We live in the age of life hacking, the art of accumulating tricks and skills to increase our personal productivity. And many of us have heard tips from life hackers and many of us want to be life hackers ourselves. We're drawn to anything that promises to shortcut our work or to make our communication more accurate and efficient or to help us remember and recall information at just the right time in life.

The goal of life hacking is productivity. So we mark off little areas of our life or little behaviors and we reduce them to certain actions. Actions that can be sped up and simplified and improved by new techniques. Around the promises of these new practices has arisen a whole industry of life hacking websites and podcasts and best selling books and of course, bushels and bushels of smartphone apps.

Rising in the ranks of all stars in the field of life hacking are people like Tim Ferriss, a man who willingly offers himself up as a personal guinea pig as he calls himself. Ferriss tests an incredibly varied mix of modifications to the patterns and rituals of our everyday lives.

And his books and podcasts are endlessly interesting as he discovers newer and better ways to eat and sleep and work and work out. Along the way, he has adopted the best of the vivid, pragmatic knowledge of the old stoic philosophers into his own philosophy of life, but he takes the Stoics with one key modification.

He intentionally leaves behind the theology of the Stoics. In the life hacking age, you can do such a thing. You can drop God out of your life equation altogether. And on the surface, decluttering the divine will lead to no noticeable loss to the bottom line of personal productivity. But this discrepancy also exposes the most toxic flaw of life hacking.

We can hack away to save time and at the same time lose our way along the path of life. We grow more and more proficient with our daily routines, but we grow less and less clear of the ultimate purpose and ends of our lives inside God's creation. It's too easy to hack wonder and devotion and God-centered delight and glory right out of our lives.

This is when life hacking goes wrong. Enter Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is perhaps the most famous life hacker of the 18th century. He is both a fascinating example of life hacking at its finest and he is a prominent example of life hacking gone wrong. To get the story, I connected with author and Baylor historian Tommy Kidd, who recently finished writing an excellent book titled Benjamin Franklin, the Religious Life of a Founding Father, which is due out in May of 2017 from Yale.

Kidd is also the author of George Whitefield, America's Spiritual Founding Father, published by Yale in 2014, and more recently, American Colonial History, Clashing Cultures and Faiths, published by Yale this year. To begin our 45-minute conversation, I asked Kidd for a brief biographical overview of Benjamin Franklin's life and his accomplishments.

Here's what he said. Well, he's really truly a remarkable person. I mean, at so many levels. I mean, he's a great inventor and scientist. He is one of the great innovators in the printing industry. He's a critical diplomat for the American colonies and then the newly independent United States, and I think is rightly seen as a true American genius and world genius scientifically and in all of his innovations along the lines of, you know, maybe like an Einstein or a Steve Jobs in a more contemporary world.

You know, I knew all that going into writing this book, but I was sort of freshly blown away by what a Renaissance man he is, and I think is just gifted by God, I believe, uniquely with all these natural gifts to discover and innovate. He's just an incredible person, and because he lives for such a long time into his 80s, which in the 18th century is an awfully long time to live, he's able to do just amazing things coming out of a pretty humble background.

So I really don't think that you can overstate the importance of Benjamin Franklin in American and in European history. No, certainly not. He is from a fairly humble background, in fact. In his rise in the world, how far low did he begin, how far up did he rise? Yeah, well, he grew up in a modest Puritan family in Boston.

They came to--his father came to Boston in the late 17th century, and Ben Franklin is born in the early 1700s, and just a--you know, tradespeople, regular folks in Boston, not elite at all. They did have some thoughts because they knew that Benjamin Franklin was brilliant. That was easy to see in him as a boy, and so they thought maybe they would send him to Harvard College, but Harvard was at that time in the early 1700s almost exclusively a school for training pastors.

And I think they also--his parents also started to realize maybe by his early teens that he was developing some skepticism about traditional faith, and I think that may have played a role in them scuttling the plans for him to go to Harvard. And so he had very limited formal education and didn't go to college, like many of the founding fathers in America that never went to college.

