The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

If he was religious, Washington was exceedingly private about those beliefs, even in personal letters and papers. He mentions Jesus perhaps once in ninety volumes of letters and papers, and never in private correspondence.26 The ostentatious show Weems invented is simply not in keeping with Washington’s strong, silent character. As Ron Chernow, Washington’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, notes in Washington: A Life: Some of Washington’s religious style probably reflected an Enlightenment discomfort with religious dogma, but it also reflected his low-key personal style. He was sober and temperate in all things, distrusted zealotry, and would never have talked of hellfire or damnation. He would have shunned anything, such as communion, that might flaunt his religiosity. He never wanted to make a spectacle of his faith or trade on it as a politician. Simply as a matter of personal style he would have refrained from the emotional language associated with evangelical Christianity. This cooler, more austere religious manner was commonplace among well-heeled Anglicans in eighteenth-century Virginia.27