Life Hacking Gone Wrong The Story of Benjamin Franklin

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:05.720 | We live in the age of life hacking, the art of accumulating tricks and

00:00:10.120 | skills to increase our personal productivity.

00:00:13.240 | And many of us have heard tips from life hackers and

00:00:15.440 | many of us want to be life hackers ourselves.

00:00:18.480 | We're drawn to anything that promises to shortcut our work or

00:00:21.000 | to make our communication more accurate and efficient or

00:00:24.480 | to help us remember and recall information at just the right time in life.

00:00:29.080 | The goal of life hacking is productivity.

00:00:32.200 | So we mark off little areas of our life or little behaviors and

00:00:35.440 | we reduce them to certain actions.

00:00:37.520 | Actions that can be sped up and simplified and improved by new techniques.

00:00:43.200 | Around the promises of these new practices has arisen a whole industry of

00:00:47.440 | life hacking websites and podcasts and best selling books and of course,

00:00:50.880 | bushels and bushels of smartphone apps.

00:00:54.920 | Rising in the ranks of all stars in the field of life hacking are people like

00:00:58.880 | Tim Ferriss, a man who willingly offers himself up as a personal guinea pig as he

00:01:03.320 | calls himself.

00:01:04.680 | Ferriss tests an incredibly varied mix of modifications to the patterns and

00:01:08.560 | rituals of our everyday lives.

00:01:10.960 | And his books and podcasts are endlessly interesting as he discovers newer and

00:01:14.840 | better ways to eat and sleep and work and work out.

00:01:18.800 | Along the way, he has adopted the best of the vivid,

00:01:22.200 | pragmatic knowledge of the old stoic philosophers into his own philosophy of

00:01:26.000 | life, but he takes the Stoics with one key modification.

00:01:30.120 | He intentionally leaves behind the theology of the Stoics.

00:01:35.160 | In the life hacking age, you can do such a thing.

00:01:37.160 | You can drop God out of your life equation altogether.

00:01:40.920 | And on the surface, decluttering the divine will lead to no noticeable loss to

00:01:45.440 | the bottom line of personal productivity.

00:01:48.000 | But this discrepancy also exposes the most toxic flaw of life hacking.

00:01:52.800 | We can hack away to save time and at the same time lose our way along the path of

00:01:56.640 | life.

00:01:57.760 | We grow more and more proficient with our daily routines, but we grow less and

00:02:02.280 | less clear of the ultimate purpose and ends of our lives inside God's creation.

00:02:08.600 | It's too easy to hack wonder and devotion and God-centered delight and

00:02:12.240 | glory right out of our lives.

00:02:14.880 | This is when life hacking goes wrong.

00:02:18.440 | Enter Benjamin Franklin.

00:02:20.280 | Franklin is perhaps the most famous life hacker of the 18th century.

00:02:24.440 | He is both a fascinating example of life hacking at its finest and he is a

00:02:28.680 | prominent example of life hacking gone wrong.

00:02:32.440 | To get the story, I connected with author and Baylor historian Tommy Kidd, who

00:02:35.800 | recently finished writing an excellent book titled Benjamin Franklin, the

00:02:38.920 | Religious Life of a Founding Father, which is due out in May of 2017 from

00:02:44.080 | Yale.

00:02:45.080 | Kidd is also the author of George Whitefield, America's Spiritual Founding

00:02:49.520 | Father, published by Yale in 2014, and more recently, American Colonial History,

00:02:55.240 | Clashing Cultures and Faiths, published by Yale this year.

00:02:59.880 | To begin our 45-minute conversation, I asked Kidd for a brief biographical

00:03:04.000 | overview of Benjamin Franklin's life and his accomplishments.

00:03:07.320 | Here's what he said.

00:03:09.520 | Well, he's really truly a remarkable person.

00:03:12.920 | I mean, at so many levels.

00:03:14.760 | I mean, he's a great inventor and scientist.

00:03:18.360 | He is one of the great innovators in the printing industry.

00:03:23.080 | He's a critical diplomat for the American colonies and then the newly independent

00:03:29.040 | United States, and I think is rightly seen as a true American genius and world

00:03:37.640 | genius scientifically and in all of his innovations along the lines of, you know,

00:03:43.960 | maybe like an Einstein or a Steve Jobs in a more contemporary world.

00:03:49.080 | You know, I knew all that going into writing this book, but I was sort of

00:03:54.520 | freshly blown away by what a Renaissance man he is, and I think is just gifted by

00:04:03.400 | God, I believe, uniquely with all these natural gifts to discover and innovate.

00:04:10.520 | He's just an incredible person, and because he lives for such a long time into his

00:04:14.760 | 80s, which in the 18th century is an awfully long time to live, he's able to do just

00:04:20.880 | amazing things coming out of a pretty humble background.

00:04:24.880 | So I really don't think that you can overstate the importance of Benjamin Franklin

00:04:30.440 | in American and in European history.

00:04:32.600 | No, certainly not.

00:04:34.840 | He is from a fairly humble background, in fact.

00:04:38.000 | In his rise in the world, how far low did he begin, how far up did he rise?

