Ethics

Should Washington Be Taken As Seriously as Jefferson?

By Ed Brayton

Here's an interesting article in the Texas Journal of Law and Politics by Nathan Forrester that makes the argument that George Washington's views on church and state have been unfairly ignored and should be given as much weight as those of Thomas Jefferson. The article is actually a book review of Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State, by Tara Ross and Joseph Smith. And there's much in the article that is hard to argue with.

I've pointed out many times the basic split among the first four presidents on such matters. Washington and Adams were what might be called non-coercive accommodationists, while Jefferson and Madison were strict separationists. Washington and Adams believed that the government should provide a general and rhetorical support to religion through proclamations of days of thanksgiving and prayer, but only if those proclamations were kept non-coercive (that is, no one was required to follow them) and they were worded very broadly so as to encompass almost any religious belief, not merely Christianity.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).