Dispatches from the Culture Wars

This is a lie. The journal was not found "among Washington's personal writings" after his death. It was found in a trunk of material owned by Lawrence Washington, one of George's descendants, around 1890 and was only presented as belonging to the Washington family, not to George Washington himself. In fact, Lawrence had taken it to the Smithsonian and they had concluded that it could not have belonged to George himself but to a later descendant. It was an auctioneer, Stan Henkel, who ignored both Lawrence Washington and the Smithsonian and had the journal published as belonging to George Washington. Hey, anything for a buck.

But other Christian Nation apologists go even further, claiming that the prayer journal was in George Washington's handwriting. Here's what Tim LaHaye said about it:

That President George Washington was a devout believer in Jesus Christ and had accepted Him as His Lord and Savior is easily demonstrated by a reading of his personal prayer book (written in his own handwriting), which was discovered in 1891 among a collection of his papers. To date no historian has questioned its authenticity. It consists of twenty-four pages of his morning and evening prayers, revealing many of his theological beliefs about God, Jesus Christ, sin, salvation, eternal life, and himself as a humble servant of Christ.

And William Federer:

In 1752, George Washington created a personal prayer book, consisting of 24 pages in his field notebook, in his own handwriting...

But as Rodda points out, the only one who ever claimed it was in George Washington's handwriting was Stan Henkel, who was - to be blunt - lying. Historians immediately debunked that claim when it was published and showed that it did not match George's handwriting at all:

Among the historians to question the prayer book's authenticity was Rupert Hughes. In his 1926 book George Washington: The Human Being and the Hero, the first volume of his three volume biography of Washington, Hughes presented side by side images of the handwriting from the prayer book and examples from authentic Washington documents from the period in which the prayer book was allegedly written. It doesn't take a handwriting expert to see that they weren't written by the same person. But, the handwriting samples used by Rupert Hughes for his comparison were from 1748 (age sixteen) and 1757 (age twenty-five), allowing his critics to assert that there was a possibility that Washington's handwriting at age twenty differed from these samples, and might still match the prayer book. A number of other historians, however, including Worthington C. Ford, the editor of the second major collection of Washington's writings, also determined that the book was not in Washington's handwriting. A more recent handwriting comparison can be found in the 2005 book The Ways of Providence: Religion & George Washington, by Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. of the University of Virginia. Grizzard uses a sample of Washington's handwriting at exactly age twenty, which, of course, is no closer to that in the prayer book than the slightly earlier and later samples used by Hughes.

Frank Grizzard is a senior editor of the George Washington Papers collection at the University of Virginia. I contacted him for my post in December 2004 about this document and he said in no uncertain terms that this document was neither written by nor associated with George Washington. But you will not find any of that information admitted by any Christian Nation apologist. As with so many other things, when lies are told for Jesus they aren't really lies at all.