00:04:42.920 | Yeah, well, he grew up in a modest Puritan family in Boston.

00:04:51.120 | They came to--his father came to Boston in the late 17th century, and Ben Franklin

00:04:57.760 | is born in the early 1700s, and just a--you know, tradespeople, regular folks in

00:05:06.120 | Boston, not elite at all.

00:05:09.400 | They did have some thoughts because they knew that Benjamin Franklin was brilliant.

00:05:16.680 | That was easy to see in him as a boy, and so they thought maybe they would send him

00:05:22.200 | to Harvard College, but Harvard was at that time in the early 1700s almost exclusively

00:05:30.060 | a school for training pastors.

00:05:32.400 | And I think they also--his parents also started to realize maybe by his early teens that he

00:05:39.040 | was developing some skepticism about traditional faith, and I think that may have played a

00:05:44.600 | role in them scuttling the plans for him to go to Harvard.

00:05:48.200 | And so he had very limited formal education and didn't go to college, like many of the

00:05:54.320 | founding fathers in America that never went to college.

00:05:58.680 | But that doesn't mean he wasn't educated.

00:06:00.880 | I mean, he was deeply educated and literate and a voracious reader.

00:06:06.560 | I think his parents certainly wanted him to read the Bible, and he did that a lot.

00:06:12.840 | One of the things we see about Franklin is that even though he had some skepticism about

00:06:18.680 | traditional Christian doctrine, it is not because he was ignorant about the Bible.

00:06:23.440 | He knew the Bible backwards and forwards, had learned it in his home growing up, and

00:06:29.600 | then just read everything he could get his hands on as a teenager and a young man.

00:06:35.480 | That's part of the reason why he went into the printing business is because he liked

00:06:39.560 | the idea of being able to have access to a lot more books for free.

00:06:44.520 | And so that's how he became a printer's apprentice.

00:06:48.720 | First he was an apprentice to his older brother in Boston, and then they had a falling out

00:06:54.180 | and he ended up running away from his brother's print shop and going from Boston to Philadelphia.

00:07:01.880 | But in those years as a teenager, he actually was working as an indentured servant, which

00:07:07.480 | is a kind of a temporary slave basically in those days.

00:07:11.280 | So he had a pretty rough upbringing by our standards, even though he came from a very

00:07:19.280 | serious Christian family.

00:07:21.040 | >>Steve: That's pretty rough.

00:07:24.200 | So how unlikely is his story?

00:07:27.160 | >>Dr. Mildner: It wasn't totally unprecedented, although Franklin's story is quite unusual,

00:07:34.640 | and I think it has to do with, again, his natural gifts, God-given gifts in entrepreneurship

00:07:42.840 | and invention.

00:07:44.480 | I think among the other founders, you know, Alexander Hamilton has a little bit of a story

00:07:49.440 | like that comes from a much more difficult family situation, born to unmarried parents

00:07:55.840 | in the Caribbean.

00:07:58.200 | And then, you know, a pastor and some other sponsors take an interest in Hamilton and

00:08:02.720 | manage for him to be able to go to King's College in New York City that later became

00:08:07.480 | Columbia.

00:08:08.480 | So, I mean, if you make the right contacts and you're able to do work hard and depend

00:08:14.620 | on your innate brilliance, I think that that story, at least among whites, I mean, it's

00:08:22.120 | very, very difficult if you're African-American or Native American to make those kind of advances

00:08:27.600 | in that period.

00:08:29.000 | But I mean, America, they talk about America and especially Pennsylvania as being the best

00:08:36.080 | poor man's country in the 18th century.

00:08:39.240 | And I think there is a little bit more of an opportunity for social advancements because

00:08:43.680 | you don't have that entrenched aristocracy in America the same way you do, for instance,

00:08:48.960 | in England.

00:08:49.960 | Lewis: Franklin takes good advantage of his opportunities.

00:08:54.680 | Fast forward to the end of his life.

00:08:57.280 | At the time of his death, what would have been said of him?

00:09:00.000 | What were maybe the top four achievements of Franklin's lifetime?

00:09:03.600 | Richard: I think his innovations as a printer.

00:09:08.320 | He is easily the most successful printer in America in the 1730s and '40s, so much so

00:09:17.360 | that he's able to retire from printing very early because he's made a fortune.

00:09:22.640 | Then his scientific experiments, in particular his experiments in electricity and the nature

00:09:30.280 | of lightning.

00:09:32.360 | He's most famous for this experiment that he did where he flew a kite into a thunderstorm

00:09:38.000 | and was able to draw off an electrical charge from the electrified kite string.

00:09:44.440 | That experiment is not only a part of American scientific lore and so forth, but it really

00:09:51.160 | did draw international attention for him, so much so that he won the Copley Medal from

00:09:59.200 | the Royal Society in England, which was kind of the equivalent of winning the Nobel Prize

00:10:04.640 | at the time.

00:10:05.640 | It was just a huge deal.

00:10:07.400 | So he really, as kind of a side project almost, he made these incredible scientific discoveries

00:10:13.840 | in electricity.

00:10:16.480 | He got awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

00:10:21.360 | After that point, he was always called Dr. Franklin.

