Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full download Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant D. G. Hart file pdf all chapter on 2024
Full download Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant D. G. Hart file pdf all chapter on 2024
Full download Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant D. G. Hart file pdf all chapter on 2024
D. G. Hart
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/benjamin-franklin-cultural-protestant-d-g-hart/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
https://ebookmass.com/product/fichtes-1804-wissenschaftslehre-
benjamin-d-crowe/
https://ebookmass.com/product/walter-benjamin-and-the-idea-of-
natural-history-cultural-memory-in-the-present-1st-edition-
friedlander/
https://ebookmass.com/product/saving-the-protestant-ethic-andrew-
lynn/
https://ebookmass.com/product/power-system-engineering-2nd-
edition-d-p-kothari-i-g-nagrath/
The Dating Disaster (Franklin U Book 2) Saxon James
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-dating-disaster-franklin-u-
book-2-saxon-james/
https://ebookmass.com/product/playboy-billionaire-collection-
hart/
https://ebookmass.com/product/introduction-to-governance-
government-and-public-administration-1st-edition-franklin/
https://ebookmass.com/product/precalculus-graphical-numerical-
algebraic-10th-edition-global-edition-franklin-demana/
https://ebookmass.com/product/weyward-a-novel-emilia-hart/
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 21/4/2021, SPi
S P I RI T U A L L I V E S
General Editor
Timothy Larsen
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 21/4/2021, SPi
The Spiritual Lives series features biographies of prominent men and women
whose eminence is not primarily based on a specifically religious contribution.
Each volume provides a general account of the figure’s life and thought, while
giving special attention to his or her religious contexts, convictions, doubts,
objections, ideas, and actions. Many leading politicians, writers, musicians,
philosophers, and scientists have engaged deeply with religion in significant
and resonant ways that have often been overlooked or underexplored. Some
of the volumes will even focus on men and women who were lifelong unbe-
lievers, attending to how they navigated and resisted religious questions,
assumptions, and settings. The books in this series will therefore recast import-
ant figures in fresh and thought-provoking ways.
Benjamin Franklin
Cultural Protestant
D. G. HART
1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/5/2021, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© D. G. Hart 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948576
ISBN 978–0–19–878899–7
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 21/4/2021, SPi
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Acknowledgments
viii Acknowledgments
inquisitive side is arguably his most attractive feature and may explain
much of his success. Franklin was an impressive person who lived an
even more impressive life.
This book is not simply a short biography of a man who is indelibly
fixed in Philadelphia institutions, memories of the American Found-
ing, and understandings of national character. It is also a spiritual
biography, a genre that may include, as indicated by the contempor-
ary distinction, “spiritual, not religious,” figures who were not known
for their religious observance. If the difference between being spiritual
and being religious applies to anyone, it makes the most sense of
Franklin, who throughout his life had a sense of dependence on divine
favor, invoked God’s assistance, studied the creator’s creation, but
could not accept the tenets of organized Christianity.
The book is dedicated to another historian and now old friend who
may well have grown up by taking Franklin for granted even on field
trips to the Franklin Institute. A native of Lancaster, whose father
taught at the college there named for Franklin (now Franklin and
Marshall), Jeff Charles has been an agreeable and knowledgeable
conversation partner since our acquaintance through the Johns Hop-
kins University history department intramural basketball team. This
book may function as an acknowledgment of the debt that both of our
Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors owed to Ben Franklin when our great
great great grandparents were settling in the New World. It is defin-
itely an expression of my great gratitude to Jeff for countless pleasant
and instructive conversations about everything from intellectual his-
tory and academic politics to golf and India Pale Ale.
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/5/2021, SPi
Introduction: A Different
Kind of Protestant
2 Benjamin Franklin
he was also president of the first abolition society in the United States.
Such details remain in the many biographies of Franklin. The best
guides available to children—and parents who read to them—are the
big picture books sold in the young readers sections of bookstores.
There people learn of his reputation as successful businessman, polit-
ician, scientist, inventor, and writer. One of the most popular of these
books is Now and Ben: The Modern Inventions of Benjamin Franklin. The
author, Gene Barretta, catalogs the wide variety of creations to which
Franklin applied his practical know-how, from starting a borrowing
library and a public hospital to inventing bifocals and the odometer.
For Barretta, Franklin is the original Horatio Alger with a heavy dose
of Thomas Edison—the ordinary citizen whose intelligence, hard
work, and common sense not only improved ordinary Americans
lives but even made America where hard work paid dividends. Frank-
lin’s business acumen, skills as a writer and editor, intellectual curios-
ity, and practical know-how more often provide a model for “making
it” in America than his skills in government reveal the nation’s polit-
ical assumptions.
However Americans remember Franklin, his accomplishments
went well beyond his humble beginnings. He was the son of a devout
Puritan Boston family whose father, Josiah, originally planned for Ben
to become a minister. Second thoughts led Josiah to apprentice his
youngest son (and fifteenth child by two wives) to another son, James,
for indentured service in a print shop. Disputes between James and
Ben prompted the younger brother to run away to Philadelphia. After
a few years of mishaps, which led to a year-long adventure in London,
Franklin started his own printing business and eventually his own
newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. Over the next two decades, Frank-
lin became a prosperous business owner and reliable neighbor. In his
spare time, he formed civic associations, invented gadgets, experi-
mented with nature, and proffered advice (“time is money”) that still
instruct and inspire the children who read books like Now and Ben.
By the 1750s, his leadership within the city catapulted him into
Pennsylvania politics at a time when the British Empire’s holdings in
North America were under threat. From the mid-1750s until his death
in 1790, Franklin became the crafty statesman who negotiated first
with the British and then the French to secure the agreeable outcome
of American independence. His status as the eldest of the nation’s
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/4/2021, SPi
4 Benjamin Franklin
with clear hierarchies and boundaries. The same applies to efforts to
characterize him as a specific kind of religious person. Franklin was an
amateur polymath with an endless curiosity about most areas of
human existence. The attitude behind his fascination was that of a
tinkerer and inventor—someone who looked for the way the universe
worked and how human beings lived together. Discovering those
mechanisms was to arrive at truth. Though he dabbled in philosophy,
Franklin was no deep or systematic thinker. The same point applies to
Franklin’s understanding and intuition about God, human nature,
and the spiritual world.
Indeed, the chief characteristic of Franklin was not intellect but will.
He was by any measure a busy fellow. His years as a tradesman were
hardly routine given the fluctuations of the colonial economy. Once
he left Boston, where he had family ties to fall back on, Franklin
needed to rely on his own cleverness and industry, both of which
were considerable. His success as a printer, combined with various
and sundry measures to make Philadelphia more liveable, positioned
Franklin well once he retired at the age of forty-two to become a
significant voice in local, national, and international politics. All along
the way, Franklin was an avid reader of everything from philosophy to
market reports, and wrote and published serious and light essays and
verse (often pseudonymously). Of the Founding Fathers, Franklin
stands out as the one with the most varied interests, who knew the
world of commerce and street life firsthand, the one with whom you
want to have a drink (except he was not a drinker). He did not avoid
religion, neither did he find faith repugnant. He observed spiritual
matters, spotted the usefulness of some, the folly of others, and looked
for those beliefs and morals by which he could improve himself and
the society in which he lived. Such betterment was not a means of
hastening a peaceful and just society. It was more on the order of
getting by with as little unpleasantness as possible.
The approach to Franklin’s spiritual life taken in the context of
what follows starts with the historical reality that in colonial North
America avoiding Christianity was impossible. Protestantism was in
the background—always there but not something that demanded
serious attention or devotion. As an active participant in that
society—on so many levels—Franklin himself functioned as a Prot-
estant. He was certainly averse to Puritanism’s “hot” faith. But he held
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/4/2021, SPi
6 Benjamin Franklin
If Ben Franklin had grown up Roman Catholic or Jewish, he might
qualify as a non-observant Catholic or cultural Jew. He might even fit
Goia’s second group—someone who made no dramatic exit. But
Franklin grew up in a branch of Protestantism that lacks categories
for non-practicing persons other than skeptic, agnostic, unbeliever, or
heretic. For most descendants of the Reformation, religious adherence
is an either/or proposition—either in communion or not. This
became all the more the norm for Protestants after the born-again
experience became popular (in many circles) thanks to Franklin’s
friend, George Whitefield. It was also true of Protestants during the
Reformation when the lines were drawn between standing either with
the pope and emperor, or with the “true” church.
Nevertheless, non-observant or cultural Protestantism makes sense
of many aspects of Franklin’s life and avoids the typically strained
attempt to put him in the appropriate religious box. For students of
the past who work on big canvasses, the affinities between Protestant-
ism and modern cultural developments are legion. On the occasion of
the Reformation’s five hundredth anniversary, for instance, political
theorist, Francis Fukuyama, legendary for his thesis about “the end of
history,” saw Protestantism as responsible for a shift in the West from
social control through hierarchical structures to an ethos of personal
responsibility mediated through congregations, families, and other
local or communal institutions. He observes that in Protestant coun-
tries like the Netherlands, crime rates, divorces, and social disorder
declined not because the modern nation-state had such effective
means of imposing control but because lesser authorities in commu-
nities took up the task of socializing children and enforcing moral
codes.5 So too Niall Ferguson, hailed by some as the “greatest histor-
ian of his generation,” revises Max Weber’s thesis about the Protestant
work ethic to argue that the Reformation cultivated literacy, frugality,
and industry in ways that allowed Protestant countries to develop
faster economically than Roman Catholic ones. His six “killer apps”
(applications) that allowed the West (for good and ill) to dominate the
world—decentralization, natural science, property rights, medicine,
the proliferation of consumer goods, and the work ethic—all were
bound up with innovations that Protestants either welcomed or did
not actively oppose.6 Not to be outdone, Samuel P. Huntington, one
of the most highly regarded political scientists of his generation,
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/4/2021, SPi
8 Benjamin Franklin
sometimes drawn between the sacred canopy that somehow unified
medieval Europe and the cosmic disenchantment often attributed to
Protestantism is worth noticing. Although still operating with expect-
ations for Christendom even at a local level, Protestants did restrain
the ambitions and power of church officers in several ways. The
doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture meant that pastors should not
in their proclamations go beyond the Bible. The recognition of insti-
tutions like marriage, not as a sacrament, but as a civil arrangement,
was another change that limited the church’s reach. Secular vocations
were worthwhile, not in sacramental ways but as part of divine
providence and the created order. In other words, the Reformation,
both explicitly in its teachings about the Christian life and implicitly in
the way it redrew the lines of church and society, elevated ordinary,
common, or secular life.
In fact, by making a fundamental distinction between the natural
world of creation and providence on the one side and the sacred world
of Scripture, worship, and church membership on the other, Protest-
ants freed the spheres of commerce, politics, language, and science to
grow by standards internal to those spheres rather than having to
square practices with Christian teaching about salvation. Protestant-
ism made it possible to excel as a printer without having to check with
church authorities about editorial content, setting prices for material
or sales, or most importantly, thinking salvation depended on work.
For all of the German sociologist, Max Weber’s, fascination with the
doctrine of predestination and the ways that Protestants supposedly
proved their salvation by worldly success, he missed the genius of the
Reformation’s doctrine of salvation. Although a Roman Catholic
printer might see his work as inferior to the holy life that monks and
priests pursued and know that purgatory was a time to overcome the
deficiencies of a life lived in the secular world, a Protestant printer who
believed the doctrine of justification by faith alone experienced no
worries (in theory) about whether his work was keeping him from
heaven. Not only was the printing business not sinful (inherently), but
it was also a way of showing gratitude to God for a salvation that
depended solely on divine grace. For Protestants work became service
to God and love of neighbors while waiting for Christ’s return.
If Franklin qualifies as a cultural Protestant, he did so by receiving
and applying much of what Protestants taught about work and study
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/4/2021, SPi
10 Benjamin Franklin
about the world outside church life. He was neither devout nor agnostic
but maintained a belief in God as the powerful governor of human
affairs and in an afterlife when people would reap either rewards or
punishments for the lives they had lived. This framework equipped him
to go from obscure and humble origins to one of the eighteenth
century’s most accomplished persons. As much of a cliché as pulling-
himself-up-by-his-bootstraps is, his advice, wit, and striving say as much
about Protestantism as it does about American character.
Franklin as “cultural Protestant” actually repeats an argument that
Perry Miller made almost sixty years ago. The Harvard University
scholar who almost single-handedly put Franklin’s contemporary,
Jonathan Edwards, on the map of U.S. intellectual history, made a
point about the cultural significance of Puritanism when he claimed
that Edwards and Franklin belonged to a “once unitary tradition” that
had split by the early eighteenth century. Each man strove for and
attained, according to Miller, “a clarity, simplicity, directness” of style
that was “the lasting impress of the Puritan spirit.” This manner went
well beyond literary expression. It was a mentality that emanated from
“a revulsion against what Protestants held to be the unprofitable
monasticism of the Medieval Church.” In contrast to priests and the
religious, Puritans countered with vocation or the idea that every
legitimate secular activity “was as much a religious exercise as any
other.” Indeed, for Puritans “the same rationale served in either
ditch-digging or manufacturing as in the physical act of putting words
on paper: nobody was doing it to amuse himself. . . . He was doing the
job in obedience to the commands of God, or of conscience, or of
probity.” Miller argued that although Franklin “blithely put aside the
theology” that Edwards explained in the study and pulpit, the Phila-
delphian exemplified the Puritan way of life “every day of his life.”9
Notes
1. Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York:
Penguin, 2004), 30.
2. Thomas S. Kidd, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 4, 6.
3. Joseph Epstein, “Funny, But I Do Look Jewish,” in Wind Sprints: Shorter
Essays (Edinburg, VA: Axios Press, 2016), 568, 570.
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 22/4/2021, SPi
Hanna hätkähti.
»Miten niin?»
»Rouva Bergin…»
»Oh ei, hyvä rouva, se menisi yli voimieni. Enempää kuin yhtä,
enintään kahta oppilasta en voi opettaa.»
Hanna nousi.
»Rouva…»
»Se on aikomukseni.»
»Kyllä.»
»Hyvin musikaalinen.»
Seuraavana päivänä aikaisin hän meni rouva Bergin luo. Tämä oli
juuri saapunut toimistoon ja luki saapunutta postia.
»Mitenkä niin? Totta kai teillä on joku tuttu, joka tuntee teidät ja
johon te voitte vedota?»
»Ei, rouva Berg, minä olen outo täällä. Te ette eilen: kysynyt
sellaisista mitään ettekä myöskään sanonut, että niitä tarvitaan…»
»Ei — ketään.»
»Tosin kyllä, mutta jos teillä on syytä salata perheenne nimi, niin
syy voi olla sitä laatua, ettette ole sopiva kasvattamaan nuoria
tyttöjä, ja edesvastuu olisi minun. Kas tässä, neiti, on
sisäänkirjoitusrahanne… Olen pahoillani, että olen pakotettu
poistamaan teidät kirjoistani.»
Mutta kyyneleet eivät auta. Hanna ajatteli sinne ja tänne. Mitä hänen
oli nyt tekeminen. Oh, hänen elämäntarinansa ei ollut omiaan
herättämään myötätuntoa. Hän oli aivan masennuksissa rouva
Bergin sanoista: »jos teillä on syytä salata perheenne nimi, niin syy
voi olla sitä laatua, ettette ole sopiva kasvattamaan nuoria tyttöjä.»
Ja asianlaita olikin niin. Hänhän oli rikollinen, langennut. Kuinka hän
ei ollut ajatellut tätä ennen, mitenkä hän oli voinut pitää itseään
siveänä ja ylväänä ja unohtaa, että vaimo, joka jättää miehensä
heittäytyäkseen rakastajansa syliin, on viimeinen, jonka hoitoon äiti
uskoo nuoret tyttönsä?
Hanna.»
»Ei tässäkään.»
Raskain mielin Hanna poistui ja lohdutti itseään sillä, että
huomenna onnistuu paremmin.
Sitten hän avasi Dori tädin kirjeen. Tätä hän juuri oli niin
levottomasti odotellut. Hän levitti paperin. Siinä oli vain muutamia
rivejä otsakirjoituksetta. Ensi silmäykseltä Hanna saattoi jo huomata
ettei kirje tuonut lohtua. Kirjeen ulkonäöstä voi jo päättää, mitä se
tuo, vaikkei se vielä ole puhunutkaan. Kenraalitar kirjoitti todellakin
seuraavasti:
»Missä on vaimosi?»
»Oletko suunniltasi?»
»Olin silloin, kun uskoin nuoren vaimo raukkani..» Hänellä oli kova
sana huulilla, mutta hän hillitsi itsensä… »maailmannaisen
huostaan.»
»Portinvartian vaimo näki hänen hiipivän pois, eikä hän ole tullut
takaisin. Herra on itkenyt koko yön tuolla; saatoin kuulla sen oven
läpi. Vasta aamulla hän meni sänkykamariin ja heittäytyi vuoteelle —
ja olen nähnyt, että kaikki laatikot ovat avatut ja että paperipalasia on
lattialla. Aamiaistakaan ei herra ole tahtonut, raukka. Vein hänelle
kahvia, mutta ei hän siihen koskenutkaan.»