What George Washington Did When America Was Dying: A New Play Brings the Answer to Life

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Most Americans know the painting. A general kneels alone in the snow, his horse standing nearby, his head bowed in prayer. The image has become one of the most recognized and contested depictions in American history — and as the nation marks its 250th anniversary, it has become the inspiration for a play that is drawing audiences to tears and “amens” at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.

In This Article

“A General’s Prayer,” starring actor James Denton and running through July 19 at the Museum of the Bible’s World Stage Theater, is doing something rare in American theater: it is portraying the first president not as a marble icon but as a man at the end of his rope, privately wrestling with doubt, begging Congress for supplies, longing for home — and kneeling before God when he had nowhere else to turn.

For a nation that has spent decades arguing about its founding and its faith, this play arrives at precisely the right moment.

Key Takeaways

“A General’s Prayer,” a one-man play starring James Denton, runs through July 19 at the Museum of the Bible’s World Stage Theater in Washington, D.C., as part of the museum’s “The Bible and America 250” initiative
The 70-minute production is set at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777 and draws almost entirely from Washington’s documented speeches, letters, and writings
The play was written by Dean Batali, known for writing episodes of “That ’70s Show” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and is inspired by Arnold Friberg’s iconic “Prayer at Valley Forge” painting currently on display at the museum
Denton describes Washington as “very insecure” and deeply spiritual, a man who refused the label of Deist because he believed God actively intervenes in human affairs
Washington’s closing speech — drawn directly from the historical record — consistently prompts audience members to respond with “Amen,” Denton told The Christian Post
The play arrives amid renewed national debate over whether Washington’s faith was genuine and what it means for America’s self-understanding as it approaches its semiQuincentennial

The Play the New York Times Does Not Want You to See

Before we talk about what happens inside the World Stage Theater, it is worth acknowledging what is happening outside it.

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The image of George Washington kneeling in prayer has become, in 2026, a cultural flashpoint. The New York Times recently warned readers that the image “has become more prominent in the Trump era, along with claims that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.” Casting doubt on Washington’s prayer life has become, as The Daily Wire observed, something of an elite pastime in certain media circles — a project of debunking that says more about the present than about the past.

Into this environment, “A General’s Prayer” drops a 70-minute theatrical portrait of a Washington who used more names for God than most modern evangelicals, who served as an Anglican church warden and attended worship services while traveling, who told his troops at Valley Forge that “the fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army,” and who, in his farewell address, called on America to be bound by “familial affection” rather than geographic or ideological faction.

The audiences, it turns out, are ready to hear it. The “amens” coming from the seats tell you that.

James Denton’s Unlikely Role

James Denton is 63 years old and best known for eight seasons as Mike Delfino on “Desperate Housewives” and a long run as Dr. Sam Radford on Hallmark Channel’s “Good Witch.” He is, by any measure, a mainstream television actor with a broad popular following and no particular reputation as a Christian entertainer.

Which is exactly why his involvement in “A General’s Prayer” is so interesting.

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As The Christian Post reported in its interview with Denton, the actor did not initially volunteer for this role. “Washington chose me, or the writer did,” Denton said. His first instinct was to push back. “I said, ‘Couldn’t it be Ben Franklin or John Adams or somebody with a lot of personality that would be funny?’ I knew it would be a challenge making it interesting for 80 minutes because he was so reserved and so stoic.”

He took the role anyway, motivated by exactly the kind of motivation that produces good theater: he was afraid of it. “At this stage of my life, you don’t get to do many things that you’re kind of afraid of, so I jumped at it,” Denton said.

The preparation required was substantial. The script runs 49 pages with no other cast members, no cues, and no safety net. Denton compared memorizing it to being handed a novel and told to learn the first 50 pages. He did it in less than a month. On the first day of rehearsal, as The Epoch Times reported, Denton arrived carrying a document signed by both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — the history geek side of him fully present, having collected presidential signatures for years.

It is worth noting what Denton is not. He has not described himself as a born-again evangelical. He is an actor who took a challenging role, did his homework, and found himself changed by what he discovered. That arc, the secular professional who encounters Washington’s faith and comes away with a different view of the man and the moment, is itself a kind of testimony worth taking seriously.

What the Play Actually Shows

The setting is Valley Forge, the winter of 1777. Washington’s Continental Army is encamped in brutal cold. Men are starving. Supplies are nonexistent. Congress is not listening. The British have taken Philadelphia. The revolution is teetering.

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Denton’s Washington addresses the audience directly, calling them “my anonymous confessors.” He pores over letters from Martha. He debates how to implore Congress for money and food. He reflects on his legacy and his doubts. He jokes. Washington cracks genuine humor throughout, describing the King George III coin he carries and always turns so the king’s lips face his backside, and deadpanning: “I can only hope that my face doesn’t appear on currency someday.”

