Stephen J. Vicchio
This book is about the religious views of the greatest statesman in the history of the United States-Benjamin Franklin. The text covers Franklin’s views from the adoption of his parents Congregationalist and Presbyterian perspectives, followed by a period of religious doubt, his comments about religion as a diplomat in Britain and France, and ironically, a return at the end of his life to the monotheism of his mother and father. This study also examines the intellectual sources of his views on religion, including the Enlightenment, the movement known as Deism, and Franklin’s readings of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers and theologians of his day. And all of this with the background that Frankin only had two years of formal education.
