How about this for a beach read? Somehow it caught my attention at B & N and I’ve had it on a shelf for a few months. Yeah, I’ve read a David Baldacci and a CJ Box this week but this one is worth sharing.
Peter A. Lillback’s book, George Washington’s Sacred Fire is an apology in defense of the founding father’s evangelical christianity. Recent historians in service of their biases have revised the founding father’s faith and painted him as a Deist. A Deist would believer that God created the world like making a clock. He just wound it up and sits back and lets it tick. Lillback presents a thorough study through multiple sources that all describe Washington as a pious christian in the Anglican church.
Why is this important? Because as life seem to have first germinated in the brine of saltwater, the spirit of liberty found in the american democratic dream was born in the hearts of christians living out their own sense of religious liberty and freedom. Evidence of this is found in the first act of the first Continental Congress. They decided they would open in prayer. Future president, John Adams tells of this in a letter to his wife “..When the congress first met, Mr Cushing made a motion that it should be opened with prayer. It was opposed by Mr. Jay, of New York, and Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, because we were so divided in religious sentiments, some Episcopalians, some Quakers, some Anabaptist, some Presbyterians, and some Congregationalists, that we could not join in the same act of worship. Mr Samuel Adams arose and said he was no bigot, and could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue, who was at the same time a friend to his country.” p. 378
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