But underneath the wit and the stoicism is a man who, as Denton put it, “probably did, knowing his history, get down on his knees more than once because he thought they were dead.”

“We never see that portrait of him because he’s always been presented as so stoic,” Denton told The Christian Post. “He really was very insecure and wondered if the country was going to survive another month.”

The production surrounds this portrait with immersive technology. As the Museum of the Bible’s official event page describes, audiences experience snowfall, tent imagery, and battlefield sound design that places them inside the encampment. The theater goes to considerable effort to make the 18th century feel immediate rather than distant.

The effect, by all accounts, is working. “I get a lot of ‘amens,’ just like it’s a sermon,” Denton said.

Washington’s Faith: More Complex Than the Culture War Allows

One of the most valuable contributions “A General’s Prayer” makes is its refusal to flatten Washington’s faith into either the secular-progressive caricature (a Deist who kept God at arm’s length) or the evangelical-patriot fantasy (a devoted Christian who prayed like a Puritan divine). Denton was careful about this nuance in his interview, and it deserves to be heard.

Washington spent his life in the Anglican Church. He served as a church warden. He attended worship services regularly, including when traveling. He wrote and spoke about God constantly, in the language of Providence, of “the benign Parent of the human race,” of “the great Architect.” He rarely spoke publicly about Jesus.

“We know he was a Christian of some sort,” Denton said. “He certainly wasn’t a Deist, because Deists don’t believe that God intervenes in our lives.” The play depicts a Washington who believed with great conviction that God had intervened in the American cause , and that the survival of a freezing, starving army through that winter was not merely a military achievement but a providential one.

At the same time, Denton noted the Anglican privacy about personal faith that characterized Washington’s public expression. “I think people want to believe what they want to believe,” he said. “Anglicans specifically were very private about their faith.”

This is a historically honest portrait. Washington was not a man who made public professions of faith in the evangelical idiom. He was a man who, in his farewell address, told the nation that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” for “political prosperity” and that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” He was a man who closed every document referring to divine assistance with the phrase “under God.” He was a man who, when he genuinely believed the cause was lost, apparently prayed.

2 Chronicles 7:14 (NKJV): “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” That verse was not in Washington’s Bible in the same translation we use today, but the concept it contains was woven through everything he wrote about Providence and the survival of the republic.

The Arnold Friberg Painting and the Contested Image

The production draws its inspiration from Arnold Friberg’s 1976 painting “The Prayer at Valley Forge,” currently on display at the Museum of the Bible. Friberg painted it for the nation’s bicentennial, and it became one of the most recognized images of Washington ever produced — a general alone in the snow, head bowed, one knee on the ground, his horse standing quietly beside him.

Whether Washington literally knelt in that snow in that manner on a specific day is a question historians have debated for two centuries. The story of a Quaker man named Isaac Potts who claimed to have witnessed Washington praying alone in the woods at Valley Forge circulated widely in the nineteenth century. Scholars have questioned its literal accuracy.

But as The Daily Wire noted in its coverage of the cultural debate surrounding the play, the image “may not be literally accurate, but the legend is true in spirit.” A man who wrote the things Washington wrote, who served where Washington served, who survived what Washington survived, almost certainly prayed. The question is not whether Washington was a man of prayer. The question is whether modern America is comfortable acknowledging it.

The play is a 70-minute answer to that question. And the audiences responding with “amens” are a 70-minute answer of their own.

The Writer Behind the Words

The play was written by Dean Batali, whose television resume includes writing credits on both “That ’70s Show” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” mainstream secular entertainment, not Christian-market content. His involvement is another signal that “A General’s Prayer” is not a product designed for the already-convinced.

As The Epoch Times reported, Batali considered Denton a natural choice for Washington — noting that the actor is a history enthusiast who “collects presidential signatures” and brought that genuine personal investment to the role from the first day of rehearsal.

Almost every word in the production, Denton has emphasized in multiple interviews, comes directly from Washington’s documented speeches and writings. This is not historical fiction in the sense of invention. It is historical curation, a skilled playwright selecting, arranging, and contextualizing words that Washington actually wrote or spoke, and trusting the historical record to be compelling enough on its own.

The result is a portrait that, as Denton told Fox News Digital, includes a Washington who insisted that America “be bound by a familial affection” so that the country “not be characterized by geographical distinctions — northern, southern, western” but can maintain unity. “That doesn’t enable cunning and unprincipled men to subvert the power of the people,” Washington says in the play. Denton notes carefully: “That’s not a political statement about anything. It’s just a general statement that our leaders have to live up to a certain standard.”

