Two rival portrayals of Washington are conventionally invoked. The first is that of Washington as the icon of the founding of Christian nation. To quote a Southern Baptist publication:
America’s greatest hero and first President was no deist, but a devout, Bible-believing Christian.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed this in a recent statement invoking the iconography of Washington praying at Valley Forge:
Amid all the bleak nights, the loss and despair, the lack of proper support, George Washington performed a profound act — he prayed. And on this day of Rededicate 250, let us follow George Washington's example. Let us pray, as he did. Let us pray without ceasing. Let us pray for our nation on bended knee. And let us ask our lord and savior Jesus Christ, as Washington did on that momentous day, so help us God.
Needless to say, the vast majority of historians rightly cringe in the face of such descriptions. To reject an evangelical view of Washington as a "Bible-believing Christian", however, is one thing. It is quite another to then rightly account for Washington's Anglicanism. In his The Religious Beliefs of America's Founders: Reason, Revelation, and Revolution (2012), Gregg L. Frazer rejects the above portrayal but then presents a no less flawed understanding of Washington:
Because of the central and symbolic role he played in the Revolution, in the framing of the Constitution, and as the first president and 'father of his country', it is vital to the Christian America cause to identify Washington as a Christian. One prominent adherent of that camp told me, 'If George Washington was not a Christian, then I'm not a Christian!' Well, George Washington was not a Christian but a theistic rationalist.
'Theistic rationalism', according to Frazer, contrasted with both "authentic Christianity" and Deism:
Theistic rationalists believed in a powerful, rational, and benevolent creator God who established laws by which the universe functioned. Their God was a unitary personal God who was present and active and who intervened in human affairs. Consequently, they believed that prayers were heard and effectual. They believed that the main factor in serving God was living a good and moral life, that promotion of morality was central to the value of religion, and that the morality engendered by religion was indispensable to society.
Amongst the intellectual figures who promoted 'theistic rationalism', as opposed to "authentic Christianity", Frazer particularly identifies the Church of England divine Samuel Clarke. Overlooked by Frazer is the fact that Clarke, despite his views on Trinitarian doctrine, was widely celebrated within the 18th century Church of England. When George Pretyman-Tomline, then Bishop of Lincoln, published his Elements of Christian Theology in 1799, he included "a List of Books, which every clergyman ought to possess". On the list, alongside the works of Secker, the High Church Archbishop of Canterbury 1758-68, and that staple of orthodox 18th century Anglicanism, The Whole Duty of Man, were the 8 volumes of Clark's Sermons.
I have no doubt [Clarke] was a very sincere Xtian, conscientious, pious & moreover, that he meant to be, & believed himself to be, a Trinitarian ... & I can look on his errors (for such Waterland, I believe, has demonstrated them to be) with far more charity, than upon the use which has been made of them, to serve the cause of a species of Unitarianism which he would have regarded with abhorrence.
Clarke, then, did not stand somehow apart from the 18th century Church of England: he was very much part of it.
To describe Washington, therefore, as a 'theistic rationalist' rather than one who professed "authentic Christianity" (an incredibly dubious term for us in serious historical study), is to ignore that the intellectual figure who defined 'theistic rationalism' was himself described by a theological opponents as "a very sincere Xtian".
This contradiction is further highlighted when we consider aspects of Frazer's summary of Clarke's thought. For example, we are told that Clarke's view that "Christianity is the religion of reason and nature" is somehow heterodox, despite it being a commonplace 18th century Anglican view found in, say, Jeremy Taylor and John Tillotson. Consider Taylor's statement in his influential The Great Exemplar:
This is all I am to say concerning the precepts of the religion which Jesus taught us: he took off those many superinduced rites which God enjoined to the Jews, and reduced us to the natural religion ...
We can indeed identify Washington with this view of Christianity as "the religion of reason and nature" - but this places him within a significant and influential stream of post-1660 Anglican thought.
It is, however, on the subject of the Trinity that Gregg believes that Clarke is clearly a 'theistic rationalist':
Clarke did not believe Christ was God, except in a secondary, inferior sense - something akin to a Greek demigod.
This, "by definition", meant that Clarke was a "non-Christian". This is a fundamentally flawed account of Clarke's subordinationist Christology, as Pfizenmaier's The Trinitarian Theology of Dr. Samuel Clarke (1675–1729): Context, Sources, and Controversy demonstrates. Various expressions of subordinationist Christology, alongside 'Trinitarian minimalism', were part of the mainstream in the post-1660 Church of England. More to the point, it was also surely the case that very few laity grasped the intricacies of the debates on Trinitarian doctrine nor defined their faith according to its terms. Mindful that lay hostility to the Athanasian Creed was as evident in England as in colonial Virginia (the future Loyalist Jonathan Boucher recounts his struggles with this Creed), and that the Apostles' Creed and Prayer Book Catechism offered a very basic Trinitarian outline, it seems highly unrealistic to interpret the lack of Trinitarian affirmations from Washington as evidence of a supposedly non-Christian 'theistic rationalism'.
