Renowned historian of religion D. G. Hart argues that Benjamin Franklin was a “cultural Protestant,” a thesis he describes in a series of biographical vignettes. Scholars, he thinks, have overestimated Franklin as an intellectual or theologian. Rather Franklin was “not a thinker but a tinkerer,” indebted to his Protestant roots (9). His turn away from youthful deism to moral virtue was a secularized version of Jonathan Edwards's view that while “true virtue” was impossible in private, “public benevolence proceeded from a moral sense” (60). Franklin's vocation as printer flowed from a Protestant “people of the book” (73), both a culture and a market that challenged religious and political authorities. His view of marriage was an extension of Puritan companionship, a mean between mercenary and romantic views. His civic uplift was born of the “Reformation's civic mindedness”; in his projects including nonsectarian education and a hospital, Franklin is “doing his best impersonation of an elder in John Calvin's Geneva” (113). Philadelphia reflects Protestant urbanism's decentralized associations of laborers and tradesmen. Franklin, Hart concludes, had little knowledge of Reformist theological concepts: virtue and not faith was the end of religion, and true Christianity opposed all creeds. Despite Franklin's utilitarian stance on religion, his lingering Protestantism reemerged in passionate opposition to orthodoxy in the Hemphill affair and support for George Whitefield's revivalist “zeal and holiness” (144).
According to Hart, Franklin was no first-rate mind. He only captivated Europe's leading thinkers because of the “amateur character of eighteenth-century science” (157). Scholars confuse the “sheer volume of [his] correspondence” (158, 150) for quality. Thus Franklin qua intellectual is best understood as copious correspondent in the Reformation's Republic of Letters that connected tolerant, commercial centers. Even Franklin's natural philosophy is inheritor of the “Reformation's disenchantment of the cosmos” rooted in its separation of grace from nature (162). In politics, “Franklin was a tinkerer all the way down” (170). Whig Protestantism informed his “commitment to harmony and the public good” and pluralist balancing of Quaker and proprietary interests (193). Later, as would-be gentleman and “inveterate royalist” (183), Franklin stumbled his way through failed positions on a royal charter, the Stamp Act, and the Hutchinson Affair. Hart likens Franklin's imperial federalism or separate contracts with the Crown to the 1931 Statute of Westminster, an international union by common creed instead of papal sovereignty. After his humiliation in the cockpit, Franklin underwent a “born-again” conversion to “Americanness” (204). Tests for his zealous conversion required disavowing his former sect (Britain), turning his back on his royalist son, and rejecting the 1776 peace settlement. Still, Hart sees Franklin's dream of empire achieved in the postwar commercial and religious relations with Britain, and in a “denominational pattern of church life that sprouted and blossomed in America's seeming indifference to religion” (208). Hart finds genuine piety in Franklin's invocation to God for aid at the Constitutional convention, but there was no deathbed conversion to Christianity.
Hart uses his thesis of cultural Protestantism to assess Franklin's faith in “The American Creed.” Protestants who judge Franklin's heterodox beliefs by their own dogma reach a “dead end,” reducing him to a Unitarian or vague spiritualist (241). Liberal Protestantism, reminds Hart, is a legitimate continuation of Christianity. While Franklin's focus on economic prosperity and bourgeois virtues—a middle-class success gospel—invited Marxist critiques of Protestantism as capitalist stooge, and today's Catholic critiques that liberalism corrodes the virtues it requires, this downplays Franklin's key role in providing a secular moral standard for a pluralist nation. This loss of wholeness or integration is “one of modernity's great achievements,” attaining not just fragmentation but a new “social fabric” of differentiation and enrichment (243–244).
Hart's book is a pleasure to read—he is a skilled writer. For those interested in both religious history and Franklin, he provides a solid biography that maintains an ideal brevity. He ignores the questions that consume much scholarship and uses those interstices for interesting facts about Christian history and thought. There are a few minor errors. Young Franklin did not show “deference to Boston's religious and civil authorities” (43; see J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006–2009), 1: 172–211); Franklin instructed Sally, not Deborah, in attending church (130). Franklin was not the sole author of A Letter to a Friend in the Country, nor are its arguments those of the Observations. Hart misattributes a letter by the dancing assembly members to William Seward (140). John Gay, not Franklin, was the author of “A Thought on Eternity” (163). More than Franklin's “in-laws” (195), his allies in the White Oaks defended Deborah.
At first blush, Hart's cultural Protestantism seems tautological or contradictory. The American states were often quite intolerant in their direct and indirect support of Protestantism. Hart's Protestant critics may demand a doctrinal essence, else it is a non-religion—a reaction to Catholicism whose splintering sects evaporate in secularism. But Hart's thesis is driven by a Two Kingdoms theology: religious and secular identity must be radically separated. Cultural Protestantism is a key part of the “modern society that Protestantism encouraged” (9). Reform Protestantism “provided points of entry for people in many walks of life to make their way . . . without maintaining a religious identity” (7). And while it may not look like the Presbyterian Party took over the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1775, Hart argues that it is no less the “Anglo-American Protestant heritage” (246). If I may phrase Hart's thesis another way, Protestants were the first in the modern world to politically implement the concept of natural law and its concomitant rights grounded in reason alone. The key question, and a subject of Hart's other works, is whether the American creed itself requires Franklin's own creed as a common religious belief.
Scholars may disagree with Hart's portrayal of Franklin as second-rate thinker. Franklin commented on dense philosophical works and, as I. Bernard Cohen notes, his pragmatic electrical discoveries stemmed from a love of “pure science.” Hart's own case for Franklin as tinkerer allows him to skirt contradictions, but it is weakened in that he cites only collections of Franklin's writings instead of the voluminous Franklin Papers and additional sources that paint a different picture (such as Franklin's writings for the assembly). Hart suggests that Franklin's Dissertation does not merit scrutiny, yet he concludes that the essay is “dark” despite its supposed defense of God's infinite goodness (45). He says it showed a “lack of aptitude,” yet admits it was witty enough to impress Bernard Mandeville (46). Hart's Franklin rejects revelatory knowledge, yet prays to a god and believes in an afterlife; he is raised in church and spoofs its teachings, yet is ignorant about doctrines like justification. As I have argued in this journal, Franklin was hardly uninformed in theology but borrowed from Presbyterian writers in the Hemphill affair. And with regard to Franklin's involvement in politics, he was the assembly's expert (even speaker), who sat on standing committees, drafted legislation, and wrote its official positions.
Finally, scholars may take issue with parts of Hart's narrative, which leans heavily on secondary sources, particularly Gordon Wood's description of Franklin as nonpartisan aspiring gentleman converted to radical patriot (Hart twice mentions the Feke portrait, but see Lemay, The Life, 2: 320). This view is contested by leading Franklin scholars like Lemay and Carla J. Mulford, who situate Franklin's writings and affiliations in historical context to show his early American identity, support of popular politics, opposition to proprietary government, and leadership in the bitter dispute in the early 1750s.
Ultimately, Hart's biography is both engaging and thought-provoking, and it will appeal to a general audience and scholars alike.
