It might strike many college professors—immersed in a campus atmosphere that writes off the American Founders for complicity in slavery—as odd that I still get, at my little Catholic liberal arts college, questions every year from students about George Washington being a Freemason. In the midst of the preparations for the 250th anniversary of the American Founding celebration (1776-2026), the younger generation of conservatives seem to have bifurcated into enthusiasm for “Christian nationalism” and claims that America had a “Christian founding” or “post-liberal” hostility to America as the embodiment of the modern, secular Baconian and Lockean experiment. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to address this old Catholic accusation against the American Founders that seems to be having a bit of a resurgence.

George Washington (like Columbus) is a figure on whom many generations of Americans and waves of immigrants have projected their vision of what America was, is, and ought to be. On the one hand, he has certainly been claimed by early-20th-century biographers as a Freemason, a Deist, a modern secular rationalist. On the other hand, Irish-American immigrants in the late 19th century circulated stories that Washington had had a final, deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism by a Jesuit priest, or even that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to him as he prayed in the dark days of the winter at Valley Forge. 

The fact that stories of a deathbed conversion or Marian apparition remain popular among Catholics even today is at least a sign that they admire Washington enough to want to claim him as one of their own; this is a countercultural patriotic attitude in the face of the widespread anti-Americanism of our elite institutions. And of course, most famously, his earliest biographer, Parson Weems, claimed that he was a devout evangelical Christian.

The Usual Portrait: Lukewarm Christian and a Freemason

Paul Johnson, in his excellent brief biography of George Washington (2005), summed up the received wisdom of the 21st century on Washington’s attitude toward religion in a single paragraph. Johnson writes of Washington’s Christian character dismissively: 

As an adult he became a vestryman as befitted his landed status, but for social reasons. His record of church attendance, about 50 percent or less, suggests decorum rather than enthusiasm…he was impatient with long sermons and never read religious works. In his twenty volumes of correspondence, there is not a single mention of Christ. In no surviving letter of his youth does the name Jesus appear, and only twice thereafter. “Providence” occurs more frequently than God.

Paul Johnson misreads his evidence here, as we shall discuss further below.

Instead of portraying Washington as a Christian, Johnson says that Washington preferred 

that substitute for formal dogma, freemasonry, whose spread among males of the Anglo-Saxon world was such a feature of the eighteenth century…and in 1752, when he reached the age of twenty, he was inducted as an Entered Apprentice Mason in the Fredericksburg Lodge. Thereafter, Masonry plays an important, if discreet, part in his life, as it did among many of the Founding Fathers…Washington swore the oath of office as president on the Masonic Bible and when he laid the cornerstone of the capitol in 1793 he invoked the lodges of Maryland and Virginia. Indeed at his funeral all six pallbearers were Masons and the service followed the Masonic rite. 

Thus, in a brief one-two punch, Paul Johnson casts doubt on the sincerity of Washington’s Christian belief and foregrounded his adherence to Freemasonry.

There is a lot to unpack here but first a few preliminaries. 

First of all, conspiracy theory is the pathology to which historians are most liable because, it turns out, everything in history is related ultimately to everything else (and, there being only 365 days in a year, almost everything that has ever happened occurs, generally coincidentally, on the anniversary of something else). The internet has made conspiracy theories all the more alluring to the young; so teaching them balanced judgment should be at the forefront of education.

Second, while God is one, evil is not one but legion. As C.S. Lewis nicely reminds us in his introduction to The Screwtape Letters, even Satan is not the opposite of God; the opposite of God is nihil, and the devils are merely fallen angels who retain some good part in the divine providential plan. So, to reduce all evil to the Freemasons or the Jews is not just a pathology of the historical imagination but fundamentally an un-Christian view of history, which must acknowledge that the fomes peccati, the seeds of sin, are within everyman. 

