Benjamin Franklin, Virtue, and the Good Life

Even during his lifetime, Franklin's friends (like readers today) speculated about Franklin's spiritual life and belief practices. Some wondered whether he personally experienced spiritual inspiration typical for Christians of his day or whether he totally denied the possibility of metaphysical presence in the physical realm (Mulford 2013). Franklin admired the itinerant Anglican evangelist, George Whitefield, and he strongly defended the Irish minister, Samuel Hemphill, during a controversy over Hemphill's preaching in Philadelphia (Christensen). The scientist and dissenting minister, Joseph Priestley, was among Franklin's closest friends. Yet in his own memoir, Priestley "lamented" that Franklin, so full of positive influence in the world, "should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done so much as he did to make others unbelievers" (1809, 79–80). Priestley's late account of Franklin's ideas—published nearly two decades after Franklin's death—participated in the existing debate about Franklin's belief systems: was he a deist or even an atheist, or was he a believer in Christianity?

Some were writing—with a rhetorical fire of Anglophilia stoked against revolutionary France—that Franklin was a thoroughgoing deist, duplicitous and conniving like most non-believers. Jonathan Boucher, for instance, ranted about "the duplicity of his character," insinuating that he was one of the key "enemies of our country" in his admiration of France (1797, 407; 445). Boucher said that Franklin "had nothing in his . . . writings in favour of any particular religion" (1797, 445). Similarly, writing as Oliver Oldschool, Joseph Dennie claimed that Franklin, "as a deist," "supported his religion with the arts of infidelity; with the rank garbage of Mandeville, Tindal, and Chubb; with the crumbs that fell from those poor men's tables." He concluded his diatribe by calling Franklin "one of our first Jacobins, the first to lay his head in the lap of French harlotry; and prostrate the Christianity and honour of his country to the deism and democracies of Paris" ([Dennie] 1801, 53). Many from that era who wished to frame Franklin as an irreligionist conceived their prejudice from a desire to remain loyal to England and to pejorate revolutionary France.

Others sought to use Franklin to shore up religious practice in North America and claimed him as a true believer in divinity who conceived the Christian God as a political agent for America. Thus, William Smith, who was not by any means Franklin's friend during his lifetime, commented in his eulogy that Franklin believed in divine revelation (Smith 1792; Ketcham 1964). Mason Locke Weems took Smith's lead and wrote repeatedly, in books published across the nineteenth century, about Franklin's presumed Christianity, creating anecdotes (pure fiction) about Franklin in life and at his deathbed (Sloan 1972). In Weems's narrative, Franklin's life modeled the virtues of Christianity, cleanliness, frugality, industry, and scientific inquisitiveness. As bits and pieces of Franklin's writings reached print during the nineteenth century, Weems's rendering of Franklin began to solidify into a national story (Mulford 1999, 421–23).

Nineteenth-century nationalist (and Protestant nationalist) celebrations gave way to twentieth-century skepticism, however, and readers and scholars alike tended to question Franklin's presumed Christian leanings. Several scholars tackled the question of Franklin's core beliefs, and many of them—most notably, A. Owen Aldridge—argued that Franklin was a thorough Deist (Aldridge 1967). Others interested in examining Franklin's many statements about religion highlighted Franklin's writings related to theism and spirituality in a less scientifically oriented perspective. Thus, for instance, Kerry Walters proposed in 1999 that Franklin enjoyed "theistic perspectivism," allowing for a multitude of gods—indeed, allowing for polytheism—in the search for "useful fictions" that one might live by at any given time in one's life (Walters 1999). Others looked at the evidence and pointed out that Franklin's...