00:10:25.600 | That's where that name came from.

00:10:27.320 | Then finally, certainly his diplomatic work.

00:10:31.600 | He spent most of the second half of his life either in England or in France as a diplomat.

00:10:39.600 | The great success there was his negotiation of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which brought

00:10:47.520 | an end to the American Revolution and granted the new American nation its independence on

00:10:53.560 | very favorable terms for the American nation.

00:10:56.960 | In a lot of ways, I think the Treaty of Paris is still considered the greatest diplomatic

00:11:02.880 | achievement in all of American history.

00:11:06.080 | He wasn't the only one working on that, but he was probably the lead diplomat for America.

00:11:11.720 | It's just stunning that any one person would have these kinds of accomplishments in a single

00:11:18.440 | lifetime.

00:11:19.440 | >>Joseph: So Franklin grew up in a Puritan home.

00:11:22.400 | He was familiar with the Bible, but he lived in a time of hostile religious debate between

00:11:29.680 | Christians, a lot of infighting.

00:11:31.080 | Do you think this infighting soured him to the faith or what impact did it have on him?

00:11:36.840 | >>Ted: He, like a lot of people who are influenced by what we broadly call the Enlightenment

00:11:43.080 | of the 18th century, believes that there are good things about religion and Christianity,

00:11:49.840 | but they have seen that as practiced, going back to certainly the Reformation, the wars

00:11:56.720 | of religion that were happening in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, often between Protestant

00:12:02.440 | and Catholic power, fighting within Puritan churches, Congregationalist and Presbyterian

00:12:09.360 | denominations, expulsions of pastors.

00:12:14.000 | He got involved in a very technical theological debate, public debate in the 1730s over a

00:12:22.240 | favorite pastor of his in Philadelphia who was being disciplined by the Presbyterian

00:12:27.320 | denomination over what Franklin thought were just some pointless theological issues.

00:12:33.160 | I think some other Christians might think that they were actually pretty important,

00:12:37.840 | but he focused on why can't we just live out Christianity and Christ's teachings on ethics

00:12:48.200 | and morality and the Beatitudes and so forth, and set aside or deemphasize these doctrinal

00:12:56.040 | disputes about issues like justification and the atonement and whether we should require

00:13:04.400 | assent to the Westminster Confession of Faith and these kind of things.

00:13:08.880 | He just grew up with these kind of controversies, and I think for some good reasons got tired

00:13:15.000 | of it and wondered whether you could have a much more ethically focused kind of Christianity

00:13:21.960 | that was much less doctrinal.

00:13:25.800 | And so I think that childhood and then young adult kind of experience with those sorts

00:13:30.880 | of controversies and just a knowledge of history and the wars of religion helped to give him

00:13:38.080 | a skeptical view not only of certain doctrines but kind of doctrinalism and thought that

00:13:45.600 | Christianity should go a different way.

00:13:49.400 | On that note, you write this quote, "Franklin was a pioneer of a distinctly American kind

00:13:55.320 | of a religion, doctrineless, moralized Christianity."

00:14:01.640 | I don't think as Americans we see this as our contribution to the world, but it really

00:14:06.640 | it is.

00:14:07.640 | I mean, how revolutionary was this in his day?

00:14:10.320 | Yeah, I mean, he's one of the founding fathers of this kind of religion, and I think doctrineless,

00:14:18.680 | moralized Christianity, if that is still Christianity, which is kind of an open question in my book,

00:14:25.280 | you know, that's, it's such a common kind of belief system.

00:14:33.320 | I mean, it's not quite a formal religion necessarily for a lot of people, but the folks who have

00:14:40.000 | followed everybody from Dale Carnegie to go back a while to Stephen Covey with Seven Habits

00:14:49.040 | of Highly Effective People to Oprah to Joel Osteen to even, you know, contemporary kind

00:14:56.040 | of, you know, podcasters like Tim Ferriss and so forth.

00:14:59.520 | I mean, this type of belief about your best life now, as Joel Osteen would put it, that

00:15:08.320 | the point is to live the kind of life that, you know, God or your higher power or whatever,

00:15:15.120 | you know, wants you to live right now, and it doesn't really matter that much how you

00:15:19.600 | get there in terms of what you believe.

00:15:22.680 | The point is the quality of your life now.

00:15:27.160 | And the emphasis that this is not only the right way to live, but it's the best and most

00:15:32.200 | effective way to live.

00:15:34.800 | I mean, that is so utterly common if you go back through that list of names and you think

00:15:40.240 | about the incredible titanic best-selling books and popular shows and podcasts and everything

00:15:47.440 | that this kind of philosophy has produced.

00:15:51.560 | And it doesn't necessarily overtly contradict Orthodox Christianity, which is one of the

00:15:59.560 | ways it can be, I think, pernicious.

00:16:03.700 | And so it is so influential, and I think that Franklin is certainly one of the founding

00:16:11.040 | fathers, and often explicitly.

00:16:13.080 | I mean, Stephen Covey's company was called Franklin Covey, right?

