FAITH OF OUR FOUNDING FATHER: The Spiritual Journey of George Washington

According to most historians, Washington's religious beliefs were private, pragmatic, and—like those of many of his compatriots—deistic. He spoke often of providence but rarely of Jesus Christ, infrequently attended religious services and did not take communion. On his deathbed, he summoned no clergy. Connell does not argue with these assessments; indeed, she seems entirely unaware of them. Her George Washington is a devout, prayerful saint of unimpeachable moral virtue, called by God to establish freedom, patriotism and private enterprise. She devotes more than 20 pages to reproducing the Rules of Civility, maxims from 16th-century French Jesuits that the 13-year-old Washington copied as a school exercise. Another 20 pages are given to "Daily Sacrifice," a collection of prayers Washington is alleged to have copied or written at age 20. (Connell does not mention that these are not included in his official papers because scholars doubt their authenticity.) With previous bestsellers such as Meetings with Mary and Angel Power, it is not surprising that Connell gives credence to a story that began circulating some 60 years after Washington's death about a Marian apparition and prophetic vision at Valley Forge, or that she tells the popular but unlikely story about a Catholic priest coming to Washington's deathbed. When she is not rehashing pious legends, the author recounts familiar stories (many of which are not faith-related); inexplicably reproduces the entire Declaration of Independence, which Washington neither wrote nor signed; and loquaciously emotes about her hero, whom she calls "America's mystical icon of heroic grace." (Nov.)