Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable

The most powerful man in America walked away from power voluntarily, and on the way out he left a warning. Not a warning about foreign armies or about the national debt, though he gave those too. A warning about what holds a free people together when no king, no army and no church is forcing them to behave.

That warning is the middle of Washington's Farewell Address, and it is one of the most quoted and most misread passages in American political writing. Quoted, because it says in plain words that religion and morality are the supports of political prosperity. Misread, because both sides of the modern argument want it to say something it does not. The enemies of public faith say it was a throwaway. Some friends of public faith treat it as if it settled the establishment of a church. It does neither.

Let me do what I think a citizen ought to do with any founding text. Read the exact words. Put them in their setting. Test the argument, and then ask what follows.

The setting: September 1796

George Washington had served two terms. In 1796 he decided not to run for a third, and he chose to announce it not in a speech but in a letter to the people, published in a Philadelphia newspaper, Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser, on September 19, 1796. It was not delivered aloud. It was addressed "Friends and Citizens," and it was reprinted across the country within days.

The Address has a history of drafting that is worth knowing. Washington had considered retiring in 1792, at the end of his first term, and had asked James Madison to prepare a draft of a farewell message. Madison did so. Washington then set the idea aside when the quarrels between his own cabinet members persuaded him to stay. In 1796 he came back to it. In May 1796 he sent Alexander Hamilton Madison's old draft along with a section of his own, Hamilton produced a fresh draft in July, and Washington went over it and altered it before publication. The editors of the Washington Papers describe the ideas as Washington's, the structure as Hamilton's, and the language as shared. That is how a great statesman's public documents are often made, and nobody should be shocked by it. A president who delegates the polish and keeps the substance is doing his job.

The Address is long. It warns against the spirit of party, it advises neutrality and good faith toward other nations, it counsels against permanent alliances, and it urges the people to cherish the Union. In the middle of it comes the passage on religion and morality. I will give it in the form it appeared.

The passage, read closely

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.

Start with the word "indispensable." It does not say useful or helpful or pleasant. An indispensable support is one you cannot take away without the building falling. Washington is making a claim about what free government needs in order to survive. It is a claim about cause and effect, not about piety.

And note "of all the dispositions and habits." The subject is the character of a people, their habits of mind and conduct. This is the same idea that Tocqueville would work out in Democracy in America in the 1830s, that the laws of a republic depend on its mores. Washington got there first and said it in a sentence.

In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens.

This is the "tribute of patriotism" sentence, and it is a hard one. Washington is saying that a person who works to tear down religion and morality has forfeited the claim to be a patriot, because he is sawing at the foundations of the thing he says he loves. Remember the context. In the 1790s, the French Revolution was in full cry, and its most radical wing had closed churches, converted Notre-Dame into a Temple of Reason, and replaced the calendar. Americans watched that experiment with horror and with fascination. Washington's sentence is a reply to it. A republic that sets out to dissolve its people's moral and religious habits is not liberating them. It is removing the thing that keeps them from needing a master.

The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them.

Here is the sentence that deserves more attention than it gets. Washington does not say only the pious should care. He says the "mere Politician," a man who may have no religion at all and who looks only at the machinery of government, has reason to respect and cherish these supports. It is an argument addressed to the skeptic. You need not believe to see the point. You need only look at what makes a people governable by consent and not by force.

That one sentence answers a charge made against conservatives today, that to praise religion in public life is to demand that everybody believe. Washington demands no belief. He says that the politician of any persuasion benefits from a people who have it.

A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice?

This is a practical argument, a lawyer's argument. In the eighteenth century a courtroom ran on oaths. A witness swore to tell the truth, and the whole system depended on the witness fearing something worse than a fine if he lied. Washington asks what happens to justice when that fear is gone. If nobody believes in any higher accountability, then every trial is a contest of who lies best.

You do not have to accept the historical form to see the point. A free society depends on millions of daily acts of honesty that no police force could possibly check: signing a contract, telling the truth to a jury, reporting income, keeping a promise. The question is where that honesty comes from. Washington's answer is that for most people, most of the time, it comes from a sense of obligation that is rooted in religion.

And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

This is the passage that gets quoted most, and it is carefully built. Washington grants the other side's best case before he answers it. He concedes that "refined education" may sustain morality in "minds of peculiar structure," meaning a few cultivated philosophers who really can live by reason alone. Then he says that this does not scale. A nation is not a seminar. "Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." He appeals to reason, which tells him how human motive works, and to experience, which is the evidence of history.

Notice the wording again: "National morality." He is not talking about the salvation of individuals. He is talking about the moral habits of a whole people, and he is making a prediction about what happens to them when the religious source is cut off.

'Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

The conclusion follows. Virtue is a "spring," a source and a motive force, of popular government. In a monarchy, the king's power can hold the machine together even when the subjects are corrupt. In a republic, the people are the sovereign, and if the sovereign is corrupt, there is nothing left. That is what Montesquieu argued in The Spirit of the Laws, and the Founders had read him closely.

