Historians were not deaf to Washington’s religious references. But where the scientists and clergy understood such references as testaments to Washington’s religious 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 knew that Americans did not believe the same thing (contrary to what one of the scientists claimed) that
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