While visiting George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon, I was very interested in why it is OK for us to say that America is the best country on earth and that we should preserve it very boisterously. And why George Washington? Well, we named our capital city after him and think of him as the ultimate Founding Father, the pacesetter who started something new in the world, and we have measured everything thereafter with him in mind. So, what made George Washington so great? And why do Americans feel like they must always tell the world that they are the best and greatest? Our form of government is by far the best, and it’s an unquestioned reality. But if you’ve ever traveled the world and dined with acquaintances from other countries, and you’re watching a news report in which someone from America comes on and says that America is the best country on earth, it can get a little weird. In that case, it can be a little uncomfortable because the people you eat at the table think the same about their country. What makes it more accurate for us in the United States than for them, whoever they are? That’s happened to me a lot of times. Yet, I think Americans should say such a thing because I believe our form of government is superior to that of anywhere in the world and that we should be proud of it. We should even brag about it like we do. But why? You can understand something instinctively, but to actually “know” it requires much more understanding and perspective, which is undoubtedly the case with this topic. And now that I’ve visited Mt. Vernon with my wife, George Washington’s home, I think I understand it much better.
I think the key to understanding why America is the best country in the world is literally a “key.” The key that George Washinton used to hang in the entry to his house that his friend and long lost adopted son Marquis de Lafayette gave to him that used to be the key to the Bastille’s main gate, once the French stormed it and destroyed it as a symbol of tyranny during the French Revolution. George Washington kept it to show how a country can overthrow tyranny, and even though the French Revolution got well out of hand while the American Revolution slightly before it was much more civil and orderly, the reminder that the people ultimately have the power to rule over themselves was represented in the key, which Washington understood as literally the key to setting up a proper government for the people and by the people. George Washington liked his house so much that he didn’t want to be away from it with commitments to power and was always reluctant to achieve any high office. But as to that as well, why? Then, of course, you would have to understand the Bible, the primary literary entertainment at the time of these revolutions, and the forming of our country. They didn’t have television shows or music to entertain themselves with thought, but they did have the Bible. And George Washington would have shared the Bible with just about everyone pursuing a life of thoughtful understanding. One thing that I have always thought about Biblical studies is that they are narratively, really insightful, psychologically. I’ve read most of the foundation religious texts of the world, and I can say that the Bible is a brilliant enterprise that served as a good guide through the foundation of a new country. It was the first to figure itself out, as the Bible had spent the previous 1500 years being fleshed out as an idea. And the ideas formulated in the Bible essentially laid the groundwork for the creation of America. So George Washington, by way of dinner conversation, would have spent a lot of time reading and talking about the Bible with his dinner guests at Mt. Vernon, which would have happened all the time.
I spent most of the previous year leading up to Trump’s election reading various books about George Washington because I felt that the world would need to understand what was about to happen, and to understand America, you have to understand George Washington. And to understand that, you must understand George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon. So that’s what my wife and I did to celebrate Trump being back in the White House; we visited Mt. Vernon to unpack why putting Trump back in as President was necessary and why he should be so boisterous about why America was the best country. It ultimately comes down to how George Washington thought and how much the Bible influenced him, especially the Book of Judges and the character within that book of Gideon, the military hero who saved Israel with only 300 men but was the reluctant hero always trying to downplay his efforts. I often see our form of government as a republic as a deliberate attempt to fix the problems in the Book of Judges, where God wanted people to rule themselves. Still, the failure of the regional judges drove the Hebrew people to demand a king to rule over them. The wheels fell off the apple cart, leaving the kingdom to become divided by God’s anger after the death of King Solomon.
I think Washington modeled himself after Biblical characters with his approach to leadership and, most notably, Gideon himself. Gideon’s conquests led to 40 years of peace during the rest of his lifetime. Still, before he died, he had made a gold ephod from the spoils of war that some Israelites began to worship. Once Gideon wasn’t around anymore, idolatry started to poison the minds of the people, and one of his 70 sons, Abimelech, led an uprising that killed all the others and drove them to a fallen society. Thinking about human nature through this story, George Washington was trying not to make the mistakes of Gideon. Rather than become just another corrupt king with multiple wives, like Gideon, Washington stayed loyal to Martha and kept himself grounded at Mt. Vernon all his life before and after the Revolution and his two terms as President. George fought off the hungry temptation to be romantic with Sally Fairfax, the wife of his very good friend William, and the couple for which Fairfax County is named today. But being inspired by Bible stories, Washington wanted to avoid those pitfalls and stayed grounded throughout his life. However, once he was out of office, like Gideon’s sons, it was hard to pull together a republic without everyone fighting all the time, which was undoubtedly the case with subsequent presidents like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. And like the story of the Book of Judges, leadership always failed. And the way that America set up its republic form of government to resist those temptations, for society to call out for a king and to give them unlimited power, our government was built on the Book of Judges from the beginning to correct it. That was certainly at the core of George Washington’s belief and why he thought the key to the Bastille was so important. It was more important for people to rule themselves and to throw off the oppressors of social order than to conform to it. Because once a person has collected such power, as the Bible shows, they all fail. So Washington and our American form of government set everything up to resist that temptation and to give people just enough power, knowing that the faults of humanity were always very close. And like his temptations with Sally Fairfax, he would keep those lusts cool and always on the back burner, where they belonged. If a leader can’t govern their emotions, how can they govern other people? Because of these concerns, and after several hundred years, they led to President Trump, who found that balance late in life on his own terms. We can say that America is better than all other forms of government because it was built with these concerns in mind, which had previously destroyed every society people had in it. And we have now sustained ourselves for many centuries on a premise of restraint, which George Washinton started, based on the Bible story of Gideon, the reluctant military general whom God worked through directly to save his people, even if only for a short time.
Rich Hoffman
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