Why This Matters in 2026

The Museum of the Bible situated “A General’s Prayer” within its broader “The Bible and America 250” initiative, which also includes new exhibits and a lecture series exploring the question: what was the Bible’s role in the founding of the United States, and what does it mean for us today?

That question is not an antiquarian one. It is the central contested question of American public life in 2026. The answer you accept determines how you think about religious expression in the public square, the proper relationship between faith and government, and what it means to appeal to transcendent moral standards in a pluralistic democracy.

Washington’s own answer, reflected in his writings and embodied in this play, was that God is not a sectarian decoration on American civic life but its deepest foundation. He did not believe a republic could endure without the moral scaffolding that religious conviction provides. He said so repeatedly, clearly, and on the record.

What “A General’s Prayer” does is put those words back in front of an American audience at the moment when they are most needed and most disputed. The medium is live theater, immersive, emotional, personal, rather than through a lecture or a documentary, and it does so with a mainstream television actor playing the role, which means the audience is not pre-selected for theological agreement.

For the Church, this production is an opportunity. Understanding America’s defining spiritual awakenings and how faith has shaped the nation’s history provides the deeper context within which Washington’s prayer life makes complete historical sense. The general who knelt at Valley Forge was not inventing a practice. He was participating in a tradition of leaders who understood that what they were attempting was larger than human capacity alone could achieve.

What Audiences Are Taking Home

Denton’s own summary of what he hopes audiences receive is simple and worth quoting in full: “I hope this inspiration that’s been breathed upon me is somehow transferable. That you take it with you, and that helps the nation.”

That is not a grand theological claim. It is an actor’s honest account of what he has found himself carrying after weeks of embodying a man who bore the weight of an impossible moment and chose to pray rather than despair.

The closing speech of the play, drawn from Washington’s historical writings, addresses how leaders should behave, how America should treat those from other nations who come to its shores, and how the nation is known by its love for one another. “I get a lot of ‘amens,'” Denton said, “just like it’s a sermon.”

There is something theologically significant in that. Washington did not write sermons. He wrote dispatches, letters, and addresses. But the truth embedded in those documents, that a nation under God is accountable to standards higher than its own convenience, that its leaders must be worthy of emulation, that its people must be bound not by ideology but by genuine regard for one another, is the same truth that fills pulpits. It is not surprising that when it is delivered clearly and sincerely, the people of God recognize it and respond with amen.

Psalm 33:12 (NKJV): “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance.” Washington may not have quoted that verse from a stage, but he built his appeal to Providence on exactly that conviction.

Practical Details

“A General’s Prayer” runs through Saturday, July 19, at the Museum of the Bible’s World Stage Theater, located three blocks from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Performances are Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 11:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Late seating is not permitted. Tickets range from $35 to $49 and are available at museumofthebible.org.

If you are in the Washington area before July 19, this is worth prioritizing. If you are not, it is worth knowing about, both because the production itself may tour, and because the conversation it is participating in will not end when the run does.

Conclusion: The Kneeling General and the Nation That Needs Him

America is 250 years old this year. It arrives at that milestone more divided, more anxious, and more uncertain of its own foundations than at any point in living memory. The questions about what it was built on, what it stands for, and what holds it together are not academic. They are daily and urgent.

Into that moment, a television actor has spent weeks memorizing the words of a man who stood at an earlier impossible juncture and chose to kneel. Not because he was certain of victory. Not because he had enough men or supplies or Congressional support. But because he believed that the God who had brought this cause this far was not finished with it.

That is not a partisan position. It is a historical one, grounded in documented evidence, embodied in an 80-minute performance, and met nightly with “amens” from people who recognize in Washington’s words something they have been waiting to hear.

The play closes July 19. But the prayer it depicts never really stopped.

For those who want to go deeper into the theological foundation beneath Washington’s conviction and its continuing relevance for the American Church, exploring America’s ten most impactful spiritual awakenings tells the larger story of how faith and national formation have been intertwined from the beginning. And understanding the importance of consistent, Scripture-grounded prayer reconnects what Washington modeled in a snow-covered Pennsylvania encampment with what believers are called to practice today.

Three things to do right now:

See the play if you can. It runs through July 19. Tickets are at museumofthebible.org. If you are in Washington, make time.
Visit the Museum of the Bible. The “Bible and America 250” initiative continues through 2026 and into spring 2027, with exhibits, lectures, and programming designed to root American identity in its biblical foundations.
Pray for the nation. Washington did it when the situation seemed hopeless. The situation today is not hopeless. But it does require the same posture: humility before God, honest acknowledgment of human limitation, and the conviction that He is still in the business of intervening in the affairs of nations.