00:16:19.040 | Because, you know, this is explicitly drawing on the urtexts of this movement, like Franklin's

00:16:27.320 | The Way to Wealth, like his Father Abraham speech, which it just gives all these proverb-sounding

00:16:35.640 | kind of statements, you know, early to bed, early to rise, and so forth.

00:16:41.640 | You know, no pains, no gains.

00:16:45.480 | You can't even believe some of these things that came from Franklin.

00:16:49.680 | And so it's extraordinarily important in terms of American religion, world religion, but

00:16:58.680 | because it's so pervasive, it's like the air we breathe.

00:17:03.480 | We almost don't notice it because this kind of belief system is so pervasive.

00:17:08.000 | Yeah, that's amazing.

00:17:10.040 | For Franklin, it seems almost as if, for him, the chief end of man is to be productive and

00:17:17.800 | to live virtuously.

00:17:20.000 | Would you agree with that sort of overview?

00:17:21.960 | Yeah, I think that that's right, to be benevolent, to be generous, to be virtuous.

00:17:30.200 | And I think he did think that probably, I do say probably, that there would be a future

00:17:38.240 | judgment by God of our works.

00:17:44.240 | And so he thought that it's the happiest way to live, it's the most effective way to live,

00:17:51.480 | and that in the end, we'll be rewarded by God for our good deeds.

00:17:58.080 | And so this, of course, is turning away from the legacy of Puritanism that would have understood

00:18:04.680 | that we can't do any good deeds without regeneration and this kind of thing.

00:18:10.900 | But I think that Franklin here, again, is saying, "Let's take everything about the ethics

00:18:15.560 | and virtue taught by Christianity, taught by Jesus, and not worry about what he saw

00:18:22.880 | as the divisive doctrine."

00:18:24.760 | So yes, I think the chief end of man is to live a virtuous life.

00:18:30.320 | And he might even sort of say, "Okay, fine, if you want to say, 'And please God in doing

00:18:35.840 | that,'" he might have been willing even to add that.

00:18:39.320 | Yeah, a virtue was huge in colonial America, of course.

00:18:43.720 | How would you compare Franklin's list of virtues with the list of resolutions that was written

00:18:49.520 | by Jonathan Edwards?

00:18:50.520 | I mean, these are two different guys setting out to achieve virtue, but with very different

00:18:55.560 | worldviews.

00:18:56.560 | How would you compare Franklin's list of virtues with Edwards' resolutions?

00:19:00.600 | Yeah, I think that Franklin's idea is very much a virtue born out of effort and discipline,

00:19:11.840 | and that is very much directed towards the only way that Franklin would say that we know

00:19:16.880 | to love God in this life is to do good to people.

00:19:22.960 | And I mean, again, there are shades of differences here.

00:19:27.480 | I mean, you get some things like that out of the Gospels about doing unto the least

00:19:34.400 | of these and so forth.

00:19:36.000 | I mean, those kind of teachings, it's just that someone like Edwards or George Whitefield,

00:19:42.320 | Franklin's longtime friend, would say you're not understanding that the greatest good is

00:19:51.320 | love of God and that our capability for good comes out of regeneration.

00:19:58.440 | I mean, so Whitefield and Edwards would say this kind of man-centered good that doesn't

00:20:05.600 | require any kind of transforming power from God might look good from a worldly perspective,

00:20:12.800 | but because of our sin, our best efforts in this life without any assistance from God

00:20:21.560 | is just filthy rags.

00:20:23.520 | And so I think that Franklin just simply didn't buy that.

00:20:27.200 | I think he just thought, "Well, you just do your best, and you try to be sincere and disciplined

00:20:33.280 | and go after virtue, and God will understand that we fall short."

00:20:39.560 | And so I think Edwards and Whitefield would have said, "Bottom line, what you're missing

00:20:44.360 | is the new birth in Christ and the understanding that because of our sin, God cannot accept

00:20:56.240 | us on the basis of just a lot of effort."

00:20:58.960 | It's no secret that Franklin loved prostitutes.

00:21:03.400 | It's a reality.

00:21:04.400 | I mean, he was not an angel.

00:21:07.000 | How do you think he processed his own lack of virtue?

00:21:11.160 | Well, I think it is easy to see in retrospect, and Franklin knew this too, that virtue that

00:21:20.800 | only depends on your own effort, I think is gonna be necessarily limited in its success.

00:21:26.400 | I mean, that kind of philosophy.

00:21:28.360 | And so when he went to London as a young man, he and some of his friends there really kind

00:21:36.880 | of went wild and took in all that London had to offer in those days, and he really sowed

00:21:46.400 | his wild oats.

00:21:49.520 | And even Franklin came to realize, I think pretty clearly, that he couldn't go on this

00:21:55.520 | way.

00:21:56.520 | I mean, he was running up debts, he was worried about venereal disease.

00:22:03.240 | We don't know who the mother of his child, William, his son William was, but some people

00:22:10.160 | think it may have been a prostitute.

00:22:13.160 | And so he realized that he needed to get his act together.

00:22:18.160 | And so when he came back to America, he sort of put together the system of moral resolution

00:22:24.520 | that was gonna be his guide, he said, for the rest of his life.

