Gospel of lies.

The Washington Monument needs no Doktor Freud or a semiotician to evoke phallic visions. The last thing I think of when I see it is Jesus, but the nasty worm that chews at the heart of America has been circulating another one of an endless series of historical perversions trying to make you think not only was it designed by Washington as a statement of our country's religious essence but a monument to prayer, a stone arm reaching up from our first president's fundamentalist heart to God above. Perhaps you've seen it.

"Washington continues to give praise to God" is the title of the lie although of course the words "Jesus Christ" never once appeared in any writings of his yet to be found, much less any evidence that he differed from Jefferson in believing that the notion of a divine Jesus was anything but a myth destined to be relegated to the same fate as the divinity of the Greek gods. He was never known to give praise to God, and his friends, including Jefferson did not think of him as a Christian at all but a Deist.

"The constitution does not provide for separation of Church and state" screams the version that appeared in my mailbox last night. It does, of course and Washington agreed:

I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction. To this consideration we ought to ascribe the absence of any regulation, respecting religion, from the Magna-Charta of our country.

So much for his acknowledgement of a nation under God.

Of course the monument was begun in the Civil War era, when the evocation of God as the foundation of the soon to be disunited States was foisted upon the public as a way to make the unpopular war seem , as we're usually told wars are, God's work. Such an idea could not have been further from the ideas of George Washington and did indeed elicit rage from Jefferson and his fellow patriots. Yes, as the viral gospel of lies claims, the capstone does read Praise to God or Laus Deo, but by 1888, when it was installed, the history of our aggressively secular Republic had already been drowned in the deluge of religious rapture brought back to our shores by the huddled, God sodden masses we had left behind and Washington was dust and his dreams come to nothing.

No, Pierre Charles L'Enfant who designed a plan for the street layout did not design the pattern to look like a cross from the monument which was only contemplated long after his death in 1825. In truth, the government did not like his plan, adopted the usual "tax and spend" rhetoric and refused to pay him for it and he died penniless. The actual planning for the capital city was accomplished by the surveyors, Andrew and Joseph Ellicott, and none of these men discussed any monuments to God or to the pretend piety of our first President or the idea that the view from a monument built a generation later would remind anyone of a cross.

"Praise be to God, such was the discipline, the moral direction, the spiritual mood given by the founder and first president of our unique democracy . . one nation under God"

hisses the evil snake of Christianist revisionism. The one unique feature of our new democracy was that its authority was not based and was forbidden to be based on divine authority, but on the consent of the governed, nor was the illegal religious oath we force children to say, possessed of the phrase "under God" until 1954 thus, finally erasing our national heritage and our national birthright of religious freedom.

The screed finishes with a fictitious "prayer" by Washington which was not written by Washington, was not a prayer to God but a deliberately misquoted version of a direct statement addressed to a governor.

What can I say? Like Jefferson, I can only swear eternal enmity to those who lie and subvert in the pursuit of tyranny over the mind of men and the religious lies they use to that sinister and vile purpose.