The year 2026 is one of important anniversaries in the history of ordered liberty. Americans, and the world, are observing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This year is also the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the book that launched the modern study of classical economics.
There is another important, albeit lesser known, anniversary: the 20th anniversary of Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country by Michael Novak and Jana Novak. This book holds a special place in my heart because of its role in how I first came to know the Acton Institute.
Was the first president a deist? A heretic? Simply a lukewarm Anglican? His insistence of God’s providential care, which he sought in prayer, leads any open-minded inquirer to a very different conclusion.
I was a research professor at the University of Virginia editing the Papers of George Washington when Michael Novak began work on Washington’s God. Thanks in part to a friendly exchange of letters between the two of us about Washington in First Things, over several months Michael and his research intern consulted me and my colleague, Frank Grizzard Jr., about Washington and religion. I was really the junior partner and Grizzard, author of The Ways of Providence: Religion & George Washington, the expert.
When Michael found out I was leaving Virginia for a tenure-track professorship in Grand Rapids, he praised my choice. Why? Because Grand Rapids was where the Acton Institute was located. He told me the first person I needed to look up on my arrival was his “good friend, Fr. Robert Sirico.” I did, and the rest, as they say, is history.
So Washington’s God is special to me for personal reasons, but why should it be of interest to you?
As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of their country’s birth, many doubt its future. In doubting its future, they also question its founding principles, heroes, and myths. This includes increasing numbers on the right who should know better. Rather than seeking to conserve the universal principles at the heart of the American founding—human dignity, limited government, religious liberty, civil liberty—these critics instead blame them for America’s social ills, cultural decay, and political pathologies.
Given his role as general-in-chief of the Continental Army, president of the Constitutional Convention, and the first president of the United States, Washington indeed was the founding’s “indispensable man.” Henry Lee famously called him, “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Indeed, Washington is a Founding Father whom you will admire more, not less, the more you study him.
Due to his unquestioned importance, Washington’s religious beliefs have preoccupied Americans for over two centuries. On the one hand, there are those well-meaning Christians who think proving Washington was a Christian will validate the founding and confirm that the United States was, is, and ever shall be a “Christian nation.” On the other hand, there are those who think his alleged deism strips the founding of all religious meaning, revealing an overwhelmingly secular and even anti-religious event with no intellectual or moral roots in the Western and Christian heritage.
In Washington’s God, Michael and Jana Novak set out to tackle this debate, not as ideologues with foregone conclusions but as scholars interested in basing their assessment only on Washington’s own words and actions. Their findings should play an important role in the fight on the right over the value of America’s founding principles, for in the quest to identify Washington’s god we encounter a microcosm of Americans’ struggle to find the meaning of the founding on the occasion of the nation’s 250th birthday.
Other scholars, the Novaks claim, have not taken “Washington’s words about God seriously.” In the 20th century most historians were just not interested in religion. This led them to characterize Washington as a deist, a practical rationalist, or “at best a tepid Anglican.” These views can be boiled down to three theses: that Washington was a deist, that he lacked religious conviction but merely pretended to be a Christian for the sake of public appearance, and that by “Providence” he merely meant something impersonal like fate or destiny rather than the personal, loving, and holy God of the Bible.
The Novaks argue that when we combine Washington’s own words related to God, religion, and virtue and his universal reputation as a man of integrity “who meant what he said, and did what he asked others to do, and acted seamlessly between his private life and his public life,” then we cannot conclude that Washington was a deist, a rationalist, or a tepid believer.
To identify Washington's God is to encounter a microcosm of Americans' struggle to find the meaning of the founding.
One strength of this book is that it reminds us first to take people at their word, for there are those who actually believe what they say. Where faith is concerned, this means taking religion seriously. If one starts from the Marxist perspective that religion is about power, class, and control, then that lens will shape one’s conclusions. As I wrote back in 2011, in an essay for The Imaginative Conservative, “Taking religion seriously in our study of the past means first of all beginning with the assumption that people really believe what they say they believe.”
Some self-understanding is in order as well. As the inscription on the Temple of Delphi in ancient Greece read, and as Socrates later affirmed, the key to wisdom is to “know thyself.” When we acknowledge our own faults, we will not be so quick to dismiss others’ religious beliefs as hypocrisy just because they sometimes fail to live up to them.
The core of the Novaks’ argument is that if Washington was a man of integrity and not a hypocrite, then this fact ought to shape how we interpret what he said publicly and privately about God. “Our method . . . was to begin with trust in Washington’s integrity.”
Washington’s God thus devotes considerable space to establishing the role of virtue and integrity in Washington’s life, explaining why and how he gained this reputation. There are many examples, including his decision to free his slaves and provide support and education for them and their descendants upon his death. But the one that is the most biblical (i.e., one of the three temptations offered to Christ by the devil) involved Washington’s refusal to become a king when he could easily have done so. This impressed many, including King George III.
