Portrait by Mather Brown
QUICK FACTS
BORN:
c. 1731 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
DIED:
17 November 1813 in London, England
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Portrait by Mather Brown
For all their talk of reason and enlightenment, Washington and the other leading Founders were more religious than they sometimes seem. Most of them had no quarrel with religion as long as it was reasonable and orderly. Washington was a member of his Anglican, later Episcopal, church vestry, and he remained a frequent churchgoer — though unlike his wife, Martha, he never became a member of his church, meaning that he did not partake of the Eucharist on communion Sundays. Washington, the perfect Freemason, considered himself enlightened in religious matters (being no bigot myself to any mode of worship
), and he almost never knelt in prayer and seems never to have purchased a bible.