00:22:30.620 | The problem is that when you see him come up against temptation, especially in relationships

00:22:38.880 | with women later in life, in middle age and going on into amazingly old age, he had a

00:22:48.720 | series of relationships that were certainly inappropriate with other women for, Franklin

00:22:55.960 | as a married man by then, and it is conspicuous that his talk about his moral system sort

00:23:04.180 | of goes quiet in those years and on those topics.

00:23:09.320 | And we just don't see if it's all up to us, if it's all up to our discipline.

00:23:16.640 | And Franklin will say this at times, you can excuse anything.

00:23:20.400 | Now having said all that, I do want to caution that it's not as if, and Christians who are

00:23:27.840 | listening know this very well, it's not as if being in Christ sort of solves all your

00:23:33.200 | problems with regard to sin or eliminates all your blind spots.

00:23:39.240 | And I talked about this in my biography of George Whitefield, for instance, that George

00:23:44.560 | Whitefield was involved in slavery and the slave trade, and he just didn't see the problem

00:23:51.760 | with it.

00:23:53.760 | And we can see in retrospect that there's all kinds of immoral issues going on with

00:23:59.640 | the slave trade.

00:24:00.840 | So it's not as if I would say, "Oh, if only he had been a Christian, then he would have

00:24:05.400 | lived in perfect holiness," or something like that.

00:24:08.400 | But it is, I think, pretty conspicuous how limited this moral code is when, for instance,

00:24:17.480 | it doesn't stop you, it doesn't even really seem to raise questions for him about the

00:24:22.880 | propriety of the series of relationships he has with married women, women who are much,

00:24:31.480 | much younger than him, you know, really just pretty salacious stuff.

00:24:36.880 | And his moral code just doesn't seem to come into play.

00:24:40.040 | So it's inadequate, I think, at moments where he needed to do much better.

00:24:45.720 | >>Joseph: Okay.

00:24:46.720 | I want to press into the pragmatics a little more.

00:24:50.640 | One writer said Franklin had, quote, "a love for the useful," end quote.

00:24:55.920 | I mean, he was a hacker.

00:24:58.600 | Technology itself can feed pragmatism and a utilitarianism within us.

00:25:04.640 | And I think this is true in our own day.

00:25:06.640 | We life hack our diets and our work habits and our sleep patterns and really all of life.

00:25:13.680 | Everything has an app now.

00:25:15.280 | We can trace the minutia of our day, every calorie, every step that we take.

00:25:20.240 | We can manage our calendars down to the second.

00:25:23.060 | But if we're not careful, life can get boiled down to everything just becomes the right

00:25:27.440 | technique.

00:25:29.200 | And when you see this in America today, how much has Ben Franklin behind this?

00:25:34.640 | What's his role in life hacking today?

00:25:37.160 | >>John: Well, he thought that a life that is maximally effective to do good, there's

00:25:46.240 | another way to put it, about what his life goal was.

00:25:49.760 | And so he wanted to be successful in useful fields.

00:25:55.160 | And so he would discipline himself in terms of use of time.

00:26:01.960 | He was focused on diet.

00:26:03.920 | I mean, everything you might expect out of that kind of life hacking literature, you

00:26:09.600 | know, blogs and so forth today, he was interested in those kinds of issues too because he wanted

00:26:14.680 | to be freed up to be the most successful, effective entrepreneur that he could be, especially

00:26:20.840 | as a young man.

00:26:24.000 | But he said that these things all need to serve benevolent goods.

00:26:28.520 | I mean, you need to be doing good for people and not involved in just trashy pursuits.

00:26:35.400 | And so, I mean, for instance, one of the most famous instances was he had his list of the

00:26:43.680 | virtues.

00:26:45.920 | And he would keep a daily chart for some years of his life that he would say, you know, "Have

00:26:53.000 | I been modest?

00:26:56.000 | Have I controlled my speech?"

00:26:59.480 | And all these kind of – and he's going down the list and checking it.

00:27:02.800 | "Yes, I did all these things today," or "No, I failed here and there."

00:27:07.840 | I'm not sure in that system how you account for pride because it seems to me that if you're

00:27:14.960 | checking off all the boxes about how well you've done, that may undermine the pride

00:27:19.320 | issue.

00:27:20.320 | But anyway, you know, he would try to systematize all these things and say, you know, "I can

00:27:25.600 | count up how well I'm doing and the expectations I hold for myself."

00:27:31.360 | And so tracking it, measuring it, you know, he again is a pioneer on all those kind of

00:27:38.440 | life hacking things.

00:27:39.680 | But I think the difference for him is that he knew that all these things were supposed

00:27:46.960 | to at least feed into virtue.

00:27:49.280 | I'm not sure that all of our life hacking folks, podcasts, bloggers, and everything

00:27:55.160 | today necessarily – I mean, it's often in the background, but because Franklin was

00:28:01.440 | so deeply familiar with the Christian virtues from his upbringing, that just came naturally

00:28:08.360 | to him, and he still felt, I think, obligated to live with responsibilities to that virtuous

00:28:15.480 | code, which he would readily admit he derived from Christianity.

00:28:19.280 | Yeah, that's really a key point, and it seems like he even tried to life hack the

00:28:24.520 | Christian life, too.

