1787. THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, Philadelphia. Time dragged as delegates bickered about representation in Congress. Virginia’s James Madison insisted that states with more people (including slaves) should possess more power. The small states knew that under the Articles of Confederation—America’s existing national government—all states had equal authority, regardless of population. Why should the small states give that power up under a new Constitution? The convention might have failed at this point. If it had, the country would have continued to struggle under the inefficient (some said feckless) Articles government. Or the new American nation might have disintegrated.
At this critical moment, the octogenarian Benjamin Franklin took the floor. Calling for unity, he asked delegates to open sessions with prayer. As they were “groping as it were in the dark to find political truth,” he queried, “how has it happened that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings?” If they continued to ignore God, they would remain “divided by our little, partial, local interests, our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a by-word down to future ages.” This man, who called himself a deist, now insisted that delegates should ask God for wisdom. This was strange: classic deists did not believe that God intervened in human affairs.1
Even more strange, he was one of the few delegates who thought opening with prayer was a good idea. His motion was tabled. What kind of deist was this elderly man, dressed in his signature Quaker garb, calling on America’s greatest political minds to humble themselves before God?
“Franklin, of Philadelphia.” In our mind’s eye, the man seems ingenious, mischievous, and enigmatic. His journalistic, scientific, and political achievements are clear. But what of Ben Franklin’s faith? Was Franklin defined by his youthful embrace of deism? His longtime friendship with George Whitefield, the most influential evangelist of the eighteenth century? His work with Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence, and its invocations of the Creator and of “nature and Nature’s God”? Or his solitary insistence on prayer at the convention? When you add Franklin’s propensity for joking about serious matters, he becomes even more difficult to pin down. Regarding Franklin’s chameleon-like religion, John Adams remarked that “the Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends believed him a wet Quaker.”2 This biography illuminates Ben Franklin’s faith, even as it tells the story of his remarkable career in printing, science, and politics.
The key to understanding Franklin’s ambivalent religion is the contrast between the skepticism of his adult life and the indelible imprint of his childhood Calvinism. The intense faith of his parents acted as a tether, restraining Franklin’s skepticism. As a teenager, he abandoned his parents’ Puritan piety. But that same traditional faith kept him from getting too far away. He would stretch his moral and doctrinal tether to the breaking point by the end of his youthful sojourn in London. When he returned to Philadelphia in 1726, he resolved to conform more closely to his parents’ ethical code. He steered away from extreme deism. Could he craft a Christianity centered on virtue, rather than on traditional doctrine, and avoid alienating his parents at the same time? More importantly, could he convince the evangelical figures in his life—his sister Jane Mecom and the revivalist George Whitefield—that all was well with his soul? (He would have more success convincing his sister than Whitefield.) When he ran away from Boston as a teenager, he also ran away from the city’s Calvinism. But many factors—his Puritan tether, the pressure of relationships with Christian friends and family, disappointments with his own integrity, repeated illnesses, and the growing weight of political responsibility—all kept him from going too deep into the dark woods of radical skepticism.
