The last matter that we will consider here is Washington’s alleged involvement in the treaty that the United States established with Tripoli. The Treaty of Tripoli came about because Muslim ships dispatched from the Barbary coast of Africa were attacking American vessels and turning the captors into slaves. This treaty put on paper an agreement to stop this terrible practice.
The relevance of the wording of the Treaty of Tripoli for our discussion is how its text related to Washington’s religion, as well as how it reflects our founders’ view of the relationship of Christianity and the American Constitution. For example, does it matter for our interpretation of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, whether or not Washington said to the Muslims in Tripoli, “These United States are not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”38
We believe that it does matter if Washington said this. If we are to understand the original intent of the Constitution that the founders wrote, we must understand Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention.
Did Washington write, “America is in no way founded upon the Christian religion” in the Treaty with Tripoli? Scholars on both sides of the debate regarding Washington’s Deism—even Boller, who rejects Washington’s Christianity—have concurred that this is a myth,39 although not everyone has gotten the word.40 Thus, frequently and unfortunately, it is still stated as though it were a fact.
In fact, there is ambiguity surrounding the authenticity of this phrase in the treaty itself that was signed by President John Adams. Charles I. Bevans states in Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United Sates of America,
This translation from the Arabic by Joel Barlow, Consul General at Algiers, has been printed in all official and unofficial treaty collections since it first appeared in 1797 in the Session Laws of the Fifth Congress, first session. In a “Note Regarding the Barlow Translation” Hunter Miller stated: “. . .Most extraordinary (and wholly unexplained) is the fact that Article 11 of the Barlow translation, with its famous phrase, ‘the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.’ does not exist at all. There is no Article 11. The Arabic text which is between Articles 10 and 12 is in form a letter, crude and flamboyant and withal quite unimportant, from the Dey [Governor] of Algiers to the Pasha [ruler] of Tripoli. How that script came to be written and to be regarded as in the Barlow translation, as Article 11 of the treaty as there written, is a mystery and seemingly must remain so. Nothing in the diplomatic correspondence of the time throws any light whatever on the point.”41
Is it possible that Joel Barlow’s explorations of atheism may have induced him to interpolate this phrase into the treaty?42 At any rate, Washington never wrote nor signed the disputed words of the Treaty of Tripoli. In stark contrast to this dubious statement from the Treaty of Tripoli, Washington wrote on September 19, 1796, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.”
CONCLUSION
What the objections of this chapter demonstrate is that Washington was not a perfect man. In Christian terms, he was a man who sinned. But the definition of a Christian is not perfection, and being a sinner does not make a man a Deist. If that were the case, then every Christian would be a Deist, since Christianity affirms the universality of sin.
Perhaps a more appropriate definition of a Christian is a person who practices faithful and faith-filled repentance. Washington’s repentance of slavery at the end of his life, his repentant control over the misplaced passions of temptation, and his self-control over his explosive anger are each indicative of a spiritual life. While Washington never wrote, “America is in no way founded upon the Christian religion” in the Treaty with Tripoli, it is clear to us that the Christian religion is what Washington’s spiritual growth was founded upon.
TWENTY SEVEN
“Minds of Peculiar Structure”:
George Washington vs. Deism
“Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
George Washington, 1796
1
As we have already seen, reason was in the air during the seventeen hundreds. By reason, man now knew he was no longer the center of the universe, but also by reason he was sure he would be its master. German philosopher Immanuel Kant declared, “Sapere aude!—Dare to reason! Have the courage to use your own minds!—is the motto of enlightenment.”2 Alexander Pope’s “Essay On Man” reflected the intoxicating optimism that was the enticement of enlightenment thought: “O happiness! Our being’s end and aim! Good, pleasure, ease, content! Whate’er thy name.”3
This enlightenment spirit sometimes expressed itself as Deism, which Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary defined as, “The doctrine or creed of a deist; the belief or system of religious opinions of those who acknowledge the existence of one God, but deny revelation: or deist is the belief in natural religion only, or those truths, in doctrine and practice, which man is to discover by the light of reason, independent and exclusive of any revelation from God. Hence deism implies infidelity or a disbelief in the divine origin of the scriptures.”4
DEISM AND THE FOUNDING FATHERS
But this emphasis upon the power of human reason did not mean that our founding fathers agreed on everything, or that all of them became Deists. Norman Cousins has well written, “To say that the Founding Fathers were the products of the Age of Enlightenment does not mean that they had a uniform view of religion or politics or anything else. All the Enlightenment did, and this was enough, was to give men greater confidence than before in the reach of the human intelligence.”5
In fact, some of them, like John Adams, were explicitly opposed to Deism. John Adams wrote to fellow founder Dr. Benjamin Rush on January 21, 1810:
Learned, ingenious, benevolent, beneficent old friend of 1774! Thanks for “the light and truth,” as I used to call the Aurora, which you sent me. You may descend in a calm, but I have lived in a storm, and shall certainly die in one....