Along with acknowledging Washington’s integrity, a second key to making sense of his religious views is to understand what he meant when referring to “Providence.” The Novaks demonstrate how Washington’s experiences on the battlefield shaped his understanding of God’s Providence. It was the battlefield more than the Book of Common Prayer that taught Washington to pray to God for blessings and to offer him thanksgiving.
Washington was so convinced of the connection between piety and divine favor that he mandated paid chaplains for all Continental Army encampments. The chaplains’ job was to “implore the blessings of heaven” and to offer “thanksgiving to God” in order to “continue to deserve his future blessings.” We must, he told his men, be grateful for “the miraculous care of Providence.” God’s “interpositions” and “Divine favour” would be needed for what Washington said was a righteous cause. Impiety, said Washington, threatened a loss of God’s blessings.
Washington did not equate Providence with unstoppable destiny. His sense of Providence also was not the understanding of fate we see in Homer’s Iliad, wherein success or failure is dependent on the whims of Zeus:
There are two urns that stand on the door-sill of Zeus. They are unlike for the gifts they bestow: an urn of evils, an urn of blessings. If Zeus who delights in thunder mingles these and bestows them on man, he shifts, and moves now in evil, again in good fortune. But when Zeus bestows from the urn of sorrows, he makes a failure of man.
Our destiny is not determined by whim. Nor is it a faceless kind of fate like the kind the writer of Beowulf accepts when he declares, “Fate goes as fate must.” According to the Novaks, for Washington Providence meant “the total sovereignty of God over concrete contingent events and the benevolence of God,” even amid trials. It was more a sharpener of one’s character and opportunity for virtue than a predetermined outcome.
Washington knew that appealing to Providence does not mean one always wins.
Washington’s appeals to Providence reveal that he thought it involved a test of one’s faith under pressure. This helps explain his serenity during the worst days of the Revolutionary War: “Ours is a kind of struggle designed I dare say by Providence to try the patience, fortitude and virtue of Men.” For Washington, acknowledging Providence enabled men to face great difficulties while developing the virtues needed to persevere, whether in victory or in defeat.
In other words, Washington knew that appealing to Providence does not mean one always wins. But it does mean that one faces life’s difficulties with prudence, fortitude, and realism.
What Washington learned on the battlefield he joined to what he knew as a regular churchgoer familiar with the Book of Common Prayer. The result was an anthropology with a realistic but uncynical view of what he could expect from others. With its “balance between avoiding too much pessimism in bewailing human depravity, on the one side, and taking its affirmation that God had also given humans a certain nobility . . . too far to the other extreme,” the Book of Common Prayer confirmed Washington’s own experience.
As Washington himself put it, “We must take human nature as we find it.” It is harder to be a utopian ideologue grown bitter from human frailty and easier to be patient and magnanimous with others when one’s understanding of human nature is rooted in a recognition that the human person is a mix of aspirational and real virtues with passions and interests.
In the end, the Novaks assert, it was this realism about human nature that enabled Washington to act “as a Christian general ought to act.”
Along with Washington’s integrity, sense of Providence, and Christian anthropology, another way to identify the god of Washington entails investigating what late 18th-century deism was and what it was not. The Novaks do this in a chapter that everyone who lazily proclaims that “the founders were deists” ought to read.
Citing the work of Avery Dulles, the Novaks point to deism as an unintended fruit of the Protestant Reformers’ critique of the Catholic engagement with philosophy and reason. Protestants thought that Catholics had overemphasized reason and veered too strongly into paganism, not only in philosophy but in art. “Luther called reason ‘the Devil’s greatest whore’ and the ‘greatest enemy that faith has.’”
Anglicans, meanwhile, argued that moral truths could be learned through reason alone. Thus, it should not surprise us that deism first arose in English efforts “to boil Christianity down to its most practical points.” This entailed the study of human nature. As the Novaks put it, these early deists “did not so much deny Christian doctrines as try to find doctrines of reason that performed the same practical work.” Few in England lampooned Christian beliefs like the intellectual leaders of the French Enlightenment or hated Christianity like the Jacobins of the 1790s did.
These early modern deists, in the Novaks’ telling, were different in important ways from the theist philosophers of the ancient world. First, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero were pre-Christian and unfamiliar with Judaism. Second, the earliest Christians admired the ancient theists for uncovering through philosophy so much about God without having access to revelation. Divine Providence had prepared them to accept the gospel. As C.S. Lewis put, “A pagan . . . is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin.”
Between the ancient philosophical theists and the modern deists lay over 1,500 years of Christianity. The modern deists relished the task of “stripping away” as much Christianity and Judaism as they could from what they saw as a reasonable belief in an impersonal, creator god. In reality, however, as they stripped away the miracles, the Incarnation, and other Christian beliefs, Enlightenment deists unknowingly “borrowed many themes from the Jewish-Christian past: fraternity, equality, liberty, compassion for the most vulnerable, sensitivity to the category of cruel and inhuman treatment of human beings, the moral evil of slavery, and the rest.” All the while the deists had faith that they had learned these things through reason alone.