But that doesn't mean he wasn't educated. I mean, he was deeply educated and literate and a voracious reader. I think his parents certainly wanted him to read the Bible, and he did that a lot. One of the things we see about Franklin is that even though he had some skepticism about traditional Christian doctrine, it is not because he was ignorant about the Bible.

He knew the Bible backwards and forwards, had learned it in his home growing up, and then just read everything he could get his hands on as a teenager and a young man. That's part of the reason why he went into the printing business is because he liked the idea of being able to have access to a lot more books for free.

And so that's how he became a printer's apprentice. First he was an apprentice to his older brother in Boston, and then they had a falling out and he ended up running away from his brother's print shop and going from Boston to Philadelphia. But in those years as a teenager, he actually was working as an indentured servant, which is a kind of a temporary slave basically in those days.

So he had a pretty rough upbringing by our standards, even though he came from a very serious Christian family. >>Steve: That's pretty rough. So how unlikely is his story? >>Dr. Mildner: It wasn't totally unprecedented, although Franklin's story is quite unusual, and I think it has to do with, again, his natural gifts, God-given gifts in entrepreneurship and invention.

I think among the other founders, you know, Alexander Hamilton has a little bit of a story like that comes from a much more difficult family situation, born to unmarried parents in the Caribbean. And then, you know, a pastor and some other sponsors take an interest in Hamilton and manage for him to be able to go to King's College in New York City that later became Columbia.

So, I mean, if you make the right contacts and you're able to do work hard and depend on your innate brilliance, I think that that story, at least among whites, I mean, it's very, very difficult if you're African-American or Native American to make those kind of advances in that period.

But I mean, America, they talk about America and especially Pennsylvania as being the best poor man's country in the 18th century. And I think there is a little bit more of an opportunity for social advancements because you don't have that entrenched aristocracy in America the same way you do, for instance, in England.

Lewis: Franklin takes good advantage of his opportunities. Fast forward to the end of his life. At the time of his death, what would have been said of him? What were maybe the top four achievements of Franklin's lifetime? Richard: I think his innovations as a printer. He is easily the most successful printer in America in the 1730s and '40s, so much so that he's able to retire from printing very early because he's made a fortune.

Then his scientific experiments, in particular his experiments in electricity and the nature of lightning. He's most famous for this experiment that he did where he flew a kite into a thunderstorm and was able to draw off an electrical charge from the electrified kite string. That experiment is not only a part of American scientific lore and so forth, but it really did draw international attention for him, so much so that he won the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in England, which was kind of the equivalent of winning the Nobel Prize at the time.

It was just a huge deal. So he really, as kind of a side project almost, he made these incredible scientific discoveries in electricity. He got awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. After that point, he was always called Dr. Franklin. That's where that name came from.

Then finally, certainly his diplomatic work. He spent most of the second half of his life either in England or in France as a diplomat. The great success there was his negotiation of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which brought an end to the American Revolution and granted the new American nation its independence on very favorable terms for the American nation.

In a lot of ways, I think the Treaty of Paris is still considered the greatest diplomatic achievement in all of American history. He wasn't the only one working on that, but he was probably the lead diplomat for America. It's just stunning that any one person would have these kinds of accomplishments in a single lifetime.

>>Joseph: So Franklin grew up in a Puritan home. He was familiar with the Bible, but he lived in a time of hostile religious debate between Christians, a lot of infighting. Do you think this infighting soured him to the faith or what impact did it have on him? >>Ted: He, like a lot of people who are influenced by what we broadly call the Enlightenment of the 18th century, believes that there are good things about religion and Christianity, but they have seen that as practiced, going back to certainly the Reformation, the wars of religion that were happening in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, often between Protestant and Catholic power, fighting within Puritan churches, Congregationalist and Presbyterian denominations, expulsions of pastors.

