Benjamin Franklin's Many Gods
His declaration of independence from both deism and Christianity
In 1728, Benjamin Franklin wrote a curious document, “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” that records his religious position. Traditionally interpreted as a straightforward declaration of deism, I argued in my 1998 book Benjamin Franklin and His Gods (University of Illinois Press) that the “Articles”’references to “gods” suggests a much more sophisticated position, one I call “theistic perspectivism.” The “Articles” is Franklin’s emancipatory proclamation of a religious point of view he retained for the rest of his life. It identifies him (to use a perhaps barbarous phrase) as a pre-post-modernist when it comes to religion. It also helps give the lie to the polemical claim that America was founded as “a Christian nation.”
The entire book is, of course, a defense of my interpretation of Franklin’s position. I offer here a summary of its conclusions, taken from a few pages (84-88) of my chapter entitled “The Great Insight.”
Franklin’s emancipatory vision rests on several points.
The first is his steadfast belief in the existence of a God more like a metaphysical first principle than a personal, loving deity whom persons can adore and supplicate. Franklin thinks this clockmaker God’s existence is indisputably suggested by observable design in creation, but a very select kind of design. Most proponents of traditional design arguments point to two features of the natural order from which the existence of a Creator can be inferred: its rationality (orderliness) and its suitability for human flourishing (providence). Franklin bases his implicit acceptance of the design argument exclusively on the claim that the physical universe, ordered as it is by uniform natural law, could not have originated by chance. Because he cannot bring himself to believe that the First Cause is anything more than a distant principle with no knowledge of or concern for humans, he cannot argue for its existence on the grounds that the natural order displays signs of divine benevolence.
Second, Franklin was struck by the psychological and ethical inadequacy of this concept of the divine. An unapproachable God, Franklin suggests in his Autobiography, has little more regulative utility than no God at all. Certainly the more freethinking of his friends had, in Franklin’s estimation, gone bad. This convinced Franklin that the average person needs an incentive to pursue the path of virtue and that the aloof deity of the philosophers is incapable of such inspiration. The First Cause may give rise to intellectual awe, but its divine indifference does not encourage humans to follow courses of action pleasing to God.
Judging from the experiences of his boon companions in the early days, but even more from his own, Franklin also concluded that the distant God of the philosophers is incapable of helping humans arrive at a sense of meaning or purpose in their lives. As a boy, Franklin may have felt suffocated by the ever-present Calvinist God. But later he also came to feel adrift, abandoned by the mechanistic deist alternative. A rudderless existence, Franklin saw, is an unhappy and, most likely, less than virtuous one. Other thinkers in another time may have found a way to guide themselves through life’s journey without God, but such an option was unthinkable for a person like Franklin. He was too steeped in religion since boyhood to find any satisfaction or fulfillment in a godless universe.
Finally, Franklin was struck by the wide diversity of religious belief. He recognized, of course, that other major religious traditions besides Christianity commanded the hearts and allegiances of worshippers. But he was also intrigued by the diversity of sects within the Christian tradition. Anglicans, Presbyterians, Quakers, the Moravians: these and many more denominations, each with its own sectarian inflection, were encountered every day in Philadelphia. Some of these sects, particularly those heavily influenced by Calvinist doctrine, at times infuriated and disgusted him. Others, such as the Quakers and Anglicans, were more agreeable to him. But what began to impress Franklin about this religious pluralism was the core of common belief shared by all the denominations and, indeed, by all the world’s religious traditions, a thread of continuity that bound them together, regardless of their disagreements about specific creeds and doctrine. All accepted the concept of a God who is both creator of the universe and sustainer of life. All believed that virtue was pleasing to this God. All cultivated a sense of purposefulness in their believers.
Now, Franklin the philosopher found himself unable to subscribe rationally to any other concept of God than the First Cause one. This entailed that the only intellectually sound religious position was one of theistic agnosticism, in which God’s existence is affirmed but the possibility of any detailed knowledge about God’s nature is denied. But Franklin was also too perceptive a psychologist to ignore the fact that religious strivings are as much a matter of the heart as the head, that the average person needs a God who can serve as moral inspiration, source of meaning, and comforter in troubled times—that, in short, a thoroughgoing agnosticism about God’s nature and ways is destructive.