The Novaks assert that this is why “deism is best understood as an attitude, a posture,” more “a movement of the imagination, such as romanticism, than like an ideology composed of one set of clear ideas.”
Taking this all into account, the Novaks (correctly, in my view) conclude that Washington was not a deist. The idea that Washington was a deist does not fit with his own words and behavior. One does not call an impersonal deist god “holy,” pray to it, or thank it, let alone talk about seeking its favor and intervention. Nor does an impersonal god act in history through what Washington called “interpositions” or assess our piety and private behavior.
If Washington’s god was not the god of the deists, then to whom did Washington pray and give thanks?
The Novaks contend that Washington’s god was not only the God of the Hebrew Scriptures but also the God of the Christians. All this comes together in a prayer Washington attached as president to his Circular Letter to the States. In the letter, Washington asks God “to dispose us all, to do justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our Blessed Religion, and without an humble imitation to whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.” Washington is referring here to Jesus Christ and to the Christian theological virtues.
Having established Washington’s Christianity, the question remains of his attitude toward religious liberty. In our time of anti-religious secularism on the one hand and the illiberal promotion of Protestant triumphalism or post-liberal Catholic integralism on the other, we should want to know what the “Father of his country” thought about religious liberty, especially if he was a Christian. Thankfully, Washington’s God is illuminating in this regard.
Washington “used more than reason alone,” the Novaks argue, “to come to his understanding of religious liberty.” His opinion on religious liberty grew out of his “theological anthropology,” which took account of “the way that God created human beings.” Freedom of conscience, for Washington, was rooted in the human person’s capacity to reflect and to choose, not the more practical goal of preventing sectarian violence. The State protects religious liberty because it is foundational to who the human person is, as a being whose mind was created to know the truth, to make choices, and thereby achieve character and virtue.
Washington’s respect for religious liberty did not just extend to his fellow Americans but even to America’s adversaries in war. In the name of liberty, Washington commanded Benedict Arnold to respect the Canadians’ religion during the Revolutionary War: “While we are contending for our own Liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the Rights of Conscience in others, ever considering God alone is the Judge of the Hearts of Men, and to him only in this Case, they are answerable.”
As general, Washington’s vigorous promotion of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion did not stop him from mandating chaplains. As president, he proclaimed days of thanksgiving and appealed to God for blessings on America. This began with his first inauguration, when “Washington reached beyond the Constitution to swear his oath of office upon the Bible; he even kissed the Bible upon taking the oath.” Here is one precedent that some historians dismiss as political theater. The Novaks argue that calling this “political theater” ignores everything we know about Washington’s character and sense of integrity.
The Novaks contend that Washington’s god was not only the God of the Hebrew Scriptures but also the God of the Christians.
Arguably, the best-known words by Washington on religion come from his 1796 “Farewell Address”:
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 labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. … And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. … Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
At first glance these words can seem instrumentalist, seeing religion as a good only because it tends to create the preconditions for social and political stability. One needs to read the “Farewell Address,” however, in light of the totality of Washington’s religious statements and behavior over the course of his life. Washington believed that virtue comes from religion, and that to merit divine blessing in the plan of Providence requires piety. The precondition for virtue and piety is freedom of religion.
Questioning the principles of the American founding is not just an intra-American problem. Although American revolutionaries referred to the “traditional liberties of Englishmen,” they also believed that they were protecting and promoting rights that were universal to all humanity. These rights were universal because they were neither the gift of the State nor the peculiar inheritance of a single people. They were traditional among the English because, according to the Whig historians, Saxons had fought for liberty and self-government for centuries against arbitrary and centralizing tendencies of Norman rule. Among these “traditional liberties of Englishmen” were rights that were no less universal for having been preserved by centuries of common law jurisprudence and constitutional development.
It was not Washington but another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, who brought these seemingly contradictory ideas of particularity and universality together. Jefferson did so first in his A Summary View of the Rights of British America(1774) and then in the Declaration of Independence (1776). In the former, Jefferson wrote of “those rights which God and the laws have given equally and independently to all.” In the latter, he wrote of Americans’ “firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.”
Washington in some ways thought more deeply about God than Jefferson did. Washington believed in Providence not because he was as well read as Jefferson or had been to college like Jefferson but because he had seen God’s “interpositions” as general during the Revolutionary War. He also believed in Providence because of the peaceful settlement of difficulties among the United States that resulted in the U.S. Constitution.
As President Washington told several “Hebrew Congregations” in 1790:
The Power and Goodness of the Almighty were strongly Manifested in the events of our late glorious revolution; and his kind interposition in our behalf has been no less visible in the establishment of our present equal government. In war he directed the Sword; and in peace he has ruled in our Councils. My agency in both has been guided by the best intentions.