He got involved in a very technical theological debate, public debate in the 1730s over a favorite pastor of his in Philadelphia who was being disciplined by the Presbyterian denomination over what Franklin thought were just some pointless theological issues. I think some other Christians might think that they were actually pretty important, but he focused on why can't we just live out Christianity and Christ's teachings on ethics and morality and the Beatitudes and so forth, and set aside or deemphasize these doctrinal disputes about issues like justification and the atonement and whether we should require assent to the Westminster Confession of Faith and these kind of things.

He just grew up with these kind of controversies, and I think for some good reasons got tired of it and wondered whether you could have a much more ethically focused kind of Christianity that was much less doctrinal. And so I think that childhood and then young adult kind of experience with those sorts of controversies and just a knowledge of history and the wars of religion helped to give him a skeptical view not only of certain doctrines but kind of doctrinalism and thought that Christianity should go a different way.

On that note, you write this quote, "Franklin was a pioneer of a distinctly American kind of a religion, doctrineless, moralized Christianity." I don't think as Americans we see this as our contribution to the world, but it really it is. I mean, how revolutionary was this in his day? Yeah, I mean, he's one of the founding fathers of this kind of religion, and I think doctrineless, moralized Christianity, if that is still Christianity, which is kind of an open question in my book, you know, that's, it's such a common kind of belief system.

I mean, it's not quite a formal religion necessarily for a lot of people, but the folks who have followed everybody from Dale Carnegie to go back a while to Stephen Covey with Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to Oprah to Joel Osteen to even, you know, contemporary kind of, you know, podcasters like Tim Ferriss and so forth.

I mean, this type of belief about your best life now, as Joel Osteen would put it, that the point is to live the kind of life that, you know, God or your higher power or whatever, you know, wants you to live right now, and it doesn't really matter that much how you get there in terms of what you believe.

The point is the quality of your life now. And the emphasis that this is not only the right way to live, but it's the best and most effective way to live. I mean, that is so utterly common if you go back through that list of names and you think about the incredible titanic best-selling books and popular shows and podcasts and everything that this kind of philosophy has produced.

And it doesn't necessarily overtly contradict Orthodox Christianity, which is one of the ways it can be, I think, pernicious. And so it is so influential, and I think that Franklin is certainly one of the founding fathers, and often explicitly. I mean, Stephen Covey's company was called Franklin Covey, right?

Because, you know, this is explicitly drawing on the urtexts of this movement, like Franklin's The Way to Wealth, like his Father Abraham speech, which it just gives all these proverb-sounding kind of statements, you know, early to bed, early to rise, and so forth. You know, no pains, no gains.

You can't even believe some of these things that came from Franklin. And so it's extraordinarily important in terms of American religion, world religion, but because it's so pervasive, it's like the air we breathe. We almost don't notice it because this kind of belief system is so pervasive. Yeah, that's amazing.

For Franklin, it seems almost as if, for him, the chief end of man is to be productive and to live virtuously. Would you agree with that sort of overview? Yeah, I think that that's right, to be benevolent, to be generous, to be virtuous. And I think he did think that probably, I do say probably, that there would be a future judgment by God of our works.

And so he thought that it's the happiest way to live, it's the most effective way to live, and that in the end, we'll be rewarded by God for our good deeds. And so this, of course, is turning away from the legacy of Puritanism that would have understood that we can't do any good deeds without regeneration and this kind of thing.

But I think that Franklin here, again, is saying, "Let's take everything about the ethics and virtue taught by Christianity, taught by Jesus, and not worry about what he saw as the divisive doctrine." So yes, I think the chief end of man is to live a virtuous life. And he might even sort of say, "Okay, fine, if you want to say, 'And please God in doing that,'" he might have been willing even to add that.

Yeah, a virtue was huge in colonial America, of course. How would you compare Franklin's list of virtues with the list of resolutions that was written by Jonathan Edwards? I mean, these are two different guys setting out to achieve virtue, but with very different worldviews. How would you compare Franklin's list of virtues with Edwards' resolutions?

