The pull of traditional faith grew stronger in the last decades of his long life. One reason for this was relational. His closest sibling, Jane (Franklin) Mecom, was an evangelical Christian who occasionally jousted with Franklin on topics such as salvation by God’s grace alone. He also became close friends with George Whitefield, the premier evangelist of the Great Awakening of the mid-1700s. In fact, his relationship with Whitefield had started as a business association, because Franklin printed (and profited enormously from) Whitefield’s writings and sermons. But over time, their relationship became closer, even though Whitefield reserved the right to question Franklin about the state of his soul. Franklin once even proposed to Whitefield that they should found a colony together in the Ohio territory, one that would be committed to Christian ethics, especially in its treatment of Native Americans. The weight of these relationships kept Franklin from going too far with espousing radical deism – he knew he would have to answer to Jane and George if he did.
The experience of the American Revolution also moved Franklin back toward his parents’ faith. Franklin was a moderate Patriot for a long time. But once he became convinced that the British authorities had given the colonists no choice, he became a morally indignant radical, blaming King George III personally for the war. He also came to believe that, far from playing the role of the distant “watchmaker” of radical deism, God was actually working by Providence in the course of American history. For the new national seal, he and Thomas Jefferson (who was becoming an even harder-edged skeptic than Franklin) originally proposed a scene from God’s Exodus deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Somehow, even to Franklin and Jefferson, the experience of America was hearkening back to the salvation of God’s chosen nation in the Bible.
This trend back toward traditional faith helps to explain, finally, why the deist Franklin proposed that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 open its sessions with prayer. (Strikingly, few delegates supported his proposal, which was tabled.) Although Franklin still could not bring himself to believe in doctrines like the divinity of Christ, he was confident that God was guiding the affairs of the new nation. It would behoove the delegates, he thought, to humble themselves before God in prayer. The faith-ward trajectory of the “deist” Franklin is one of the best reasons for us to doubt the old historical story of how the “Enlightenment” necessarily meant secularization.