And finally, while there was definitely anti-Catholicism in colonial America, it is important to keep in mind that Freemasonry in the English-speaking, Protestant world did not have quite the same anti-clerical, virulent anti-Catholic tone as Freemasonry in Latin countries like France, Italy, and Spain. There being no established Roman Catholic Church, Freemasonry had a slightly different tone in the British colonies. You could not profess the doctrine of Transubstantiation in colonial Virginia and sit on a jury or attend the College of William and Mary; Virginians were vehemently opposed to the initial Catholic regime in Maryland; and the terror that the New Englanders expressed after the French and Indian War brought Catholic Quebec within the British North American empire show that the makings of hysteria were at hand. 

But this was the common coin of the Protestant ethos and not all traceable to Freemasonry. Nor should these evidences be assimilated to the later anti-immigration Know-Nothing hysteria of the 1840s. The historical imagination requires recognizing differences between the characters of different centuries. The historical imagination requires recognizing differences between the characters of different centuries.Tweet This

18th-Century Christianity

Paul Johnson’s description of Washington as “The Eighteenth-Century Man writ large” is very helpful in diagnosing three errors in his treatment of Washington’s religious character.

Paul Johnson says that Washington’s religious practice “suggests decorum rather than enthusiasm.” This phrase sounds very different to the 21st-century ear than it would to the 18th-century hearer. Eighteenth-century “decorum” in fact implied a more reverent and dignified form of worship, slightly more “high church,” formal, and liturgical than the “enthusiasm” of the backwoods Methodist and Baptist preachers, or the very “enthusiastic” congregation-led preaching of the Quakers. 

Ronald Knox has an excellent book on Enthusiasm, which explains that the emotive and experiential style of religiosity of the 17th and 18th centuries was far afield from the idea of religion as rooted in reasonin a rational insight into the human creaturely condition (Thomas Aquinas himself discusses “religion” under the heading of the human, cardinal virtue of Justice, rather than under the theological virtue of Faith). Enthusiasm was an extreme version of Martin Luther’s sola fides or fiduciary faith, which not even all in the Reformed tradition espoused.

Paul Johnson also reads too much into the fact that Washington did not use the name of Christ or Jesus in his public speeches and letters. His personal correspondence with his wife, Martha Custis Washington, is lost to us because she burned all of their letters—a sign of the “decorum” and discretion about personal matters so characteristic of the 18th century as opposed to the romanticism of the 19th century (and today!). And precisely that sense of decorum in religion prevented even the most devout Puritans in the 18thcentury from frequently using the name of Christ or Jesus out of extreme reverence for the divine name. 

While evangelicals of the First Great Awakening might evoke Jesus in prayer, the older generation still habitually used reverent circumlocutions. They referred to Jesus as “he who did not disdain to weep for a friend” or “the greatest Consolator” (capital “C”), or “the Divine Author of our Religion” (as Washington put it). As Jeffry Morrison has explained in his study of the references to God in the Declaration of Independence, and in his section on “Providence” in The Political Philosophy of George Washington, the term “Providence” was typically Presbyterian, not Deist. Providence implied divine intervention in the working of personal and national history, not a Watchmaker God who set the laws of Nature in motion and then left the universe to run on its own. It is impossible to read George Washington’s papers and letters without finding that he expressed great outrage at anyone who denied or was so blind as not to recognize the miraculous, divine intervention of Providence on behalf of the Americans in the Revolutionary War.

Finally, it is simply not true to say that George Washington “never read religious works.” In his library at Mount Vernon, he had sermons on original sin and on the evils of slavery. In his speeches, he made references that were drawn from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, both of which were in his library. He read Cicero’s On Duties, which, although a pre-Christian work, places the obligation to worship the divine as the highest of all moral duties—beyond the duty to parents or to country. 

It is important to realize that the idea that the existence of a Creator God is rationally knowable and that the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” are discernible to rational human beings is itself a part of the Christian tradition which sees God as Logos. Afterall, the extreme confidence in Reason characteristic of Deism and rationalism are heresies—partial truths isolated and taken to an extreme—that could only have arisen within the Christian world. They are certainly not the product of the Islamic world.