Yeah, I think that Franklin's idea is very much a virtue born out of effort and discipline, and that is very much directed towards the only way that Franklin would say that we know to love God in this life is to do good to people. And I mean, again, there are shades of differences here.

I mean, you get some things like that out of the Gospels about doing unto the least of these and so forth. I mean, those kind of teachings, it's just that someone like Edwards or George Whitefield, Franklin's longtime friend, would say you're not understanding that the greatest good is love of God and that our capability for good comes out of regeneration.

I mean, so Whitefield and Edwards would say this kind of man-centered good that doesn't require any kind of transforming power from God might look good from a worldly perspective, but because of our sin, our best efforts in this life without any assistance from God is just filthy rags. And so I think that Franklin just simply didn't buy that.

I think he just thought, "Well, you just do your best, and you try to be sincere and disciplined and go after virtue, and God will understand that we fall short." And so I think Edwards and Whitefield would have said, "Bottom line, what you're missing is the new birth in Christ and the understanding that because of our sin, God cannot accept us on the basis of just a lot of effort." It's no secret that Franklin loved prostitutes.

It's a reality. I mean, he was not an angel. How do you think he processed his own lack of virtue? Well, I think it is easy to see in retrospect, and Franklin knew this too, that virtue that only depends on your own effort, I think is gonna be necessarily limited in its success.

I mean, that kind of philosophy. And so when he went to London as a young man, he and some of his friends there really kind of went wild and took in all that London had to offer in those days, and he really sowed his wild oats. And even Franklin came to realize, I think pretty clearly, that he couldn't go on this way.

I mean, he was running up debts, he was worried about venereal disease. We don't know who the mother of his child, William, his son William was, but some people think it may have been a prostitute. And so he realized that he needed to get his act together. And so when he came back to America, he sort of put together the system of moral resolution that was gonna be his guide, he said, for the rest of his life.

The problem is that when you see him come up against temptation, especially in relationships with women later in life, in middle age and going on into amazingly old age, he had a series of relationships that were certainly inappropriate with other women for, Franklin as a married man by then, and it is conspicuous that his talk about his moral system sort of goes quiet in those years and on those topics.

And we just don't see if it's all up to us, if it's all up to our discipline. And Franklin will say this at times, you can excuse anything. Now having said all that, I do want to caution that it's not as if, and Christians who are listening know this very well, it's not as if being in Christ sort of solves all your problems with regard to sin or eliminates all your blind spots.

And I talked about this in my biography of George Whitefield, for instance, that George Whitefield was involved in slavery and the slave trade, and he just didn't see the problem with it. And we can see in retrospect that there's all kinds of immoral issues going on with the slave trade.

So it's not as if I would say, "Oh, if only he had been a Christian, then he would have lived in perfect holiness," or something like that. But it is, I think, pretty conspicuous how limited this moral code is when, for instance, it doesn't stop you, it doesn't even really seem to raise questions for him about the propriety of the series of relationships he has with married women, women who are much, much younger than him, you know, really just pretty salacious stuff.

And his moral code just doesn't seem to come into play. So it's inadequate, I think, at moments where he needed to do much better. >>Joseph: Okay. I want to press into the pragmatics a little more. One writer said Franklin had, quote, "a love for the useful," end quote. I mean, he was a hacker.

Technology itself can feed pragmatism and a utilitarianism within us. And I think this is true in our own day. We life hack our diets and our work habits and our sleep patterns and really all of life. Everything has an app now. We can trace the minutia of our day, every calorie, every step that we take.

We can manage our calendars down to the second. But if we're not careful, life can get boiled down to everything just becomes the right technique. And when you see this in America today, how much has Ben Franklin behind this? What's his role in life hacking today? >>John: Well, he thought that a life that is maximally effective to do good, there's another way to put it, about what his life goal was.