00:28:26.480 | You write of Franklin this, "Church attendance had its utility when rightly conducted."

00:28:33.360 | Church attendance had its utility when rightly conducted.

00:28:38.560 | How did the church become for Franklin a form of utility?

00:28:41.280 | Well, I think he thought that most people certainly needed religion, and for him, I

00:28:49.880 | don't think he would have said it had to be Christianity, but I think he would have

00:28:54.880 | conceded that Christianity was – maybe he would have said the most sublime kind of religious

00:29:01.600 | code system of ethics, that it's the best, but it's not necessarily an exclusive thing.

00:29:08.560 | He would have said you need religion to give you a set of morals, a virtuous ideal, and

00:29:15.680 | certainly Christ is a wonderful, virtuous, ideal example for us to follow.

00:29:23.720 | I think he thought that churches brought accountability for ethics and virtue, that churches were

00:29:30.960 | a great way to live out a virtuous life, because churches gave you a way to be engaged in working

00:29:37.800 | with the poor, and churches filled – I mean, in an era when the government performed very

00:29:44.600 | few social welfare functions, I mean, the churches did that.

00:29:49.560 | They worked on education, health care, all kinds of poor relief efforts.

00:29:55.600 | And so he was great with – especially if churches were doing those kind of things,

00:30:00.640 | outreach and ministering to people, Franklin loved that.

00:30:05.480 | This is actually part of the reason why I think Franklin admired George Whitefield,

00:30:09.920 | the great revivalist, so much is that we forget that Whitefield was very well known in his

00:30:18.240 | time for his Bethesda orphanage in Georgia, which was the great charitable project of

00:30:24.800 | Whitefield's career.

00:30:27.040 | And Franklin gave money to the Bethesda orphanage and thought, yes, what we need are these great

00:30:33.040 | social experiments and taking care of the least of these, like orphans.

00:30:39.320 | Franklin was involved in the first hospital in Philadelphia, which – and Franklin's

00:30:44.080 | own publicity was explicitly Christian, justified on explicitly Christian grounds.

00:30:50.520 | So he thought, if that's what church is about, if that's what religion is about,

00:30:55.360 | is about benevolent service, then that's my kind of thing.

00:31:01.000 | If it's about dry doctrine and helping out the institutional church and its pastors

00:31:10.360 | and so forth, he's not keen on that.

00:31:13.920 | And so that's why he thinks, you know, churches are great, and I think he would say we need

00:31:18.600 | churches, but only to the extent that it's encouraging practical virtue.

00:31:24.880 | His theology becomes problematic.

00:31:28.000 | Franklin seemed to have layers of God as kind of a distinct theology.

00:31:33.320 | Explain his theology proper.

00:31:34.800 | How would you explain it to listeners?

00:31:38.440 | Franklin's ideas about God are changing over his lifetime, and they're often speculative.

00:31:47.960 | I mean, it's not as if he has, you know, just this one set of beliefs.

00:31:54.360 | I mean, he often will sort of say, "Well, maybe it's like this," or "I have doubts

00:31:58.720 | about that."

00:32:00.160 | And so it can be very difficult to pin him down about exactly what he does believe and

00:32:05.920 | doesn't believe.

00:32:08.120 | What you're suggesting is that early in life, as a young man, he wrote a document about

00:32:14.840 | articles of belief in which – it's a very strange document – where he speculates about

00:32:22.840 | something that sounds like polytheism, that there's maybe this one great superintending

00:32:30.280 | God, but we don't really have any access to that God, and so that there are these sort

00:32:36.120 | of lesser gods who kind of represent God to us, and that maybe Jesus is sort of one of

00:32:43.600 | these demigods or something like that.

00:32:46.480 | I mean, it's weird stuff, you know, to our perspective, and he really doesn't follow

00:32:53.640 | that up very much.

00:32:55.400 | So it's one of those things about which one of these documents should we take totally

00:32:59.960 | seriously.

00:33:01.520 | But I think the consistent thing, especially once he goes through a pretty radical phase

00:33:07.940 | in his teens and early twenties, and then I think he settles down and basically believes

00:33:16.040 | that virtue's the point of religion, there is a God that probably is like God the Father

00:33:23.440 | in the Bible, that Jesus has given us a supreme code of ethics to follow, that there is almost

00:33:33.720 | certainly an afterlife and a future judgment, and that God is somehow providentially involved

00:33:41.440 | with the world.

00:33:42.440 | And this is a difference between Franklin and some of the more radical deists.

00:33:48.360 | A lot of the English deists in particular said that God was like the cosmic watchmaker,

00:33:54.160 | that he wound the world up and then just left, and that God isn't around anymore.

00:33:59.680 | Franklin had a stronger view of providence than that.

00:34:03.600 | And Franklin even believed, especially later on in life, that prayer probably did some

00:34:09.320 | good if for no other reason than it had a kind of disciplining effect on us.

00:34:15.520 | But this is why Franklin is the one, the solitary figure really, who asked the Constitutional

00:34:22.580 | Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 to open its sessions with prayer.

00:34:28.400 | And it's such a strange scene.