Rather than through Trinitarian doctrine, the piety of Washington is surely better understood within the context of what Lauren F. Winner has described as the 'cheerful and comfortable faith' of 18th century Virginia's elite households. In her study was see Washington buying Bibles and Books of Common Prayer for his young stepchildren in 1761; purchasing a "red Morocco" BCP, bound with the New Version of the Psalms, in 1771; and presenting Martha with a volume of Watts' psalms and hymns in 1789. Alongside this is his church attendance, duties as a vestryman, being a godfather (e.g. in Pohick Church, 11th June 1769), and his diary entries noting funeral sermons (e.g. 2nd June 1769, 27th April 1773). All this indicates the conventional Anglican piety of colonial Virginia.
As for Washington's practice regarding the Sacrament of Holy Communion, while he did not receive the Sacrament post-1783, there is some evidence to suggest he did partake prior to the Revolutionary War. John K. Nelson's study of Anglican Virginia 1690-1776, however, rightly reminds us that "Communicants were a minority of parishioners", something that continued to be the case amongst Episcopalians after the War. He also emphasises that "caution" is required in assuming that not communicating indicated enlightened or heterodox dissent. "Scrupulousness", Nelson suggests, "had a much more prominent role in "explaining eighteenth-century behaviors". This being so, in not partaking of the Sacrament of Holy Communion, Washington was reflecting a quite typical approach seen in both colonial Virginian and in the post-War Episcopal Church.
Both in terms of piety and theology, therefore, Washington emerges not as a 'theistic rationalist' standing apart from Christianity but, rather, as an example of a well-established expression of 18th century Anglicanism. Indeed, his piety and theology would have been indistinguishable from that of many British officers in the Revolutionary War.
Nor, contrary to Gregg's suggestion, was it in any way the case that Enlightened thought was somehow regarded as incompatible with Anglicanism. As Ashley Walsh notes in his Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England 1701-1800 (2020), proponents of Enlightened thought in England "insisted that they were not simply defending right religion in general but Christianity in particular and above all". He also quotes Roy Porter's view that Enlightenment "throve in England within piety". What is more, "All modes of Restoration Anglican divinity developed concepts of civil religion to generate civil peace": this was not at all a supposed 'theistic rationalist' distinctive. For a Virginian gentleman who adhered to the commitments of Enlightened thought, there was little - if any - sense that this was incompatible with being a member of the Church of England.
The nature of Washington's religious discourse is also often a matter of comment. Gregg, for example, regards this as further evidence of 'theistic rationalism':
Washington also stressed the same attributes of God as did deism - power, wisdom, and benevolence. He regularly referred to God as 'All-powerful', 'the Omnipotent Being', 'the Almighty', 'All Wise', and as one whose actions were 'all ways wise'. He was confident that the ways of God were always 'for gracious purposes' and that God was filled with 'goodness' and was 'kind', 'benign', and 'beneficent'.
Those familiar with much 18th century Anglican discourse will be somewhat surprised to hear that such modest and reserved language regarding God is to be taken as a sign of commitment to 'theistic rationalism' rather than Christianity. As Mary V. Thompson points out, the correspondence of Martha Washington - whose religious orthodoxy is acknowledged - employed a similar approach to the language of piety:
I can say that Martha Washington, who is generally considered a very devout, orthodox Christian, refers most often to “God,” occasionally to “Providence,” and never to Jesus.
Significantly, we see such discourse in the works William Paley, regarded as the premier apologist for Christianity in the Georgian Church of England. Consider how he references God in the closing pages of Natural Theology (1802): "the Creator ... the Deity ... the Divinity ... this stupendous Being ... this great Being ... a wise and powerful Being". Likewise, Edmund Burke, the great intellectual defender of British constitutional order against the forces of the Revolution in France, employed the same terminology:
The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections. The rest is our own.
The modesty and reserve of Washington's religious language was the quite conventional public discourse of 18th century civic Anglicanism.
All this, of course, is very far removed from what 21st century evangelicals would describe as being a 'Bible-believing Christian'. Nor is it a religious sensibility that would please quite a few contemporary Anglicans, desiring something rather more 'full fat'. Such views, however, are beside the point. To describe Washington's piety and theology as 'theistic rationalism', rather than "authentic Christianity", is to also dismiss a vast swathe of 18th century Anglicanism. This is not how religious history is to be written. Nor, to be frank, is it how to assess popular Anglicanism in any context. Washington's Enlightened commitments, his understanding of 'natural religion', the piety of a Virginian gentleman, and the modest character of his religious discourse were all unremarkable in 18th century Anglicanism.
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