And so he wanted to be successful in useful fields. And so he would discipline himself in terms of use of time. He was focused on diet. I mean, everything you might expect out of that kind of life hacking literature, you know, blogs and so forth today, he was interested in those kinds of issues too because he wanted to be freed up to be the most successful, effective entrepreneur that he could be, especially as a young man.

But he said that these things all need to serve benevolent goods. I mean, you need to be doing good for people and not involved in just trashy pursuits. And so, I mean, for instance, one of the most famous instances was he had his list of the virtues. And he would keep a daily chart for some years of his life that he would say, you know, "Have I been modest?

Have I controlled my speech?" And all these kind of – and he's going down the list and checking it. "Yes, I did all these things today," or "No, I failed here and there." I'm not sure in that system how you account for pride because it seems to me that if you're checking off all the boxes about how well you've done, that may undermine the pride issue.

But anyway, you know, he would try to systematize all these things and say, you know, "I can count up how well I'm doing and the expectations I hold for myself." And so tracking it, measuring it, you know, he again is a pioneer on all those kind of life hacking things.

But I think the difference for him is that he knew that all these things were supposed to at least feed into virtue. I'm not sure that all of our life hacking folks, podcasts, bloggers, and everything today necessarily – I mean, it's often in the background, but because Franklin was so deeply familiar with the Christian virtues from his upbringing, that just came naturally to him, and he still felt, I think, obligated to live with responsibilities to that virtuous code, which he would readily admit he derived from Christianity.

Yeah, that's really a key point, and it seems like he even tried to life hack the Christian life, too. You write of Franklin this, "Church attendance had its utility when rightly conducted." Church attendance had its utility when rightly conducted. How did the church become for Franklin a form of utility?

Well, I think he thought that most people certainly needed religion, and for him, I don't think he would have said it had to be Christianity, but I think he would have conceded that Christianity was – maybe he would have said the most sublime kind of religious code system of ethics, that it's the best, but it's not necessarily an exclusive thing.

He would have said you need religion to give you a set of morals, a virtuous ideal, and certainly Christ is a wonderful, virtuous, ideal example for us to follow. I think he thought that churches brought accountability for ethics and virtue, that churches were a great way to live out a virtuous life, because churches gave you a way to be engaged in working with the poor, and churches filled – I mean, in an era when the government performed very few social welfare functions, I mean, the churches did that.

They worked on education, health care, all kinds of poor relief efforts. And so he was great with – especially if churches were doing those kind of things, outreach and ministering to people, Franklin loved that. This is actually part of the reason why I think Franklin admired George Whitefield, the great revivalist, so much is that we forget that Whitefield was very well known in his time for his Bethesda orphanage in Georgia, which was the great charitable project of Whitefield's career.

And Franklin gave money to the Bethesda orphanage and thought, yes, what we need are these great social experiments and taking care of the least of these, like orphans. Franklin was involved in the first hospital in Philadelphia, which – and Franklin's own publicity was explicitly Christian, justified on explicitly Christian grounds.

So he thought, if that's what church is about, if that's what religion is about, is about benevolent service, then that's my kind of thing. If it's about dry doctrine and helping out the institutional church and its pastors and so forth, he's not keen on that. And so that's why he thinks, you know, churches are great, and I think he would say we need churches, but only to the extent that it's encouraging practical virtue.

His theology becomes problematic. Franklin seemed to have layers of God as kind of a distinct theology. Explain his theology proper. How would you explain it to listeners? Franklin's ideas about God are changing over his lifetime, and they're often speculative. I mean, it's not as if he has, you know, just this one set of beliefs.

I mean, he often will sort of say, "Well, maybe it's like this," or "I have doubts about that." And so it can be very difficult to pin him down about exactly what he does believe and doesn't believe. What you're suggesting is that early in life, as a young man, he wrote a document about articles of belief in which – it's a very strange document – where he speculates about something that sounds like polytheism, that there's maybe this one great superintending God, but we don't really have any access to that God, and so that there are these sort of lesser gods who kind of represent God to us, and that maybe Jesus is sort of one of these demigods or something like that.