Was George Washington anti-Catholic?

Freemasonry is virulently anti-Catholic, and Catholics are not allowed to belong to this secret society.

But both Michael Novak’s 2006 book Washington’s God and the even more thorough 2006 study George Washington’s Sacred Fireby Peter Lillback conclude that it is not possible to deduce from Washington’s membership in a Masonic lodge that he was not a Christian believer or that he was anti-Catholic.

Paul Johnson says that George Washington’s record of church attendance was 50 percent or less, but he fails to acknowledge that when Washington did go to church it was a three-hour ride, that there was a shortage of Anglican ministers in the colony such that there was often only a monthly service held, and that his attendance at the Masonic lodge was also, as he himself notes in a letter, “rare.” 

There is no evidence from Washington’s life that he shared the virulent anti-Catholic tendencies of Freemasonry. A number of non-legendary, historical things in George Washington’s life stand out. First, he put an end to the anti-Catholic Guy Fawkes festivals in the Continental Army while in Massachusetts, and this festival has not persisted in America. Secondly, he had two religious images on either side of the mantlepiece in the formal dining room at Mount Vernon, images of the Madonna and of St. John, at a time when Marian images were rare in the colonies (the paintings remain in Mount Vernon’s dining room to this day). And finally, at a time when anti-clerical, revolutionary France was confiscating all the endowments of Catholic colleges and exiling the priests and religious who taught in them, Washington’s presidency saw the founding of the first Roman Catholic university in America, Georgetown, which he visited when one of his great-nephews attended the highly regarded Jesuit institution.

Washington, religion, and slavery

But the key sign of the quality of Washington’s moral character was his personal approach to slavery. George Washington was determined to get himself out of debt so that he would be in a position by his death to free his slaves. And George Washington not only freed his slaves; he gave each an education in some trade and an annuity so that they would not be, in the language of the 18thcentury, “cast on the public purse.” 

This was no small achievement in colonial Virginia. The fact that Washington stands alone among the American Founders who owned slaves who accomplished it should help us to realize how difficult and how signal the achievement was. Like most Virginia planters, Washington inherited the slavery issue. At age 10 he inherited land, slaves, and debt. He also inherited the cultural mixture of attitudes toward slavery. Volumes have been written about the cycle of debt that Virginia tobacco planters found themselves in. 

Volumes also have been written to show that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and others of the founding generation, fully recognized the moral, political, social, and economic injustice of slavery. But Jefferson died in his debt and his creditors swooped down like vultures to carry off his slaves from Monticello; and James Madison’s stepson’s gambling debts likewise made it impossible for him to extricate himself from debt and slavery.

But Washington achieved the freedom of his slaves with his perfectly-kept financial accounts, his persistence in trying new methods of cultivation, and his efforts to diversify his crops. He also strove to “keep alive the celestial fire called conscience,” a phrase he had copied out in his youth from a little book of manners and morals compiled by the Jesuits and translated into English. After many years of reading and wrestling with the issue morally, politically, and economically, he arrived at a moment in his life when he vowed not to purchase another slave, not to sell another slave, and to free his slaves in his Last Will and Testament in a manner that would not separate slave families. With determined effort over the course of his retirement from the army and the presidency, he kept that vow. He stipulated that his final wishes in his Will with regard to the freeing of his slaves be “religiously fulfilled…without evasion, neglect, or delay.”

Conclusion

The fact that Washington took seriously his duty to freely do what a free man should by freeing his slaves (and bequeathing them a start in life from the plantation they had worked for generations), speaks more to the character of our Pater Patriae than whether he was a Freemason or saw a Marian apparition. It is better for the next generation to learn the moral complexity of the political, social, and moral situation that he faced—and faced with integrity—than to be taught simplistic characterizations aimed at claiming him for one group of Americans or another.