On this date in 1732, George Washington was born. Washington was elected to the House of Burgesses in Virginia in 1758. He was a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress of 1774, and became commander of the Continental army in 1775. He presided over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, which adopted a godless constitution, and was elected the first president of the United States in 1789. He was re-elected in 1793 and retired to Mount Vernon at the end of his second term.
Thomas Jefferson recorded that Washington was not a Christian (Memoir, Vol. IV, p. 512). As the largest property holder in the parish, Washington was for a time a vestryman, a political office in Virginia. He occasionally attended the Protestant Episcopal church with his wife Martha, but did not take part in communion. The foremost mythmaker about Washington was Parson Mason L. Weems, whose Life of Washington (1800) promoted the cherry tree story and other disinformation, such as the claim that Washington prayed in the woods at Valley Forge in the hard Revolutionary War winter of 1777-78. (The make-believe scene has been painted, and even appeared on stamps.) Christian propagandists allege Washington wrote a Christian prayer, which is engraved on a bronze tablet at St. Paul's Chapel, New York City. The source is not a prayer, but a business letter to governors, which makes two orthodox, Deistic references (Ford's Writings of Washington, Vol. X, p. 265). Washington's diaries reveal that he seldom attended church, and often traveled on the sabbath. Washington has been claimed by many religions, but kept his private beliefs to himself. D. 1799.
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