ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 10 · Matthew 6:1-6
A man who prayed where nobody was recording it, and what we can and cannot claim about the interior life of someone two centuries dead.
Last week settled that the founding does not depend on any founder's private faith. God used Cyrus, and God used the man who wrote Common Sense and then The Age of Reason.1
So this week is not an attempt to recruit Washington. It is a lesson in what we are able to know about anybody's interior life, using the most examined and most mythologized man in American history as the case, and then turning that back on the people at your own table.
Start with what is documented, in both directions, because both directions are real.
He was an Anglican his whole life and took the office seriously enough to serve as a vestryman at Truro Parish, which was a working administrative post rather than an honor.2 He attended services, though not every week, and his diaries record it plainly.
He also generally did not take communion. He would leave before the sacrament (a sacred rite of the church, such as baptism or communion). James Abercrombie, his rector at Christ Church in Philadelphia, preached about people in high station setting that example, and Washington's response was to stop attending on communion Sundays altogether rather than to change the practice.3 For a man of his period and church, that is a loud silence.
And in an enormous body of writing, he almost never used the name of Jesus Christ. He wrote constantly about Providence, the Deity, the Great Author, the Almighty Being. The nearest he comes is the Circular Letter to the States in 1783, which closes by asking God to dispose everyone to charity, humility and a pacific temper of mind, "which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion."4 In the collected papers of a man who wrote for forty years, that is about as close as he comes to a Christological sentence.
His deathbed matches. No clergyman was sent for. There is no recorded profession of faith, and the last words his secretary wrote down were "'Tis well."5
Now the other direction, because it is equally documented. The Farewell Address argues that religion and morality are indispensable supports of political prosperity, and that reason and experience both forbid us to expect national morality to prevail without religious principle.6 He believed that publicly and said it in the most carefully written document of his life.
But notice what kind of claim that is. It is an argument about what a republic requires. It is not a confession, and treating the two as the same thing is the error this week exists to name.
Then there are the stories, and a course that cut a Bonhoeffer quotation it liked in week eight has to cut these too.
Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge, seen praying by a Quaker named Isaac Potts, is not attested by anyone at the time. It comes from Mason Locke Weems, and it appears in the same book by the same author who invented the cherry tree.7 Historians treat both as devotional fiction.
Weems was not a cynic. He was a parson who wanted his countrymen to have a pious founder and supplied one. That is exactly how the Bonhoeffer sentence got into circulation, and it is why both have to go. A movement that manufactures the evidence it needs has told you something about the strength of its actual case.
Here is the part that should complicate anybody's confidence in either direction.
Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them. When you give, do not sound a trumpet. When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret (Matthew 6:1-6).8
Read that against a documentary record.
Christ commands that the genuine article be done where nobody is recording it. Which means the evidence a historian would most want about a man's faith is precisely the evidence obedience to this passage would have destroyed. And the evidence that does survive, the public gesture and the quotable line, is the category Jesus specifically warns us not to weigh.
That does not prove Washington was praying behind the door. It does mean the argument from silence runs both ways, and that people confident in either verdict are more confident than the passage allows.
Paul says it directly, to a church that had gotten into the habit of ranking its teachers. Do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart (1 Corinthians 4:5).9
The purposes of the heart are disclosed at the end, by him, and not before, by us.
It is worth asking why Paul had to command that at all. The Corinthians were ranking their teachers, and ranking is a pleasure. There is something in a fallen heart that wants the file closed on other people, either to admire them safely or to dismiss them safely, and the same appetite is what put a praying Washington in the snow. Weems did not invent that scene because he was wicked. He invented it because we wanted it, and he was obliging.
Samuel got the same correction while looking at Jesse's sons. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7).10 And Paul again, to Timothy: the Lord knows those who are his (2 Timothy 2:19).10
He knows. That sentence is only a comfort if it also means we do not, and the honest position on Washington is that we do not know, and that the not knowing is a category the Bible expects rather than a gap in the archive.
Jesus told Nicodemus that the new birth is like wind. The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (John 3:8).11
That verse is why this whole week is possible. The new birth is real, it is God's work, and it is not something you can audit from the outside. You can hear the sound of it. You cannot produce the paperwork.
Christ lived the perfect life we could not live, went to the cross, and came out of the tomb, and the debt was paid in full with nothing left for us to add. Nobody in that transaction needed a witness statement from a secretary. God chooses, and the Father draws, and salvation is his work from start to finish. We receive it; we don't author it, and we do not certify it for anybody else either.
Which is where this stops being about a portrait on a wall.
There are people in this room who cannot tell you whether a father or a husband or a child died believing. The record is thin, the last conversation was about something else, and no clergyman was sent for. Matthew 6 and 1 Corinthians 4:5 are addressed to you before they are addressed to a historian. The evidence you want was never yours to hold, the verdict was never yours to render, and the Lord knows those who are his.
Scripture stays the final authority here too, and here it mostly tells us to stop. That is a strange thing for a course to teach in a week about a president, and it is the most useful thing this week has.
coming.
ways of assessing whether somebody is a Christian?
we tempted to supply evidence we wish existed?
does 1 Corinthians 4:5 do to it?
Next class: the Constitution, where individual worth comes from, and why a document that names God nowhere still assumes him.