| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kerry S. Walters. Benjamin Franklin and His Gods. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 213. Cloth $44.95, paper $18.95.

Kerry S. Walters, who distinguished himself with earlier work on the American Deists and how Enlightenment thought penetrated strands of American religion, offers the first full-length analysis of Benjamin Franklin's religion in more than thirty years. His work is revisionist; at the outset, he states his intent to counter the prevailing understanding developed by Alfred Owen Aldridge in Benjamin Franklin and Nature's God (1967). 1

Aldridge argued that Franklin was an idiosyncratic deist who espoused a kind of polytheism. Walters does not deny the existence of an idiosyncratic dimension to Franklin's thought but counters that it leads to a theistic perspectivism, not polytheism. Both acknowledge that Franklin's religious insights evolved throughout his long life, always reacting against the Calvinism proffered by Franklin's parents. 2

Walters fixes on key documents to make his case, beginning with the Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725). Published in England while Franklin was still a teenager, the treatise was starkly deistic in tone and content but strident in repudiating traditional Calvinistic understandings of Christianity. It represented a "false start," for Franklin quickly regretted what he wrote and moved in other directions. . . .

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