Franklin explored a number of religious opinions. Even at the end of his life he remained noncommittal about all but a few points of belief. This elusiveness has made Franklin susceptible to many religious interpretations. Some devout Christians, beginning with the celebrated nineteenth-century biographer Parson Mason Weems, have found ways to mold Franklin into a faithful believer. Weems opined that “Franklin’s extraordinary benevolence and useful life were imbibed, even unconsciously, from the Gospel.” There is something to this notion of Christianity’s “unconscious” effect on Franklin. But Weems had to employ indirection because of Franklin’s repeated insistence that he doubted key points of Christian doctrine. Other Christian writers could not overlook those skeptical statements. The English Baptist minister John Foster wrote in 1818 that “love of the useful” was the cornerstone of Franklin’s thought, and that Franklin “substantially rejected Christianity.”3
One of the most influential interpretations of Franklin’s religion appeared in Max Weber’s classic study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). For Weber, Franklin was a nearperfect example of how Protestantism, drained of its doctrinal particularity, fostered modern capitalism. Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth” (1758), which distilled his best thoughts on frugality and industry, illustrated the spirit of capitalism “in near classical purity, and simultaneously offers the advantage of being detached from all direct connection to religious belief,” Weber wrote. Franklin’s maxims conveyed an “ethically-oriented” system for organizing one’s business. For Weber, Franklin’s virtues were no longer a matter of just obeying God. Virtue was also useful and profitable. Franklin, admonished by his “strict Calvinist father” about diligence in one’s calling, presented money-making and success as products of “competence and proficiency” in a vocation. Weber’s Franklin grew up in an intense Calvinist setting but redirected that zeal toward virtuous labor in a profession (namely, printing). There is much to recommend in Weber’s portrait. As an adult, Franklin touted ethical responsibility, industriousness, and benevolence, even as he jettisoned Christian orthodoxy.4
Many recent scholars have taken Franklin at his word by describing him as a “deist.” Others have called him everything from a “stone-cold atheist” to a man who believed in the “active God of the Israelites, the prophets, and the apostles.” Deism stands at the center of this interpretive continuum between atheism and Christian devotion. But other than indicating skepticism about traditional Christian doctrine, deism could mean many things in eighteenth-century Europe and America. The beliefs of different “deists” did not always sync up. Some said they believed in the Bible as originally written. Others doubted the Bible’s reliability. Some believed that God remained involved with life on earth. Others saw God as a cosmic watchmaker, winding up the world and then letting it run on its own. Deism meant different things to Franklin over the course of his long career, too. He did not always explain those variant meanings. I am not opposed to calling Franklin a deist—indeed, I do so in this book—but “deist” does not quite capture the texture or trajectory of Franklin’s beliefs.5
So what did Franklin believe, precisely? As with so many issues about Franklin, the answer has been elusive. Political philosopher Ralph Lerner put it well when he wrote that “this man of many masks and voices, our native master of satire and hoax, of parable and bagatelle, preserves to himself a core that defies simple explanation.” Earlier studies of Franklin’s faith have offered a range of perspectives. Alfred Owen Aldridge’s Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God (1967) holds that Franklin “completely disbelieved Christianity; yet he was attracted by it as a system of worship.” Aldridge was right—to an extent. But Aldridge should have emphasized Franklin’s ambivalence about Christianity even more. Especially after his teenage rebellion, he wavered in his views of Christianity, Jesus, and Providence, never making any orthodox profession but rarely denying orthodoxy outright. Franklin’s certitudes about religion included the obligations of benevolent service and toleration of religious differences. These were the only “unchanging dogmas in his creed,” Aldridge noted.6
In Benjamin Franklin and His Gods (1999), Kerry S. Walters emphasizes the fluidity of Franklin’s religious views more than Aldridge did. But Walters believes that as a young man Franklin discovered a religious model—“theistic perspectivism”—which framed many of his thoughts on religion. Franklin, according to Walters, never questioned God’s existence. But he believed that a thorough knowledge of God was inaccessible. Thus, Franklin held that people “symbolically represent God to themselves in such a way as to establish some sort of contact with the divine.” But Walters gives too much weight to just one of Franklin’s writings, his 1728 “Articles of Belief.” There Franklin puzzlingly speculated about the Creator God also creating “many Beings or Gods” who help people worship the one true God. This was an intriguing thought, but not one to which Franklin gave sustained attention after 1728.7
I gratefully draw from aspects of Weber, Aldridge, Walters, and many other commentators on Franklin’s religion. But adding to the themes of Franklin’s skepticism and ambivalence, my book shows how much Franklin’s personal experiences shaped his religious beliefs. Like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin’s early exposure to skeptical writings undermined his confidence in Christianity. But books alone could not erase Franklin’s childhood immersion in Puritan piety. His ongoing relationships with evangelical Christians made it difficult for him to jettison the vocabulary and precepts of traditional faith altogether. Although his view of Providence vacillated, the weight of the American Revolution fostered a renewed belief that history had divine purpose. Franklin and Lincoln—both self-educated sons of Calvinist parents, both of whom had much of the Bible committed to memory—gravitated toward a revitalized sense of God’s role over history, as war and constitutional crises racked America in the 1770s and 1860s. Neither man’s beliefs could escape the influence of their daily relationships and stressful experiences.8
It is difficult to overstate just how deep an imprint the Bible itself made on Franklin’s (or Lincoln’s) mind, or on his ways of speaking and writing. Even many devout Christians today are unfamiliar with large sections of the Bible (especially in the Old Testament) and do not know much about current theological debates. Franklin knew the Bible backward and forward. It framed the way he spoke and thought. Biblical phrases are ubiquitous in Franklin’s vast body of writings. Even as he embraced religious doubts, the King James Bible colored his ideas about morality, human nature, and the purpose of life. It served as his most common source of similes and anecdotes. He even enjoyed preying on friends’ ignorance of scripture in order to play jokes on them.
