Washington's God by Michael Novak

Author:Michael Novak
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-04-06T20:00:00+00:00

THE PROVIDENTIAL NATION

Finally, a word must be said about the tradition of seeing Providence in the affairs of the American colonies. This tradition was as old, of course, as the Puritan colonies of New England. But it really began to go nationwide, scholars say, during the thirty years just after Washington’s birth in 1732. Indeed, young Washington’s own exploits along the Monongahela had something to do with this gathering sense of a providential destiny for a whole people. In the 1750s, the threat of French supremacy bearing down on the East Coast colonies from the westward forests, along with the war parties of Indians mobilized by the French against the British settlers on the frontier, alarmed Americans. Since the danger of attacks from the French and Indians affected all the frontier states, not just one, individual colonies began to sense a common need. This alarm fed the first blooming of a sense of national unity. A new sort of meta-story began taking shape to explain what the colonists were experiencing, a new sense of all being in this together—not just building little communities as enclaves for their own protection, but as in need of a common defense and, ultimately, as a new national experiment for all humankind.

George Washington entered upon the public stage just as the colonies were falling under the sway, in terms spread by the evangelists of the Great Awakening (1740-1763), of a new collective story, a story of freedom, a story of suffering and judgment to come, and a story of God’s blessing on a particular people. Not yet a nation, still, many Americans were beginning to sense a national call to make real in history the intention God had hidden since before the beginning of the world: the story of universal human liberty. And so Washington pointed out in his “Circular to the States” at the end of the war:

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