose of the Committee,

•   Would the Burgesses have begun the committee’s work with a founding member who was, according to Ellis, “Never a deeply religious man, at least in the traditional Christian sense of the term.”?

•   Would a Committee whose purpose was to address Deism select a member who “thought of God as a distant, impersonal force, the presumed wellspring for what he called destiny or Providence.”?

•   Would the Burgesses have elected a “secular saint” who was not sure “Whether or not there was a hereafter or a heaven where one’s soul lived on...”?

•   Did the decline of religion in Virginia need someone for whom the question of salvation in heaven “struck him as one of those unfathomable mysteries that Christian theologians wasted much ink and energy trying to resolve”?

•   Would it have been a good choice to launch such a committee with one who believed that “The only certain form of persistence was in the memory of succeeding generations, a secular rather than sacred version of immortality....”?³⁵

Should Ellis be correct in calling Washington “America’s greatest secular saint,”³⁶ it seems to us that the House of Burgesses might have better elected Washington to the Committee on Deism, since Colonel Washington allegedly had such a deep commitment to the tenets of Deism and such little interest in religion. Just to be clear, however, the Committee on Deism did not exist. Deism was one of the chief issues that the Virginian Committee on Religion sought to address.

THE NEED FOR TEACHERS OF CHRISTIANITY: WASHINGTON ON THE GENERAL ASSESSMENT BILL

According to historian Allan Nevins, the Revolutionary War had brought, “it appears, an increase of crime in Virginia, and this was attributed by many to be a decline of religion. Among those who believed in legislative support of all the churches to check this decline were not only [Patrick] Henry and R. H. Lee, but Washington and John Marshall.”³⁷ Thus, a bill entitled the General Assessment Bill was put under consideration.

The background of the bill was the perceived need to support religion in the post-war era, especially since the Anglican Church in Virginia had been disestablished. Washington had written about the matter to Samuel Chase in January, 1785.³⁸ The direct effect of the bill would have been state funding of teachers of the Christian religion. Nevins explains

A plan had found favor with the Presbyterians, and an eloquent advocate in Patrick Henry. Briefly, it proposed that the State should establish all Christian denominations, make them equally state religions, and support them by regular taxation; it was pressed vigorously in the next few years by many outside as well as inside the Episcopal Church.

Henceforth the “general assessment” was the chief religious question before the Legislature. Our available evidence shows that by the end of 1783 the plan of taxing everyone for the support of all Christian ministers had gained wide favor, and was approved by a majority of Episcopalians, Methodists, and perhaps Presbyterians; but it was opposed by the Baptists and many in all other denominations who agreed with Jefferson that any link whatever between church and state was an evil...³⁹

It was this bill that brought forth the famous “Memorial and Remonstrance” of James Madison.⁴⁰ Ultimately, the resistance succeeded and the bill failed. The concern was the inherent danger to religious liberty if the government put any funds into religious support, even if the support was broadly conceived and all churches would be beneficiaries.

But Washington did not fully agree with the opponents of this bill that would have provided support for teachers of the Christian religion. Clearly, he was a strong advocate of religious liberty. But he was also a strong advocate of Christian teaching to advance the moral well-being of the community. He believed there was a way both to support the funding of Christian teachers and to protect religious liberty. His political instincts however, told him that the bill could not carry and, if passed, it would probably create ongoing tension, due to an outspoken but substantial minority. In his October 3, 1785, letter to George Mason, Washington explained:

Dr. Sir: I have this moment received yours of yesterday’s date, enclosing a memorial and remonstrance against the Assessment Bill, which I will read with attention. At present I am unable to do it, on account of company. The bill itself I do not recollect ever to have read: with attention I am certain I never did, but will compare them together.

The bill in question was to provide for teachers of the Christian religion in Virginia by means of a specified tax, the money to be paid out on order of the vestries, elders, etc., of each religious society to a teacher or minister of its denomination. It could also be used to provide places of worship.

Altho, no man’s sentiments are more opposed to any kind of restraint upon religious principles than mine are; yet I must confess, that I am not amongst the number of those who are so much alarmed at the thoughts of making people pay towards the support of that which they profess, if of the denomination of Christians; or declare themselves Jews, Mahomitans or otherwise, and thereby obtain proper relief. As the matter now stands, I wish an assessment had never been agitated, and as it has gone so far, that the Bill could die an easy death; because I think it will be productive of more quiet to the State, than by enacting it into a Law; which, in my opinion, would be impolitic, admitting there is a decided majority for it, to the disquiet of a respectable minority. In the first case the matter will soon subside; in the latter, it will rankle and perhaps convulse, the State.⁴¹

The point here is that Washington desired to have Christian education supported by state funds if non-Christians could be exempt. Washington’s view of the separation of church and state—-a phrase that he never used—-was a friendly separation that kept the duties of the church and state distinct, but sought to have them cooperate for the good of all.⁴²

So Washington was open to the taxation of Christians for Christian causes, as long as non-Christians could find relief from such taxes. If Washington had been a Deist, who rejected all claims of revealed religion, he would have opposed the state sponsorship of Christian programs. He did not view the proposed legislation as a necessary violation of religious liberty if “Jews, Mahomitans or otherwise” could “obtain proper relief.” Four years later, serving under the United States Constitution, his idea of the friendly cooperation of the distinct spheres of church and state was still his modus operandi. He believed that it was the clergy’s duty to “instruct the ignorant, and to reclaim the devious.”⁴³ However, he also felt he could promise under the Constitution or “Magna-Charta” of America, that “in the progress of morality and science, to which our government will give every furtherance, we may confidently expect the advancement of true religion, and the completion of our happiness.”⁴⁴