00:34:29.840 | I mean, you think, "Well, this guy's a skeptic and a deist, and yet here he is.

00:34:34.480 | He proposes that the Constitutional Convention open its sessions with prayer, and it's a

00:34:39.360 | motion that they don't adopt."

00:34:41.640 | I mean, what's so amazing to me about it is that the rest of the delegates sort of say,

00:34:46.760 | "Yeah, that's complicated.

00:34:47.760 | Who's going to pray?

00:34:49.360 | Let's not worry about that.

00:34:50.880 | Let's just do our business here."

00:34:52.360 | A lot of Christian popular historians will narrate that story and say, "Oh, look how

00:34:58.480 | wonderful that Franklin proposed prayer," but that they don't give the rest of the story

00:35:02.600 | that they decided not to.

00:35:06.240 | And so Franklin, among the convention delegates, seems to actually believe more in prayer than

00:35:13.160 | most of the other people.

00:35:14.880 | It's strange to pin down on these kind of things.

00:35:18.160 | It's an incredible scene, yeah.

00:35:20.160 | And you open the book with it.

00:35:21.480 | It's so vivid.

00:35:22.920 | And yet God still seems quite impersonal to him.

00:35:26.560 | It seems that Christ, the atoning God-man who shed his blood for sinners, who approaches

00:35:32.720 | and reaches us and who makes a way for us to God, this Christ is really a stumbling

00:35:38.200 | block for Franklin, it seems.

00:35:40.560 | Yeah.

00:35:41.560 | I mean, the wonderful, if troubling, thing about Franklin is that Ezra Stiles, who was

00:35:48.920 | the president of Yale, basically pinned Franklin down about six weeks before he died and said,

00:35:57.240 | "Mr. Franklin, you've done so many wonderful things, but I don't know, Mr. Franklin, that

00:36:02.160 | I've ever heard you say what you think about Jesus."

00:36:08.520 | And Stiles was a sort of basically Orthodox Christian, and he was trying to see if he

00:36:15.800 | could get Franklin to make a profession of faith.

00:36:19.360 | Franklin, it's standard operating procedure with Franklin.

00:36:23.040 | He kind of turns it into a joke.

00:36:25.600 | That's another problem with pinning Franklin down is he'll joke about anything.

00:36:29.840 | And so he says, "You know, I've always had doubts about the deity of Christ.

00:36:37.640 | I've had doubts about the deity of Christ."

00:36:39.760 | But then he says, "But you know, I'm so old now that I might as well not worry about it

00:36:44.200 | because I'm going to find out pretty soon anyway."

00:36:46.480 | Sure enough, several weeks later, he died, and so he found out.

00:36:50.440 | You know, I think that's basically right, that he is just not sure whether he can believe

00:36:58.360 | the Christian tradition and the Scriptures when they say that Jesus was the Son of God.

00:37:06.200 | He's convinced that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but Savior, Messiah, Son of God,

00:37:14.120 | Great Person of the Trinity, you know, he just isn't sure.

00:37:18.720 | And I think that Franklin believes, you know, "Why do I have to make some kind of firm commitment

00:37:24.960 | on things that I'm not sure about anyway?

00:37:28.040 | Why don't we just, again, go back to let's live a loving, benevolent, virtuous life and

00:37:34.000 | let God sort out the doctrinal details?"

00:37:38.960 | He's the sort of person who says, "I'm just going to worry about what I know I can do."

00:37:45.520 | And he does keep God, I think, at arm's length.

00:37:49.000 | I mean, there is this personal prayer guide that he—a devotional guide that he writes

00:37:55.640 | for himself in which he seems to indicate an understanding that God is to be worshipped,

00:38:01.840 | but even there, what he says that we know about God is only revealed in the natural

00:38:07.960 | world, you know, the splendor and the mysteries of the universe.

00:38:13.800 | And that's true.

00:38:14.800 | Again, I mean, these are things that you can find some support for in Scripture, but as

00:38:22.160 | far as revealed knowledge about God, I think Franklin would say, "I just don't know how

00:38:28.600 | much of the Bible I can believe, and so why don't I just stick to the this-worldly, practical,

00:38:35.360 | utilitarian, moral responsibilities and let others worry about doctrinal issues?"

00:38:42.440 | And so there again is where the doctrinalist Christianity comes in, and whether that's

00:38:47.600 | an oxymoron right from the get-go, I think it is.

00:38:52.600 | But he thought that this is sort of the new, enlightened kind of form of Christianity that

00:38:58.920 | he hoped would take root, and, you know, in some ways in American pop culture, in global

00:39:05.960 | pop culture, it certainly has.

00:39:08.720 | I think for Reformed and Evangelical Christians, though, of course, they'll say, "I mean, we

00:39:15.200 | have to worship God in spirit and truth for the things, of course, that are revealed in

00:39:22.760 | the natural world, but that are revealed in Scripture, and that true goodness can't be

00:39:30.520 | lived out without God's power and regenerating work in our lives."

00:39:36.240 | And so that's where I think that a lot of Christians reading my book are going to say,

00:39:43.200 | "Yeah, I mean, in this worldly sense, in just the natural order of things, this guy lived

00:39:48.640 | an admirable, in many ways, remarkable, successful life, but he may have missed the biggest point

00:39:57.360 | of all, which is a relationship, a saving relationship with Jesus Christ."

00:40:01.760 | Yeah, that's tragic.

00:40:04.560 | His friend George Whitefield certainly saw the glory of Christ and spent his life proclaiming

00:40:09.040 | that glory.

00:40:10.040 | What do we know of Whitefield's attempts to reach Franklin with the Gospel?

00:40:13.960 | They had an amazing relationship, because here they are.

00:40:17.600 | I mean, Whitefield, by the time he meets Franklin in the late 1730s, Whitefield has already

00:40:23.360 | become easily the most famous pastor or preacher in the British and American world.

00:40:32.000 | And Franklin really, you know, as they say, he hitched his wagon to Whitefield's star,

00:40:37.000 | right?

00:40:38.000 | He said, "This guy is like anything I've ever seen, and I can make a lot of money off

00:40:42.800 | of this."

00:40:43.880 | So Franklin is publishing all of Whitefield's journals and sermons, and Franklin publishes

00:40:49.240 | anti-Whitefield stuff, too.

00:40:52.640 | It's a big part of the reason why Franklin is able to retire early, is because, I mean,

00:40:57.600 | he made so much money off of Whitefield.

00:40:59.840 | But in that business relationship, then they became friends.

00:41:03.840 | And so they were just amazing letters that they would write back and forth to each other.

00:41:09.120 | And Franklin, you know, he made clear to Whitefield that he appreciated his charitable work and

00:41:16.640 | all this, but that he didn't believe in Christ the way that Whitefield said people needed

00:41:22.720 | to.

00:41:23.720 | And so Whitefield would talk very frankly, write very frankly to Ben about this, and

00:41:30.720 | my favorite letter between them is a letter that Whitefield wrote to him in the 1750s.

00:41:36.320 | Now Franklin has become as famous as Whitefield is, because of Franklin's scientific experiments.

00:41:44.160 | And Whitefield says to him, "You know, Mr. Franklin, I see that you've made all this

00:41:48.800 | wonderful progress in the mysteries of science and electricity.

00:41:54.740 | Now," he said, "I implore you to study the mysteries of the new birth."

00:41:58.680 | Beautiful, that's beautiful.

00:42:02.040 | And you know, Franklin's just always like, "Yeah, you know, I knew that's what you were

00:42:06.240 | going to say to me."

00:42:08.440 | And he never goes over the line of faith, and Franklin writes poignantly in his autobiography

00:42:16.640 | that, you know, Mr. Whitefield would often pray for my conversion, but he never had the

00:42:24.040 | pleasure of believing that those prayers were answered.

00:42:28.560 | Whitefield dies about 20 years before Franklin does, and so the autobiography comes out after

00:42:34.440 | Whitefield's death.

00:42:37.440 | But even after that, even after Whitefield's death, I mean, Franklin would go out of his

00:42:41.240 | way to talk about how much he admired, and not just admired, but loved Whitefield as

00:42:46.240 | a friend.

00:42:47.880 | And so I think it's a wonderful example of somebody, Whitefield, who is a strong believer,

00:42:54.920 | obviously, and the greatest preacher of his time, who is able to maintain this kind of

00:43:01.160 | sweet friendship with a non-believer like Franklin, and not push him away, but also

00:43:07.520 | to be transparent with him about his faith.

00:43:10.600 | It really is convicting, I think, to me about, you know, two such famous, wonderful people

00:43:17.800 | who are not on the same page spiritually, but they're able to maintain that friendship.

00:43:22.840 | It's just a great example on Whitefield's part.

00:43:25.240 | Yeah, and very convicting, Dr. Kidd.

00:43:27.280 | It is always a pleasure, whenever I need the latest celebrity gossip out of the 18th century,

00:43:32.360 | you deliver.

00:43:33.360 | You're like the TMZ of colonial America.

00:43:36.680 | I will receive that, yes.

00:43:38.680 | The man putting up with me today is author and Baylor University historian Tommy Kidd.

00:43:43.200 | We're talking about his excellent book, "Benjamin Franklin, the Religious Life of a Founding

00:43:46.800 | Father," due out in May of 2017 from Yale.

00:43:49.800 | He's also the author of "George Whitefield, America's Spiritual Founding Father," published

00:43:53.440 | by Yale in 2014, and more recently, "American Colonial History, Clashing Cultures and Faiths,"

00:43:59.920 | published this year by Yale.

00:44:01.240 | He is a readable historian that every Christian should be familiar with.

00:44:05.040 | Well, thanks for listening to this special long-form conversation in the Ask Pastor John

00:44:09.240 | podcast series.

00:44:10.240 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and I'll be back on Monday with John Piper, and I'll ask him,

00:44:13.520 | if we have died to sin, why must we kill our sin daily?

00:44:18.320 | We'll see you on Monday.

00:44:20.680 | [end]

00:44:21.180 | [no audio]

00:44:24.180 | [no audio]

00:44:27.180 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Life Hacking Gone Wrong The Story of Benjamin Franklin

Chapters