First Freedom: The Fight for Religious Liberty Page #3

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and so he would thumb

his nose at the clergy,

say they were

too conventional,

they were too dry,

they were dead.

Mitchell:
In the Philadelphia

crowd that day

was Benjamin Franklin,

already a well-known printer,

the author

of the hugely successful

"poor Richard's almanack."

Ben Franklin was

a compendium of American

intellectual interests,

an autodidact who would

go on to chart the Gulf stream

and invent the lightning rod,

bifocals,

and the Franklin stove.

He was a deeply

unconventional man.

He believed in God

but rejected organized religion.

Man as Benjamin Franklin:

I never was without some

religious principles.

I never doubted,

for instance,

the existence of the deity,

that he made the world

and governed it

by his Providence

and that the most

acceptable service of God

was the doing good to man.

Benjamin Franklin.

Church:
He believed

in the practicality of religion,

that religion was a useful tool

to organize society

and keep people loving

their neighbor as themselves.

Brethren and fathers

and all ye whom I am

about to preach

the kingdom of God,

I suppose you need not be...

Mitchell:

Franklin didn't proselytize.

He didn't discuss

his religious beliefs at all

unless he was pressed.

He gave donations

to a wide variety of churches,

yet he'd decided

beforehand that he would be

impervious

to whitefield's message.

Man as Franklin:

I silently resolved he

should get nothing from me.

I had in my pocket

a handful of copper money,

3 or 4 silver dollars,

and 5 pistoles in gold.

As he proceeded,

I began to soften

and concluded to give

the coppers.

Another stroke of his

oratory made me ashamed of that,

and determined me

to give the silver,

and he finished

so admirably that I emptied

my pockets wholly into

the collection plate,

gold and all.

Mitchell:
In the end,

Franklin would publish many

of whitefield's tracts.

The preacher's eloquence

kick-started what was known

as the great awakening,

a wave of Evangelical fervor

that lasted a decade.

The awakening went

beyond the spiritual.

It instilled the vital idea

that these 13 separate

and very different colonies

were connected,

that their people could share

not only language but beliefs.

Suddenly, these colonists saw

themselves as large actors

upon the biggest stage of all.

Americans began to realize

that they were one people.

Meacham:
They were

founding a new world,

there was

a great deal of imagery,

a great deal of conversation

about America being

the new Israel,

the new promised land.

There was an intense

religious feeling shaping

the generation that became

the revolutionary generation.

Mitchell:
When

the great awakening ebbed

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