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In September of 1800, in the furies of Thomas Jefferson’s initial presidential campaign, the Federalist Gazette of the United States editorially branded the 57-year-old Virginian as “an enemy to pure morals and religion, and consequently an enemy to his country and his God.” This biting observation teaches us at least two things: (1) that in 1800, religion was a lively and passionate concern among Americans; and (2) that in a political campaign, not every word is to be swallowed whole!

In fact, Jefferson was a religious man, as were the other founding fathers—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison. Though none could be considered orthodox Christians (all were products primarily of the Enlightenment), none of them was “an enemy to God.”

The Boston-born sage of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), was the most lovable of the founders. Wise, witty, gregarious, curious, ingenuous, Franklin won admirers both at home and abroad. Though sometimes claimed by the Presbyterians or Episcopalians, Franklin can be rightly classified—with all our other founders—only as a deist or freethinker. That is, he would construct a creed for himself, not recite one created by others. He would test all by the mark of common sense and find his revelation not in the Bible but in Reason and Nature (always capitalized by Enlightenment thinkers).

On these grounds, Franklin strongly affirmed the existence of God, the freedom of human beings to make their own choices, and the potential value of institutional religion as a teacher and enforcer of a high moral code. But churches that focused exclusively on dogma and ignored morals infuriated Franklin. He denounced and satirized them and emphatically separated himself from them.

Faith was the proper path to virtue, not a diversion from being “a good parent, a good child, a good husband, or wife, a good neighbor or friend, a good subject or citizen, that is, in short, a good Christian.” Faith was the instrument, not the end.

Puritan Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, knew of Franklin’s deist leanings, but wanted, if possible, to pin down the nimble-footed freethinker to some basics. In friendship Stiles asked for some kind of creedal confession, however limited. Franklin, who said that this was the first time he had ever been asked, on March 9, 1790, readily obliged:

“Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe: that he governs the world by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we can render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal and will be treated with justice in another life respect[ing] its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion, and I regard them as you do, in whatever sect I meet with them.”

In addition, Stiles wanted to know specifically what Franklin thought of Jesus: Was Franklin really a Christian or not? Franklin responded that Jesus had taught the best system of morals and religion that “the world ever saw.” But on the troublesome question of the divinity of Jesus, he had along with other deists “some doubts.” It was an issue, he said, that he had never carefully studied and, writing only five weeks before his death, he thought it “needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opport[unity] of know[ing] the truth with less trouble.” It would be difficult to burn a heretic like that.

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