Franklin once explained the Bible-saturated environment in which he grew up in a letter to Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston. He was arranging for the publication of one of Cooper’s sermons in Europe. But Franklin needed to annotate it with biblical references. “It was not necessary in New England where everybody reads the Bible, and is acquainted with Scripture phrases, that you should note the texts from which you took them,” he told Cooper. “But I have observed in England as well as in France, that verses and expressions taken from the sacred writings, and not known to be such, appear very strange and awkward to some readers; and I shall therefore in my edition take the liberty of marking the quoted texts in the margin.” Franklin did not need Cooper to insert the Bible references. He knew them by heart. As a child of the Puritans, Franklin instantly recognized Bible phrases when he read them, even from obscure sections of the text. The shadow of scripture loomed over his long life.9
Franklin, then, was a pioneer of a distinctly American kind of religion. I’m tempted to call it an early form of “Sheilaism,” the individualist religion described in Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985). In Bellah’s Sheilaism, the individual conscience is the standard for religious truth, not any external authority. But Franklin’s protégé Thomas Paine might be a better choice as a founder of Sheilaism, with his declaration in The Age of Reason (1794) that “my own mind is my own church.” No, Franklin was too tethered to external Christian ethics and institutions to be a forerunner of Sheilaism.10
Instead, Franklin was the pioneer of a related kind of faith: doctrineless, moralized Christianity. Franklin was an experimenter at heart, and he tinkered with a novel form of Christianity, one where virtually all beliefs became nonessential. The Puritans of his childhood focused too much on doctrine, he thought. He wearied of Philadelphia Presbyterians’ zeal for expelling the heterodox, and their lack of interest (as he perceived it) in the mandates of love and charity. For Franklin, Christianity remained a preeminent resource for virtue. But he had no exclusive attachment to Christianity as a religious system or as a source of salvation. In Franklin’s estimation, we cannot know for certain whether doctrines such as God’s Trinitarian nature are true. But we do know that Christians—and the devout of all faiths—are called to benevolence and selfless service. God calls us all to “do good.” Doctrinal strife is not only futile but undermines the mandate of virtue.