Moreover, he was also of a strong experimental bent, and more than willing to judge beliefs and theories on the basis of their practical, regulative consequences. So as he pondered the moral and psychological insufficiency of the First Cause, and with Cato-like indecision asked himself what he should believe, it slowly dawned on him that he and everyone else should and in fact did believe what they needed to in order to sustain themselves spiritually and ethically. In religious matters, in other words, necessity is the mother of invention. This was Franklin’s great insight, one that served as the nucleus of his religious musings for the rest of is life. The “Articles” is an attempt to give devotional expression to it.
This insight—this theistic perspectivism—can be simply stated. Religious traditions, sectarian doctrine, and private beliefs are cultural symbol systems, influenced by historical place and time as well as individual temperament. These systems orient humans by providing them with images of the divine to which they can relate on a personally meaningful basis. Worshippers are not, of course, explicitly aware of the contrived nature of their religious beliefs. They generally consider them to have objective reference, although every religious tradition acknowledges that the essential ineluctability of God entails that human concepts always miss the mark to one degree or another.
In short, Franklin’s great insight is that all religious expressions, except the stark postulation of a First Cause, are stories or symbols—poetic, metaphorical attempts to talk about God and reality in terms that are less forbidding than the coldly impersonal vocabulary of metaphysics. These stories or “perspectives” describe deities that are all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful, and different traditions and denominations within traditions add their own individual accents. They put faces on an anonymous universe, enabling humans to think the unthinkable and grasp the unattainable.
[In the next paragraph, all quoted passages are from the “Articles.”]
These perspectival deities, I submit, are the “gods” in Franklin’s “Articles.” They are reckoned by their worshippers to be “vastly superior to Man,” to be “exceeding wise, and good, and very powerful.” Some people call their god Allah, others Jesus, others Shiva, still others Yahweh. Each of these gods provides its devotees with a personal point of reference in an otherwise vast and indifferent universe. They serve as benevolent “Powers” to whom we can direct our prayers, our hopes, our thanksgivings, and our fears. Because they result from human attempts to express the divine symbolically, they are more accessible to the mind and comforting to the heart than the aloofly abstract Supreme Architect. In this sense they truly are intermediaries between humans and the distant First Cause. But for all that, they are “created Gods,” products of place and time, who “after many Ages … are changed, and Others supply their Places.”
It must not be supposed that Franklin is saying that the gods humans worship are merely anthropomorphic projections, and that religious belief, as a result, is illusory and detrimental. Hobbes and Hume appear to have defended such a position, and Feuerbach and Freud clearly did. But Franklin was no village atheist. He never ceased to believe in the reality of the First Cause, even though he saw its mere existence as little if any comfort to suffering humankind. Nor would he have admitted that religious perspectives are illusory. Because these symbolic representations are founded in and motivated by an intuition of the First Cause’s reality, they are not simple fabrications. Like all symbolic constructions, they stand for and shed light on something other than themselves. Put another way, the gods may not be factual, but this does not make them untrue or meaningless.
Franklin’s gods, and the religious doctrines and dogmas that attend them, are better described as useful fictions than as illusions. They are instruments that aid humans in orienting themselves in the world, but they are not copies of the world, even if their users generally think otherwise. They can be said to possess a functional truth-value. Since their purposes are to maximize orientation, to facilitate a sense of normative purposefulness, and to provide opportunities for worship and succor, theistic perspectives are “true” in proportion to how well they fulfill these functions.
A corollary of Franklin’s conviction that religious perspectives are a necessary way in which humans deal with religious alienation is that some perspectives may be better than others. That this is Franklin’s position is clearly indicated by his approval of certain religious traditions and his strong disapproval of others.
Since religious perspectives are interpretations, their evaluation cannot be based on the same standards by which we appraise “factual” statements. Rather, there are two other criteria that are more properly involved. The first of these is coherence: a good story is one that does not contradict itself. A self-contradiction is inherently implausible, and consequently the credibility of any religious perspective is determined in part by its degree of coherence. The other criterion is utility. As we have already seen, a religious perspective possesses a functional truth-value. It follows from this that the greater the utility displayed by a religious belief—that is, the more meaning and purposefulness it bestows on human existence—the better the belief. One of the reasons Franklin turned his back on the Calvinism of his childhood was because of its emphasis on guilt and fear. In the language of theistic perspectivism, Franklin denied the capacity of that tradition to enhance happiness, virtue, and meaning in is life.