A. O. Aldridge's essay "Benjamin Franklin's Experimental Religion" touches on nearly all the important characteristics of Franklin's religious sentiments. [1] Aldridge accurately stresses the importance that Franklin placed on his personal creed in general (104-05) and on the juxtaposition of intentions with results in particular (111). He reminds us that this creed, a "deism of the heart" (114, 123), rested on a spectrum of different degrees of deism from Christian deism to a cult of the blind watchmaker (105). He maps Franklin's religious beliefs from a reliance on reason working to make sense of the natural world (106). But Aldridge unduly misrepresents important aspects of Franklin's belief system. He downplays Franklin's consistent metaphysical belief in God or Providence, while he often stresses Franklin's attention to the utility of virtue apart from its grounding in Franklin's understanding of God. This paper locates and rectifies these imbalances in Aldridge's essay.

Aldridge is particularly misleading in using the word "experimental" in his title. He makes rather much of Franklin's early musings on theology and metaphysical questions such as free will (101-03). Indeed, Franklin argued himself into a number of different theological positions while he was young, but Franklin later denounced this kind of theologizing, which leads to increasingly petty arguments rather than greater knowledge. As early as 1746, Franklin took an anti-experimental position on metaphysics, using the term "science" with disdain in this context:

Furthermore, once Franklin had settled upon a skeletal set of religious beliefs about God and man's relation to God, he remained faithful to them. While Aldridge suggests that Franklin would from time to time deviate from these basic beliefs (120; Aldridge does not explain what the utility of this practice would be [3]), on the contrary, throughout most of his life [4] Franklin showed remarkably little interest in any experimentation that would further develop his doctrines. [5]

Although Franklin's religious beliefs were not at all experimental in his later life, we can see Franklin's efforts at self-improvement, at least obliquely, as experiments in religious practice. Recognizing that Franklin mapped virtue—serving others—from a desire to serve God, we can read Franklin's forays into moral perfectionism as a process of trial and error with a religious basis. But this is just where Aldridge leaves Franklin without a spiritual grounding. Aldridge emphasizes Franklin's "purely utilitarian reason for seeking virtue," claiming that Franklin did not try to reconcile "his private notion of utility" with his religious doctrine until the relatively late Autobiography (108). Aldridge completely rends Franklin's "personal morality" from his desire to serve God (114). Aldridge ought to have emphasized a greater and much earlier confluence of Franklin's practice of virtue with Franklin's meager but clear beliefs. [6]

Aldridge might have been able to better understand Franklin's use of virtue in his religion, had Aldridge not gotten so caught up in describing Franklin's virtue. To Franklin, the virtues are simply those which lead to "moral Perfection," i.e., those qualities that permit one to do good to others, not least of which are those which fulfill one's own abilities and aspirations (Lemay 1383-85). But Aldridge picks up Norman Fiering's unhelpful classification of the thirteen virtues into the categories of "bourgeois or Protestant capitalist," "classical," and "Roman Catholic and Puritan" (110), he finds himself defending Franklin on the virtue of sincerity against C.-A. Lopez and E. Herbert (110-11), and he wrongly distinguishes the "social or altruistic" virtues from the "personal" ones (114). These divisions are merely arbitrary; Franklin himself notes the arbitrariness of different formulations of the virtues (Lemay 1384). Aldridge's resulting "paradox"—that Franklin's virtues "are limited to personal qualities" while Franklin often writes about social good (113-14)—is a self-inflicted confusion. Thus Aldridge unwittingly unravels his own paradox when he removes the divisions to discuss Franklin's hierarchy of works over faith and Franklin's emphasis on the Aristotelian value of habit in helping to form the virtues (115).

Finally, Aldridge all but ignores Franklin's insistence on real acts of Providence in the world. He claims that "nowhere . . . does Franklin indicate that he believed that the petitioning part of worship . . . would ever change the course of events . . . . he had no faith that prayers would be answered" (116). But one could more easily say that Franklin nowhere indicates that he believed prayer would never change events. In fact, Aldridge seems to desire so much that Franklin did not believe in Providential acts of God, that he shrugs off Franklin's "assurances that . . . prayers during the Revolutionary War had been answered" in order to repeat his point (119). If Franklin's religion was experimental, we likely would expect Aldridge to make reference to the experimental possibilities of intercessory prayer. On the subjects of prayer, virtue, and experimentation in doctrine and in practice, Franklin sports at least as much of an anti-experimental religion as an experimental religion.

1. Lokken, Roy, I. Bernard Cohen, and Bowen Dees, eds., Meet Dr. Franklin (Philadelphia: Franklin Institute Press, 1981), 101-24. Further references to this work appear in parentheses.

2. J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., Benjamin Franklin, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), 435. Aldridge claims that it was only the "esoteric metaphysical topics" that Franklin eschewed (104), but in fact Franklin avoided nearly everything beyond a belief in God's infinite wisdom, power, and goodness (Lemay 165).

3. Aldridge himself undermines his title when he adduces several uncertainties within Franklin's doctrine but not a single attempt of Franklin to test their correctness, and further undermines his title when he tries to sum up his essay with a contradictory conclusion: "Franklin never wavered in believing and in acting upon his belief that 'the most acceptable Service of God was the doing good to Man'" (123).

4. In Paris (ca. 1776-1785), Franklin's "principles on the church, divinity, liberty and equality had not changed since 1723," Faÿ, Bernard, Franklin, The Apostle of Modern Times (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1929), 489.

5. A notable exception, which Aldridge regrettably does not develop further, is Franklin's speculation "that mind or spirit could exist in inert matter [which] would support rather than weaken the argument for the existence of God" (104).

6. It is mainly because of this neglect of the spiritual aspect of Franklin's morality that Aldridge wrongly claims a passage in Franklin's Autobiography as precipitating the following passage in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Chapter VII, "How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Principle of Self-Interest Rightly Understood": "The American moralists do not profess that men ought to sacrifice themselves for their fellow creatures because it is noble to make such sacrifices, but they boldly aver that such sacrifices are as necessary to him who imposes them upon himself as to him for whose sake they are made" (109). Although Franklin many times urges this kind of "self-interest rightly understood" on his readers, he does not couch the virtue in terms of self-sacrifice but of moral self-improvement. A more likely source for Tocqueville's passage, if not also most of the chapter, would be The Federalist Papers, in which sacrifice figures explicitly as an important virtue.