I mean, it's weird stuff, you know, to our perspective, and he really doesn't follow that up very much. So it's one of those things about which one of these documents should we take totally seriously. But I think the consistent thing, especially once he goes through a pretty radical phase in his teens and early twenties, and then I think he settles down and basically believes that virtue's the point of religion, there is a God that probably is like God the Father in the Bible, that Jesus has given us a supreme code of ethics to follow, that there is almost certainly an afterlife and a future judgment, and that God is somehow providentially involved with the world.

And this is a difference between Franklin and some of the more radical deists. A lot of the English deists in particular said that God was like the cosmic watchmaker, that he wound the world up and then just left, and that God isn't around anymore. Franklin had a stronger view of providence than that.

And Franklin even believed, especially later on in life, that prayer probably did some good if for no other reason than it had a kind of disciplining effect on us. But this is why Franklin is the one, the solitary figure really, who asked the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 to open its sessions with prayer.

And it's such a strange scene. I mean, you think, "Well, this guy's a skeptic and a deist, and yet here he is. He proposes that the Constitutional Convention open its sessions with prayer, and it's a motion that they don't adopt." I mean, what's so amazing to me about it is that the rest of the delegates sort of say, "Yeah, that's complicated.

Who's going to pray? Let's not worry about that. Let's just do our business here." A lot of Christian popular historians will narrate that story and say, "Oh, look how wonderful that Franklin proposed prayer," but that they don't give the rest of the story that they decided not to. And so Franklin, among the convention delegates, seems to actually believe more in prayer than most of the other people.

It's strange to pin down on these kind of things. It's an incredible scene, yeah. And you open the book with it. It's so vivid. And yet God still seems quite impersonal to him. It seems that Christ, the atoning God-man who shed his blood for sinners, who approaches and reaches us and who makes a way for us to God, this Christ is really a stumbling block for Franklin, it seems.

Yeah. I mean, the wonderful, if troubling, thing about Franklin is that Ezra Stiles, who was the president of Yale, basically pinned Franklin down about six weeks before he died and said, "Mr. Franklin, you've done so many wonderful things, but I don't know, Mr. Franklin, that I've ever heard you say what you think about Jesus." And Stiles was a sort of basically Orthodox Christian, and he was trying to see if he could get Franklin to make a profession of faith.

Franklin, it's standard operating procedure with Franklin. He kind of turns it into a joke. That's another problem with pinning Franklin down is he'll joke about anything. And so he says, "You know, I've always had doubts about the deity of Christ. I've had doubts about the deity of Christ." But then he says, "But you know, I'm so old now that I might as well not worry about it because I'm going to find out pretty soon anyway." Sure enough, several weeks later, he died, and so he found out.

You know, I think that's basically right, that he is just not sure whether he can believe the Christian tradition and the Scriptures when they say that Jesus was the Son of God. He's convinced that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but Savior, Messiah, Son of God, Great Person of the Trinity, you know, he just isn't sure.

And I think that Franklin believes, you know, "Why do I have to make some kind of firm commitment on things that I'm not sure about anyway? Why don't we just, again, go back to let's live a loving, benevolent, virtuous life and let God sort out the doctrinal details?" He's the sort of person who says, "I'm just going to worry about what I know I can do." And he does keep God, I think, at arm's length.

I mean, there is this personal prayer guide that he—a devotional guide that he writes for himself in which he seems to indicate an understanding that God is to be worshipped, but even there, what he says that we know about God is only revealed in the natural world, you know, the splendor and the mysteries of the universe.

And that's true. Again, I mean, these are things that you can find some support for in Scripture, but as far as revealed knowledge about God, I think Franklin would say, "I just don't know how much of the Bible I can believe, and so why don't I just stick to the this-worldly, practical, utilitarian, moral responsibilities and let others worry about doctrinal issues?" And so there again is where the doctrinalist Christianity comes in, and whether that's an oxymoron right from the get-go, I think it is.

