George Washington’s Birthday is celebrated today. As an Anglican deeply rooted in the land, one important way to understand him is through what Church of England Bishop John Inge called a “theology of place” in his 2003 book by the same name. Inge and authors of similar works explain the providential and sacred in particular geographic regions that shape and potentially redeem their residents.
In the biblical stories, all the major figures are divinely molded through their interaction with places. Abraham left Ur in search of a Promised Land. Moses, whose people were in Egypt thanks to the servitude and ascendancy of Joseph, leads the Hebrews to the place Abraham sought. The kings and prophets contended for that place. And the Savior Jesus arose from that place, proclaiming a universal message intrinsically connected to that place, from which His apostles would journey to distant lands with a Gospel that forever glorified that place.
Washington of course is not a salvifuc figure on a biblical scale but he is a providential, globally decisive figure whose character and destiny are inseparable from his place. He belonged to Tidewater Virginia, born on the banks of the Potomac, and after a boyhood on the Rapahannock, returns to the Potomac where he creates his beloved Mount Vernon. As a young man he was attuned to the ceaseless daily tides that reached from the Chesapeake, and he prowled the forests and flat fields of Virginia’s lowlands. As a teenager he surveyed the Piedmont and mountains of the Virginia frontier. His lifelong dream was to open the Potomac to navigation for access to the remote backcountry he knew from his youth. As a young man he gained his international fame as a soldier in that backcountry. But he returned, as he always would, to Mount Vernon, where as a gentleman farmer he daily inspected his fields, harvested fish from the river, and fox hunted through the woods for often many hours at a time, becoming reputedly the best horseman of his age.
As a vestryman Washington was intimately tied to his parish of the Church of England in Virginia, which combined responsibility for regional spirituality, charity and governance. He intimately knew his neighbors as well as the local geography. The rhythm familiar to him echoed what an English squire would recognize in his local shire. But Washington was ever conscious that the local and familiar were bordered by a vast continental wilderness whose development became his obsession.
Although Washington fought nearly all the Revolution in unfamiliar northern lands, from Boston to Philadelphia, his final victory appropriately was won back in the Virginia Tidewater at Yorktown. The nation and its new Constitution emerged from a meeting at Mount Vernon intended to settle a Virginia boundary disputes with Maryland across the Potomac, which Washington viewed from his portico. Every Summer of his subsequent presidency he returned from New York or Philadelphia back to Mount Vernon, where he retired, and where he died, after inspecting his fields and marking trees in a cold, wet snow.
In the course of his career, Washington never emotively separated from his native Virginia and yet politically he did separate from many of his lifelong neighbors and Virginia allies. They focused on protecting Virginia against a federal state, while Washington envisioned a rising new continental nation needing great institutions of governance and finance. They remained enmeshed in agriculture and slavery. Washington foresaw industrialization and free labor. Slavery was embedded in his Tidewater culture and economy, but Washington freed his slaves.
Here Washington illustrates the captivity of and liberation from place. He was nurtured and loved the place of his origin and cherished memories. But he was not inflexibly bound to it. Like the biblical heroes, he appreciated a transcendence that sacralized space and yet saw beyond into a new and greater world for which the old and familiar were only foot stools.
The great republic and global democratic order that eventually emerged from Washington’s labors originated in the neat Boxwood gardens, brick Anglican sanctuaries, tidy court houses, rich tidal fisheries, and black earthen fields rustically fenced against endless woods of the rural Virginia Tidewater.
But thanks to Washington’s gift for benefitting from place while also looking beyond it, he could see a far country of surging cities, global commerce, and many tens if not hundreds of millions creating their own sense of place in a complex and rich new civilization. He essentially hoped that every man and woman could enjoy what he and Martha had, a cherished home of their own, where they could repose in safety and liberty under their own vine and fig tree.
Washington exemplified an exemplary theology of place, which revered his own home and community, but also wished its blessings to refine, mature and accrue exponentially to benefit greater humanity, and to foreshadow an even greater place not made with human hands. Thank you, and happy birthday.
Comment by smc on February 15, 2016 at 5:05 pm
Please…enough with making America its own “religion.” As Washington’s own bishop stated when asked about the first president…”Washington was a Deist.” In other words, Washington was NOT a believer. Freemasonry was his preferred way. In all his correspondence, not once did Washington refer to Jesus Christ as the Savior of men. America is not the New Israel. And
Washington is not the fulfillment of the type seen in Abraham. The Catholic Church is the New Israel. She is the hope mankind. The Light of Christ only shines through her.
