George Washington's Favorite Bible Verse

Monday, July 6, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! I have a distinct memory of a series of books with orange covers and black-and-white images telling the stories of great and famous Americans. Called The Childhoods of Famous Americans, the books, which had a decidedly Christian bent and extolled values like hard work, resilience, and faith, were meant to present these Americans as children with relatable experiences and struggles. In most cases these stories were highly sanitized and included accounts that were at best apocryphal if not completely fictitious. If not the same series, I imagine many of you also grew up with these hagiographies of the United States’ founding fathers — white, male, straight, nearly all of them — and perhaps a few founding mothers and one or two righteous people of color who through hard work managed to be the first in their field. And that’s how we like to remember heroes, particularly around the Fourth of July, lest our hotdogs and potato salad be interrupted by the truth of history.

Yet, now, the birthday party is over. The fireworks have faded, the flags are still out, and we are two-and-a-half centuries into this American experiment. How are we doing?

George Washington had a favorite Bible verse, or something close to one. Historians have counted nearly fifty times he wrote out Micah 4:4 across four decades of letters: “…they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid." Washington loved the image of a person laying down a sword and going home to a patch of ground, safe and free of the noise of empire. It is a beautiful vision that Washington following his service as the nation’s first president.

However, it’s also worth noting that the over three hundred people Washington enslaved at Mount Vernon could never sit under a vine of their own. They built the estate, tilled its fields, and served in its house and they were literally bound to the land and to Washington, their enslaver. The founding generation loved Micah’s verse. They loved it for themselves. They took the fruit of the vision and left the roots in the ground.

That pattern did not end with the founders.

Two hundred fifty years in, the United States remains the largest arms dealer on the planet, selling more weapons to more nations than every other country combined. Micah’s swords never quite beaten into plowshares. We have built the largest prison and detention system in the world, one in which Black Americans, who make up roughly 14% of the population, account for 42% of the incarcerated. We have built a healthcare system in which people fear the ambulance bill before they fear the heart attack, a housing market in which whole generations have been priced out of ownership, and a school system in which children practice hiding from gunfire because we have decided, again and again, that access to weapons matters more than the safety of those children. Our nation is one in which the word “freedom” is deployed quickly to protect the powerful and extended slowly, if at all, to the people beneath them.

None of this is a story about individual meanness. It is a story about what a nation builds when it decides, across 250 years, that some people’s safety, some people’s lives, matter more than others. Micah would name that clearly: not a series of unfortunate policy choices. Idolatry.

And yet. Micah was not writing a eulogy. He was writing a summons. The vision of everyone sitting unafraid was never meant to describe what already existed. It was meant to describe what a people could still choose to build. That thread, quieter and harder to kill, runs through abolitionists and suffragists, through the Black church and the Queer liberation movement, through every community that has refused to let the gap between the vision and the reality be the last word.

America has never fully been the vine-and-fig-tree nation its own founders quoted into being. But the question Micah puts to us is not whether we've arrived. It’s whether we are still walking toward it and in whose name we are walking.

In whose name are you walking? Toward what kind of “days to come” are you building?

Let us pray: God of every people and every nation, you have never belonged to any flag or any empire, and your vision of peace has never been for sale. Forgive us for the ways we have bent your words to serve our comfort while leaving others without the safety those words promised. Give us the courage to tell the truth about the distance between the vision and the reality, to refuse the false gods of peace through might and exclusion even when they are dressed up as patriotism, and to keep walking, however imperfectly, toward the day when no one, no one at all, shall be made afraid. We ask this in the name of Jesus, in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither enslaved nor free. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +