Benjamin Franklin and His Gods

Rating:
Summary: Franklin an existentialist?
Review: I really like this book, even though I'm not sure I agree with its spin on Franklin's religion. Walters argues that Ben is a "perspectivist"--basically, a proponent of religious fictions that he knows have no objective basis, but which he thinks are necessary for psychological health and social stability. The case is well presented and nicely written. (Would that all historians wrote as well!) But I can't help thinking that Franklin comes out more of a twentieth-century existentialist than he is--complete with religious angst and identity crisis. What the heck, though. This is one good book. My guess is that it's going to make a lot of people mad--especially those good American Christians who want to think that all the "Founding Fathers" of the USA were also Christians. As Walters demonstrates, it just ain't so.

Rating:
Summary: Franklin an existentialist?
Review: I really like this book, even though I'm not sure I agree with its spin on Franklin's religion. Walters argues that Ben is a "perspectivist"--basically, a proponent of religious fictions that he knows have no objective basis, but which he thinks are necessary for psychological health and social stability. The case is well presented and nicely written. (Would that all historians wrote as well!) But I can't help thinking that Franklin comes out more of a twentieth-century existentialist than he is--complete with religious angst and identity crisis. What the heck, though. This is one good book. My guess is that it's going to make a lot of people mad--especially those good American Christians who want to think that all the "Founding Fathers" of the USA were also Christians. As Walters demonstrates, it just ain't so.

Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: I've read a lot of books about Franklin, but this one is in a class of its own. It's a psycho-biography (kinda) that traces Franklin's religious development from his early childhood through the rest of his life. Nope, he's not the deist we learned about in school. Instead, he's what Walters calls a "perspectivist." If that sounds boring or dry, think again. The book reads like a novel. I definitely recommend this one. It puts a new spin on old Benjamin. My only objection is that sometimes you have to wonder how much of this is Walters, and how much Franklin. So it loses one star.

Rating:
Summary: Caught between two worlds
Review: Kerry S. Walters has written one of the best studies of 18th century religion yet produced. Benjamin Franklin is a difficult subject, in part because as Walters puts it, Franklin "wrote both too much and too little about his religious thought." (p. 4) Different historians read the same documents and come up with radically different interpretations of their meaning. Walters, however, has produced a nuanced study, sensitive to the wider religous context in which Franklin lived his life, and profoundly learned too in the cultural and intellectual developments of the Atlantic enlightenment. By meticuously locating Franklin within this larger context, he has written a work which sheds insight both into Franklin himself, as well as the larger society in which he lived. To do this in 151 pages of lucid and economical prose is quite a worthy achievement.

Walters argues that Franklin's religious views developed in tension between two ultimately irreconciliable religious traditions. On the one hand was the Calvinism of his native Boston, the faith of his father, with its sophisticated Augustinian piety. On the other hand was the "New Learning" which captivated so many polite and cultivated men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, the faith of men like Isaac Newton or John Locke, with its concomitant liberal Christian emphasis on the capacity of human reason to arrive at religous truth. As a young man, Franklin wavered, adhering first to the one and then the other.

As a mature adult, however, Franklin came to accept the ambiguity of his earlier commitments. "Recognizing that a Newtonian-inspired deism was spiritually impoverished, but unable either rationally or emotionally to return to the orthodoxy of his boyhood, he was at loose ends for a few years," Walters argues. But in 1728 Franklin found a way to reconcile the contradiction. "The solution he arrived at--his doctrine of theistic perspectivism--enabled him to escape from the mechanistically sterile cosmos into which he had drifted without falling back into a Calvinist worldview whose central tenets he found unacceptable." (p. 12)

As Walters explains, Franklin's perspectivism stemmed from a belief in an inaccessible God, which humans symbolically represent to themselves in order to establish an emotional and intellectual relationshop with the divine. This means that while God *is*, there are various human representations of God as well. "These anthropomorphized conceptions of the divine," Walters writes, "serve as the foci for personal adoration as well as sectarian theologizing." (p. 10) The result, then, is a commitment to religious toleration because human representions of the divine are culturally and historically bounded. Human religous traditions, to the extent that they share the same purposes, contain some worth.

In arguing for this understanding of religion--an understanding which arises from the tension between the two religious traditions within which Franklin was working--Walters can explain Franklin's religous statements with a cogency missing from earlier accounts. While Walter's statement of Franklin's perspectivism may sound superficially anachronistic, that is a misreading of this work. This is a terrific exercise in intellectual and relgious history, and Walter's demonstrates convincingly the historical origins in Franklin's thought of the theology he discusses.

Rating:
Summary: Caught between two worlds
Review: Kerry S. Walters has written one of the best studies of 18th century religion yet produced. Benjamin Franklin is a difficult subject, in part because as Walters puts it, Franklin "wrote both too much and too little about his religious thought." (p. 4) Different historians read the same documents and come up with radically different interpretations of their meaning. Walters, however, has produced a nuanced study, sensitive to the wider religous context in which Franklin lived his life, and profoundly learned too in the cultural and intellectual developments of the Atlantic enlightenment. By meticuously locating Franklin within this larger context, he has written a work which sheds insight both into Franklin himself, as well as the larger society in which he lived. To do this in 151 pages of lucid and economical prose is quite a worthy achievement.

Walters argues that Franklin's religious views developed in tension between two ultimately irreconciliable religious traditions. On the one hand was the Calvinism of his native Boston, the faith of his father, with its sophisticated Augustinian piety. On the other hand was the "New Learning" which captivated so many polite and cultivated men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, the faith of men like Isaac Newton or John Locke, with its concomitant liberal Christian emphasis on the capacity of human reason to arrive at religous truth. As a young man, Franklin wavered, adhering first to the one and then the other.

As a mature adult, however, Franklin came to accept the ambiguity of his earlier commitments. "Recognizing that a Newtonian-inspired deism was spiritually impoverished, but unable either rationally or emotionally to return to the orthodoxy of his boyhood, he was at loose ends for a few years," Walters argues. But in 1728 Franklin found a way to reconcile the contradiction. "The solution he arrived at--his doctrine of theistic perspectivism--enabled him to escape from the mechanistically sterile cosmos into which he had drifted without falling back into a Calvinist worldview whose central tenets he found unacceptable." (p. 12)

As Walters explains, Franklin's perspectivism stemmed from a belief in an inaccessible God, which humans symbolically represent to themselves in order to establish an emotional and intellectual relationshop with the divine. This means that while God *is*, there are various human representations of God as well. "These anthropomorphized conceptions of the divine," Walters writes, "serve as the foci for personal adoration as well as sectarian theologizing." (p. 10) The result, then, is a commitment to religious toleration because human representions of the divine are culturally and historically bounded. Human religous traditions, to the extent that they share the same purposes, contain some worth.

In arguing for this understanding of religion--an understanding which arises from the tension between the two religious traditions within which Franklin was working--Walters can explain Franklin's religous statements with a cogency missing from earlier accounts. While Walter's statement of Franklin's perspectivism may sound superficially anachronistic, that is a misreading of this work. This is a terrific exercise in intellectual and relgious history, and Walter's demonstrates convincingly the historical origins in Franklin's thought of the theology he discusses.