In the midst of the strife and acrimony, Franklin asked, “how has it happened that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings?” This was an odd request for a deist to make. The delegates were struggling to solve the problem of representation in Congress, a dilemma that threatened to derail the convention. Most famously, the elderly Franklin proposed in 1787 that the Constitutional Convention open its meetings with prayer. His speeches and letters were full of allusions to the Bible, and he angrily forecast that God would bring judgment against the British enemy during the American Revolution. “In short I soon became a thorough deist,” Franklin wrote.īut as we follow Franklin through his adult life, he was constantly doing and saying things that didn’t seem very deistic. Franklin thought the arguments for deism were stronger than the Christian polemics that his father preferred.

His worried father gave him some anti-deist tracts to read, but they had a contrary effect than what was intended. But the teenage Franklin’s voracious reading habits made him skeptical about his parents’ Calvinist convictions. Franklin grew up as the child of devout Puritans in Boston, and at one point they considered sending Ben to Harvard for training as a pastor. He was a “deist.” We know so because he tells us in his celebrated Autobiography. The faith of Benjamin Franklin, however, would seem to be an easy call.

Some of the Founders, such as George Washington, spoke highly of religion, but their personal beliefs were unclear.

Was America founded as a Christian nation? Or was the American Revolution mostly championed by Enlightenment skeptics? Americans incessantly debate the role of religion in our nation’s origins.

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