But he thought that this is sort of the new, enlightened kind of form of Christianity that he hoped would take root, and, you know, in some ways in American pop culture, in global pop culture, it certainly has. I think for Reformed and Evangelical Christians, though, of course, they'll say, "I mean, we have to worship God in spirit and truth for the things, of course, that are revealed in the natural world, but that are revealed in Scripture, and that true goodness can't be lived out without God's power and regenerating work in our lives." And so that's where I think that a lot of Christians reading my book are going to say, "Yeah, I mean, in this worldly sense, in just the natural order of things, this guy lived an admirable, in many ways, remarkable, successful life, but he may have missed the biggest point of all, which is a relationship, a saving relationship with Jesus Christ." Yeah, that's tragic.

His friend George Whitefield certainly saw the glory of Christ and spent his life proclaiming that glory. What do we know of Whitefield's attempts to reach Franklin with the Gospel? They had an amazing relationship, because here they are. I mean, Whitefield, by the time he meets Franklin in the late 1730s, Whitefield has already become easily the most famous pastor or preacher in the British and American world.

And Franklin really, you know, as they say, he hitched his wagon to Whitefield's star, right? He said, "This guy is like anything I've ever seen, and I can make a lot of money off of this." So Franklin is publishing all of Whitefield's journals and sermons, and Franklin publishes anti-Whitefield stuff, too.

It's a big part of the reason why Franklin is able to retire early, is because, I mean, he made so much money off of Whitefield. But in that business relationship, then they became friends. And so they were just amazing letters that they would write back and forth to each other.

And Franklin, you know, he made clear to Whitefield that he appreciated his charitable work and all this, but that he didn't believe in Christ the way that Whitefield said people needed to. And so Whitefield would talk very frankly, write very frankly to Ben about this, and my favorite letter between them is a letter that Whitefield wrote to him in the 1750s.

Now Franklin has become as famous as Whitefield is, because of Franklin's scientific experiments. And Whitefield says to him, "You know, Mr. Franklin, I see that you've made all this wonderful progress in the mysteries of science and electricity. Now," he said, "I implore you to study the mysteries of the new birth." Beautiful, that's beautiful.

And you know, Franklin's just always like, "Yeah, you know, I knew that's what you were going to say to me." And he never goes over the line of faith, and Franklin writes poignantly in his autobiography that, you know, Mr. Whitefield would often pray for my conversion, but he never had the pleasure of believing that those prayers were answered.

Whitefield dies about 20 years before Franklin does, and so the autobiography comes out after Whitefield's death. But even after that, even after Whitefield's death, I mean, Franklin would go out of his way to talk about how much he admired, and not just admired, but loved Whitefield as a friend.

And so I think it's a wonderful example of somebody, Whitefield, who is a strong believer, obviously, and the greatest preacher of his time, who is able to maintain this kind of sweet friendship with a non-believer like Franklin, and not push him away, but also to be transparent with him about his faith.

It really is convicting, I think, to me about, you know, two such famous, wonderful people who are not on the same page spiritually, but they're able to maintain that friendship. It's just a great example on Whitefield's part. Yeah, and very convicting, Dr. Kidd. It is always a pleasure, whenever I need the latest celebrity gossip out of the 18th century, you deliver.

You're like the TMZ of colonial America. I will receive that, yes. The man putting up with me today is author and Baylor University historian Tommy Kidd. We're talking about his excellent book, "Benjamin Franklin, the Religious Life of a Founding Father," due out in May of 2017 from Yale. He's also the author of "George Whitefield, America's Spiritual Founding Father," published by Yale in 2014, and more recently, "American Colonial History, Clashing Cultures and Faiths," published this year by Yale.

He is a readable historian that every Christian should be familiar with. Well, thanks for listening to this special long-form conversation in the Ask Pastor John podcast series. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and I'll be back on Monday with John Piper, and I'll ask him, if we have died to sin, why must we kill our sin daily?

We'll see you on Monday.