Comment by @FMShyanguya on February 17, 2016 at 1:47 am
The enigmatic President George Washington:
Slaves Held Washington Became a Catholic on His Deathbed [http://catholicism.org/washington-slaves.html]
Comment by smc on February 17, 2016 at 9:03 am
A total myth…there was no Jesuit priest, who swam across the Potomac and received the first president into the Church. And no, the Blessed Virgin Mary did not appear to George Washington either. His death bed experience was fully recorded by those that were with Washington. His last act on earth, was to check his pulse. A perfect enlightenment sort of act. He was then given full Masonic funeral rites. In short, he was never, ever a religious man. He many have had many natural virtues and he may have known the importance of having a religious people for the good of the state, but the supernatural realm was something he always ignored.
Comment by Gregory Alan of Johnson on March 6, 2016 at 2:28 pm
The Vatican has already proven itself under the authority of Satan, so your last sentence is false. There is no “Vicar of Christ” nor is there “Purgatory”.
Comment by smc on March 6, 2016 at 3:17 pm
A house divided upon itself cannot stand? Why would Satan attack Satan? The Catholic Church is constantly attacked by the Spirit of the world, whereas other religions are not bothered with. Your “dogmatic” claims and dismissals of doctrine believed in since the First Century is truly amazing. Why have Christians always prayed for the dead? Why put RIP on monuments or grave stones…which means…”may he rest in peace”? You don’t pray for those in hell nor for those in heaven. So there must be some souls that can benefit from prayers. Even the ancient Jews prayed for the dead as can be seen in 2 Maccabees. As for the the pope, the See of Rome or Church of Rome was always seen as the first and supreme of all the Churches. If you would dare, simply read the writings of ancient Christians of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries…Catholicism is fully seen. Of course, you could willfully remain in the dark and in heresy.
Comment by Kingdom Ambassador on March 5, 2016 at 10:38 am
“…We find conflicting contemporary testimony regarding Washington’s
Christianity. Some say he was a Christian, while others – including his
own pastor Dr. James Abercrombie – say he was not. One thing everyone
agrees upon is that Washington never made a public confession of Christ
as His Lord and Savior:
‘Whosever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.’ (Matthew 10:32-33)
“Washington was indisputably a Freemason:
‘Washington had served as Grand Master [actually Worshipful Master7]
of the Alexandria [Virginia] lodge in 1788 and 1789. When he was
inaugurated President of the U.S., he was therefore a Grand [Worshipful]
Master, the only Mason to be inaugurated President while serving as a
Grand [Worshipful] Master….
‘As President, he … never wavered in his attachment to Masonry. …Washington wrote: “Being persuaded that a just application of the principles, on which the Masonic Fraternity is founded, must be promotive of private virtue and public prosperity, I shall always be happy to advance the interests of the Society, and to be considered by them as a deserving brother.”….
‘John Eidsmoe, in his book-length attempt to defend the Constitution as a Christian document, takes seriously Washington’s outright lie – it can be nothing else – in a letter to G.W. Snyder in 1798, that he had not been in a Masonic lodge “more than once or twice in the last thirty years.” One does not become the Grand [Worshipful] Master of a lodge by attending services once or twice over thirty years, but one can certainly fool two centuries of Christian critics by lying through one’s wooden teeth about it.’8
“Washington, although hardly a Christian, was a Freemason of the rankest sort. “Testimony given by Timothy Bigelow in a eulogy before the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts two months after Washington’s death indicates that Washington’s Masonic experience was more than perfunctory.”9:
‘The information received from our Brethren who had the happiness to be members of the Lodge over which he presided for many years, and of which he died the Master, furnishes abundant proof of his persevering zeal for the prosperity of the Institution. Constant and punctual in his attendance, scrupulous in his observance of the regulations of the Lodge, and solicitous, at all times, to communicate light and instruction, he discharged the duties of the chair with uncommon dignity and intelligence in all the mysteries of our art.’10….”
For more, see http://www.bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt5.html.
Comment by Paladin on March 5, 2016 at 7:53 pm
There has been NO GREAT Republic if you used a BIBLICAL SCALE to measure & he certainly was not of Christian mindset but an anti-Christ one. Good try, puffing up the chests of AmeriKans and their idols – Bravo – No Encore PLEASE !
Comment by Gregory Alan of Johnson on March 6, 2016 at 2:30 pm
Mr. Tooley: Are you really that brainwashed from the true American History the public system has purged from itself?