Doctrineless Christianity, and doctrineless religion, is utterly pervasive today in America. We see it most commonly in major media figures of self-help, spirituality, and success, such as Oprah Winfrey, Houston megachurch pastor Joel Osteen, and the late Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1999). Teresa Jordan’s 2014 book Year of Living Virtuously (Weekends Off) used Franklin’s ethical program as a framework, and commended the way that Franklin never forced his beliefs on others, focusing “on practical rather than spiritual values.” Although they might differ on specifics, the common message of these authors (and their countless followers) is that a life of love, service, and significance is the best life of all.11
God will help you live that kind of life, but your faith should be empowering and tolerant, rather than fractious and nit-picking. Sociologist Christian Smith says that these characteristically American beliefs amount to “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Many of its most prominent exponents, such as Osteen, live out their faith in particular congregations and traditions. Even Winfrey has testified that “I am a Christian. That is my faith.” However, she says, “I’m not asking you to be a Christian. If you want to be one I can show you how. But it is not required.” Doctrineless Christians agree that people may need to believe in doctrines. Our personal understanding of God can help us. We may need particular beliefs to enable our “best life now,” in Osteen’s phrase. But ultimately, the focus of doctrineless Christianity is a life of good works, resiliency, and generosity—now. Faith helps us to embody disciplined, benevolent success in this life. That’s what God wants for us.12
It is easy to dismiss this kind of pop faith as peddled by wealthy media superstars. But it is America’s most common code of spirituality. Throughout American history, Franklin’s sort of religion has fueled a multitude of related trends, such as anticlericalism (suspicion of ministers), opposition to creeds, and religious individualism. For Franklin, doctrineless, moralized Christianity was serious intellectual business, born out of contemporary religious debates and dissatisfaction with his family’s Puritanism. Like many skeptics in the eighteenth century, Franklin was weary of three hundred years of fighting over the implications of the Protestant Reformation. Much of that fighting concerned church authority and particular doctrines. Franklin grew up in a world of intractable conflict between Catholics and Protestants, but also between and within Protestant denominations themselves. What good was Christianity if it precipitated pettiness, persecution, and violence? Unlike some self-help celebrities today, Franklin and his cohort of European and American deists reckoned that in promoting a doctrineless, ethics-focused Christianity, they were redeeming Christianity itself. How successful that redemptive effort was, readers will have to decide for themselves.
Could you really have a nonexclusive, doctrinally minimal, morality-centered Christianity? Or did the effort fatally compromise Christianity? Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and many of their friends in America, Britain, and France wanted to give it a try. Thirteen years after Franklin’s death, Jefferson wrote that he considered himself “a Christian, in the only sense [Jesus] wished any one to be.” He admired Jesus’s “moral doctrines” as “more pure and perfect” than any other philosopher’s. But to Jefferson, Jesus’s excellence was only human. Jesus never claimed to be anything else. His followers imposed the claims of divinity on Jesus after he had gone to his grave and not risen again.13
Franklin did not go as far as Jefferson. He preferred not to dogmatize, one way or the other, on matters such as Jesus’s divinity. Late in life Franklin told Yale president and Congregationalist minister Ezra Stiles that he had doubts about whether Christ was God. He figured that he would find out soon enough, anyway.
In a classic tension that still marks American religion, Franklin’s devout parents, his sister Jane, and the revivalist George Whitefield all found doctrineless Christianity dangerous. Yes, they agreed that morality was essential. And yes, it was better not to fight over pointless issues. But true belief in Jesus was necessary for salvation. To the Puritans and evangelicals, Jesus was fully God and fully man. Doubting that truth put your soul in jeopardy. Jesus had made the way for sinners to be saved, through his atoning death and miraculous resurrection. It was not enough to emulate Jesus’s life, as important as that was. More than a moral teacher, Jesus was Lord and Savior. Honoring Christ required belief in doctrinal truth. Franklin was not so sure. Perhaps the Puritans and Presbyterians of his youth had gotten it all wrong. Perhaps he was the one who was getting back to Jesus’s core teaching. But he was sure that doing good was the grand point.
Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father focuses closely on the period of Franklin’s life between the beginning of his publishing and writing career in the early 1720s and his departure for London in 1757. The final two chapters of the book cover his diplomatic career in London and Paris, and his last few years in Philadelphia. But the majority of the vast bulk of Franklin’s reflections on faith came in the decades prior to his diplomatic missions. Franklin likely published more on religion than any other layperson of the eighteenth century. His religious musings did continue during his final three decades of life, as did the tensions among his traditionalist background, his adult skepticism, and his quest for doctrineless Christianity. But matters related to the American Revolutionary crisis and war also dominated much of his time and thinking in those decades.14
For readability, I have silently modernized much of the spelling and capitalization in Franklin’s writings and correspondence. For exact transcriptions, readers should consult the Yale University Press volumes of Franklin’s papers.