The same idea from other Founders

Washington was not alone, and it helps to see that.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed by the Confederation Congress and reenacted by the First Congress in 1789, declared in Article III that "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The same Congress that governed the new territories wrote down the same three things in the same order.

John Adams, writing to the officers of a Massachusetts militia unit in October 1798, said that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and was wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Adams was no friend of clerical power, and nobody ever accused him of being a pushover for the preachers. He said it because he had studied history.

Madison, too, who is often claimed by the strict separationists, believed that republican government rested on the virtue of the people. At the Virginia ratifying convention in June 1788 he said, in substance, that to suppose any government could secure liberty or happiness without virtue in the people was a chimerical idea.

The strongest objection

The other side's best argument runs as follows. Washington himself was cautious about his own religion. He was a vestryman and attended Anglican services but was reserved about doctrine, and some scholars regard him as more of a Providential deist than an orthodox Christian. Jefferson, who wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786 and told the Danbury Baptists in 1802 that the First Amendment built "a wall of separation between Church & State," plainly wanted public power kept out of the pulpit. Madison fought a tax for the support of Christian teachers in Virginia in 1785. The argument concludes that the Founders wanted a secular public square, and that the Farewell Address is a political flourish.

It is a serious objection, and it has three answers.

1. It confuses two different things. The question is not whether the government may establish a church. Washington, Jefferson and Madison agreed that it may not. The question is whether the government and the public may acknowledge that religion supports the moral life of a free people. Washington says yes. Jefferson, in Query XVIII of his Notes on the State of Virginia, asked whether the liberties of a nation can be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God. The man who wrote the wall-of-separation letter also wrote that.
2. The Address makes a claim about consequences, not about doctrine. Whether Washington was orthodox or a deist, the claim is the same: a people's moral habits depend on religion. That claim is open to empirical test, and the history of the French Revolution and the century after it has not refuted it.
3. The Founders acted on it. They hired chaplains, issued thanksgiving proclamations and wrote "religion, morality, and knowledge" into the Northwest Ordinance. Men who wanted a faithless public square did not behave that way.

I do not say the Founders agreed on everything. They did not. I say that on this one question, whether free government needs religion and morality in the people, the leading ones agreed far more than their modern admirers admit.

What the passage does not say

Honesty requires noting the limits. The Address does not say that the government should compel belief, fund a church or limit office to believers. It does not say that nonbelievers cannot be good citizens. The "mere Politician" sentence, and the concession about "minds of peculiar structure," keep the door open to them. It does not say that religion is useful and therefore a convenient fiction. A fiction cannot be a "pillar," and Washington was not a cynic.

It also does not tell us how much of the work religion must do. Washington leaves that to the people. The Constitution that he had helped write contains no religious test and no established church, and the Address leaves them undisturbed. It is a statement about what a free people should value and cultivate, not about what a law should force.

What it means now

Here is the claim I would press with moral urgency. Our constitutional order assumes a people who restrain themselves. The laws cannot be enforced against a population that has stopped believing in any obligation it did not choose. The more a nation relies on inspectors, regulators and police, the less it has relied on conscience, and the cost of that choice is always higher government and lower liberty.

Run the logic. If morality can be maintained without religion, then the cultural decline of religious habits ought to leave civic virtue intact. If Washington is right, it will not. A free people with a weakened inner moral life will need a larger outer authority to keep order. You can see where that road goes. The man who warned about it in 1796 wanted us to see it before we were on it.

The Address also answers the modern claim that the Founders wanted a public square stripped of faith. They wanted the government out of the business of running the church. They did not want the people out of the business of being religious in public, and they said so in the founding papers. That is the line the Court tried to hold in cases from Everson to Kennedy v. Bremerton, with uneven success.

The Address is available in full at the site's Founders page, and the Constitution it assumed is at the Constitution page. On this blog, the dispute over whether public acknowledgment of God is allowed continues in From a Civil War coin to the Pledge, how 'under God' entered public life. Washington's other statements on religious liberty are in To bigotry no sanction, Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport and Washington's 1789 and Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving proclamations side by side. For the question of whether a nonbeliever can defend this inheritance, see Can a conservative who doesn't believe still defend the faith of the West?. The case for a faith that serves the common good through private institutions is in why a church charity knows things a federal program never will, and the clause that governs it all is read in Sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment, read phrase by phrase.

The case in brief

1. Washington published his Farewell Address on September 19, 1796, in a Philadelphia newspaper, with drafting help from Madison in 1792 and Hamilton in 1796.
2. He called religion and morality "indispensable supports" of political prosperity and said no one who works to subvert them can claim "the tribute of Patriotism."
3. He argued that "National morality" cannot prevail in exclusion of religious principle, and that virtue is a necessary spring of popular government.
4. The same idea appears in the Northwest Ordinance, in Adams's 1798 letter to the militia, and in Jefferson's Notes, so the claim that the Founders wanted a faithless public square does not fit the record.
5. The passage asks for no establishment and no religious test. It is a claim about what free people need, not about what the law may compel.

What you can do: read the religion and morality paragraph of the Farewell Address aloud at your next family dinner, and ask your school board how its civics course teaches it.