I have not seen, but am impatient to see, Mr. Cheetham’s life of Mr. Paine. His political writings, I am singular enough to believe, have done more harm than his irreligious ones. He understood neither government nor religion. From a malignant heart, he wrote virulent declamation, which the enthusiastic fury of the times intimated all men, even Mr. Burke, from answering, as he ought. His deism, as it appears to me, has promoted rather than retarded the cause of revolution in America, and indeed in Europe. His billingsgate, stolen from Blounts’ Oracles of Reason, from Bolingbroke, Voltaire, Be¢renger, &c., will never discredit Christianity, which will hold its ground in some degree as long as human nature shall have any thing moral or intellectual left in it. The Christian religion, as I understand it, is the brightness of the glory and the express portrait of the character of the eternal, self-existent, independent, benevolent, all powerful and all merciful creator, preserver, and father of the universe, the first good, first perfect, and first fair. It will last as long as the world. Neither savage nor civilized man, without a revelation, could ever have discovered or invented it. Ask me not, then, whether I am a Catholic or Protestant, Calvinist or Arminian. As far as they are Christians, I wish to be a fellow-disciple with them all.6
Benjamin Franklin, like John Adams, was clearly not an advocate of the perspective of Thomas Paine. Writing to Paine on July 3, 1786, Franklin declared, after reviewing a draft of the Age of Reason:
I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person; whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification by the enemies it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it. I intend this letter itself as a proof of my friendship, and therefore add no professions to it; but subscribe simply yours, B. Franklin.7
In the same letter to Paine, he likened defying God (which the book did) to spitting in the wind wherein it lands right back on one’s own face.
But it is clear that some of our founding fathers did embrace elements of the Deistic perspective. For example John Marshall was a church attender but not a communicant. However, he was converted to the Christian faith at the end of his life.8 Similarly, Virginia Burgessman Edmund Randolph recanted his youthful Deism as he got older.9 Deism’s rejection of revelation in favor of an exclusive dependence upon human reason brought with it in many instances an overt hostility to the clergy as well.10 In mid-eighteenth century Virginia, there was already a growing concern over the emergence of Deism. We can see by a summary in the 1761 Virginia Almanack of a book entitled, An Impartial Enquiry into the True Nature of the Faith, which is required in the Gospel as necessary to salvation, In which is briefly shown, upon how righteous terms Unbelievers may become true Christians: And the Case of Deists is reduced to a short Issue. This was the Almanack that George Washington used for the period of May 24 through October 22, 1761, to write his diary notes. There is a high likelihood that Washington read it in its entirety, since he handled it nearly everyday for six months and because the value of the short 54-page long Almanack was enhanced by the inclusion of informative charts and tables as well as humorous excerpts.11
Contained in the Virginia Almanack that Washington used in 1761 for his diary was the above summation of a book presenting the importance of Christian teaching versus that of Deism.
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL DEISTS
Meanwhile, Deists in England felt the need to evaluate everything, including religion, in light of the new emphasis on reason. One of the intellectual leaders of the Deists was Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1581-1648), often called the father of English Deism. He wrote Religion of the Gentiles With the Causes of their Errors. His essential articles of faith were: (1) the existence of God; (2) His Worship; (3) the practice of virtue; (4) repentance of sin; and (5) a faith in immortality. These truths he believed to be self-evident and accessible by all men everywhere since these beliefs were rationally based. Undergirding his perspective was the notion that all claims of revealed religion must be tested by reason.12 Lord Herbert found the Christian Gospel by salvation through faith in Jesus Christ untenable under the scrutiny of reason.13
The early English-language Deist writers included the English: Lord Herbert of Cherbury, John Toland, Robert Collins, Matthew Tindal (not to be confused with Bible translator of the Reformation age William Tyndale), William Wollaston, Charles Blount, Henry St. John Bolingbroke, Thomas Chubb, Samuel Clarke, and John Leland. The earliest French Deist writers were Voltaire and Diderot. But the Deist that most Americans became aware of was Thomas Paine, author of the anti-Christian Deistic work Age of Reason in which he declared, “The Christian theory is little less than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.”14
DEISM VS. CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY ON CAMPUS
It was inevitable that Deistic thought would cross the ocean and enter the thinking of America’s young scholars. Examples of Deistic thought appeared in colonial Virginia in the context of William and Mary College.15
Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight, the presidents of Yale College during the years of George Washington’s presidency, were keenly aware of the threat of Deism to orthodox Christianity. As early as 1759, Stiles wrote to Thomas Clap, then president of Yale, “Deism has got such Head in this Age of Licentious Liberty that it would be in vain to try to stop it by hiding the Deistical Writings: and the only Way left to conquer & demolish it, is to come forth into the open Field & Dispute this matter on even Footing—the evidences of Revelation in my opinion are nearly as demonstrative as Newton’s Principia, & these are the Weapons he used.”16
Stiles’ successor to the presidency of Yale was Timothy Dwight. His approach to the problem of Deism can be seen in his address to the graduating class of Yale. In September 1797, he gave lectures (published the next year at the request of his students) entitled, “Two Discourses On The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy.”17 This publication by Dwight was sent to George Washington by Reverend Zachariah Lewis, a young tutor at Yale that had been Washington’s adopted grandson George Washington Parke Custis’ tutor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
President Washington responded to Lewis on September 28, 1798, telling him: “I thank you for sending me Doctor Dwights Sermons to whom I pray you to present the complimts. of Yr. etc.” The word “compliments” is an expression of “praise, admiration or congratulation.” Ultimately, we do not know how extensively Washington agreed with the discourses, but they are valuable, because they represent an acknowledged study of what “infidel philosophy” looked like in Washington’s day in the context of a respected college. Given this fact, our purpose here is to capture the essence of what the deistic thinkers of Washington’s day were actually saying about their beliefs and about deistic ethical conduct and practice. And then, we want to compare these deistic ideas with Washington and see if his beliefs and ethical practices conformed to the deistic writers summarized by Dr. Dwight, the president of Yale College. The “infidel” philosophers specifically critiqued by President Dwight included the Deists: Blount, Lord Shaftesbury, Collins, Woolston, Tindal, Chubb, Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Herbert, Voltaire; and the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and David Hume.
