Praying to a Man Who Prayed to No One

eorge Washington never knelt in the snow at Valley Forge with his cocked hat resting beside him and a shaft of light breaking through the trees. Historians who have spent careers on the man say so plainly. Thomas Tweed, professor emeritus at Notre Dame, has traced the image to a story invented by Mason Locke Weems, the same early biographer who gave America the cherry tree. Weems never witnessed anything himself. He wrote up an account from a secondhand source, a Quaker named Isaac Potts, who by some tellings was not even at Valley Forge that winter. The Museum of the American Revolution confirms that Potts spent the winter in Pottstown, twenty miles from Valley Forge.

The image kept circulating regardless, turning up on a two-cent stamp in 1928, a thirteen-cent Christmas stamp in 1977, and the stained glass of the Congressional Prayer Room the Capitol built in the 1950s. Arnold Friberg painted his version in 1975 for the following year's Bicentennial, and that canvas now hangs at the Museum of the Bible on loan from First Freedom Art Company, an entity backed by the Houston investment firm CAZ Investments, which holds more than two hundred Friberg paintings in its collection. Someone owns this myth. That fact rarely makes it into the caption.

The painting keeps drawing institutional attention, since NPR found this spring that copies now ride across the nation aboard government-funded "Freedom Trucks" tied to the 250th anniversary while the image also sits on a White House page inviting visitors to pray. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invoked it directly for a room full of soldiers, telling them Washington "took a bended knee" before attacking on Christmas Eve, and that the Pentagon wants "that kind of mentality" today. A defense secretary is not describing history there. He is recruiting a fabricated scene to shape the posture of an active military.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints went further than any painting, with church president Wilford Woodruff logging in August 1877 that the Founding Fathers had visited him across two nights inside the freshly dedicated St. George Temple, seeking answers on why nobody had yet completed their temple ordinances. Woodruff had Washington baptized by proxy and ordained a high priest, alongside Benjamin Franklin, John Wesley, and Christopher Columbus. The church later softened the practice, directing members toward their own ancestors instead of famous strangers, but the original ordinance still stands in the temple record. Woodruff described the founders as spirits handpicked by God to lay the nation's foundation. That is not metaphor inside the tradition. It is doctrine, logged the way a baptism or a marriage is logged.

The historical Washington resists both versions. He attended church but stood, by his own habit, rather than kneel during the parts of the service that called for it. He spoke often of Providence but avoided naming Jesus Christ in his own writing, an omission religion scholars have puzzled over for two centuries. He was not, as Tweed put it, a "church-hating atheist," but he was not the kneeling supplicant of the paintings either. His devotional life was private enough that people have argued about its contents since the week he died in 1799.

What is documented, and rarely put on a stamp, is what he refused. In May 1782, Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote to Washington proposing he take the title of king, or something close to it, once the war ended. Washington's reply called the idea a source of more painful sensations than anything else the war had produced. A year later, at Newburgh, he talked a roomful of unpaid, furious officers out of turning the army against Congress itself, then walked away from command entirely. He had no biological children of his own. He built a life designed to end at Mount Vernon, tending his own fields, and largely got what he wanted.

He also owned people, for fifty-six years, and did not free them while he could still feel the cost of it. His will, written five months before his death, freed the 123 people he held outright, but only after Martha's death, and it could not touch the roughly 153 people bound to the Custis estate, who went on being enslaved and were eventually parceled out among her grandchildren. Martha freed his share early, in 1801, reportedly after deciding she was no longer safe living surrounded by people whose freedom depended on her dying. Washington was the only southern founder to arrange a large-scale emancipation at all, at a moment when most of his peers were doing the opposite. He was also a man who spent decades weighing his own solvency against other people's freedom and chose solvency, right up until the arrangement cost him nothing.

Washington is not alone in this treatment. Thomas Jefferson gets the marble version too, the Sage of Monticello, author of the words about liberty, with Sally Hemings and the children he fathered with her edited out of the postcard entirely. The country has a method. Take the parts of a man that flatter the present moment, discard the parts that complicate it, and call what remains history.

A country that can't tell the difference between its history and its propaganda is a country that can be told anything, by anyone holding the right stamp or the right stained glass.

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