2. England and America
It was the Wild West.
Long before George and Ben captivated the colonies with their preaching and pragmatism, America was an idea, a dream, a sacred hope. For centuries Europeans had imagined following the setting sun to parts unknown, sailing the great ocean to mysterious new lands. The prospect was exciting—and terrifying. Did this ocean wrap around the earth and reappear in the East, or was there something else out there?
For thinkers of old, these uncertainties sometimes gave birth to religious notions, grand apocalyptic theories. Would the mysterious West be the promised land for true believers? Would human history “set” there, like the sun, as it had risen in the East?
Poets waxed lyrical about the possibilities. In Dante’s Inferno, Ulysses tells a tale of sailing through the Strait of Gibraltar and out into the western sea. Urging his crew not to “deny the knowledge . . . of the unpeopled world,” he pressed westward, “following the sun,” until he reached the afterlife.1 Scholars found hints in the Bible and other ancient literature suggesting that God had great plans for a new land to be found beyond the sea. Christopher Columbus was an avid student of end-times prophecy, and saw himself fulfilling those predictions by journeying to the new world.
It didn’t hurt that the great explorers were braving the western ocean about the same time that the great reformers were crafting a new faith. In 1492, while Columbus was “sailing the ocean blue,” another Italian, the fiery Savonarola, was pronouncing judgment upon the Roman church. Balboa looked out over the Pacific Ocean from the Isthmus of Panama just as Luther was getting settled into his teaching post at the University of Wittenberg, where he would soon post the ninety-five complaints that launched the Protestant Reformation. Magellan’s crew was sailing around the world as Zwingh was beginning to stir up the Reformed movement in Zurich.
There was a new world to be found. This was the message of both groups of seekers. That world was “out there” and “in here,” across the sea and within the soul. Don’t remain behind rock-hewn walls of ignorance that have stood for centuries. God is doing something new here. Whitefield’s message of the new birth fit right in with the spirit of discovery that had motivated European settlers from the start. Take a chance on a new existence, a life of freedom, where you can commune with your God in a new way in a new land.
English Spin
As the exploratory 1500s gave way to the 1600s, the English took the lead in exploring North America. (Their 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada had shifted the balance of power in Europe and freed up the seas for English travel.) A number of English writers put their own apocalyptic spin on the new settlements. The poet-preacher John Donne rallied one group of settlers (the Virginia Company) in 1622 after they had received word of a massacre in America. Expounding Acts 1:8, he urged them to share the gospel in this uttermost part of the earth and not just worry about their business enterprises. And he looked forward to a day when the youngest of those settlers would feel at home in a fully settled America. “You shall have made this island, which is but as the suburbs of the old world, a bridge, a gallery to the new, to join all to that world that shall never grow old, the kingdom of Heaven.”2
The English had often considered themselves the great western hope of Europe, but now those hopes were transferred farther west, across the ocean. Perhaps no one expressed this more clearly than George Herbert, an Anglican poet, priest, scholar, and member of Parliament. The Temple, his landmark book of religious poetry published in 1633, included a sprawhng poem that surveyed Christian history, “The Church Militant.” Here Herbert referred with great anticipation to the westward direction of God’s plans. “Religion stands on tiptoe in our land/Ready to pass to the American strand.”3 He saw the world hurthng to a conclusion, and the church’s last act would be written in America.
A century later, the writings of George Herbert would have great influence on the life of a college student named George Whitefield. He too was convinced that God had great plans for America, and he was eager to be part of them. Days after he met Ben Franklin, George included Herbert’s “tiptoe” quote in his journal, adding that this “prophecy is now being fulfilled.”4
Mission: America
From the start the discovery of America was seen as a religious mission, but it was also an economic venture. Spanish conquistadors gathered gold for the royal coffers, and English settlers sought to establish lucrative trade in the rich resources of this new continent. These two motives worked side by side. The natives of America were a new people to evangelize. An assortment of priests, ministers, and missionaries journeyed alongside scouts, soldiers, and entrepreneurs, bringing the gospel of Christ to those who had never heard it. Columbus himself focused on evangelism as his role in fulfilling prophecy (and he was actually collecting gold to fund the rebuilding of Jerusalem, another part of his end-times vision).
There is much to condemn about the methods of these early missionary enterprises in America. In general, there was too much conflation of God’s ways with European culture and a wanton disregard for the welfare of the native population. But we must not ignore the fact that the setthng of America was a religious mission as much as it was a business opportunity.
It was also a quest for religious freedom.
The Protestant Reformation, beginning in the early 1500s, created chaos in Europe for at least a century and a half. Not only were there violent conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, but there were several different types of Protestants in the mix—Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and various independent groups. These were often political power plays more than religious disagreements, but still, in many places it was dangerous to follow the wrong religion. Many of those who could emigrate did so. Eventually, many of these religious refugees landed in America.
As Thomas Paine would write later in his Common Sense pamphlet, “The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years.”5
England had its own religious free-for-all, from the time that King Henry VIII wrested the Anglican church away from Roman Catholic control in 1534. For the next century and a half, tensions continued between Catholics and Protestants, often erupting in violent measures and brutal reprisals. Presbyterian and Puritan groups were also jockeying for position within the Church of England, though some left that church. In general, Puritans sought to purify the church of Catholic excesses—robes, genuflection, musical instruments, and also the immense power given to bishops. Believing it was more biblical to give power to the church body, they sometimes were known as Congregationalists. And there were also many independent churches (notably Baptists and later Quakers) that found the Anglicans too corrupt, too restrictive, or still too Catholic. Independents who left the Church of England were known as Separatists, Dissenters, or Nonconformists. They were often arrested and jailed, and some sought refuge in the much more tolerant Netherlands and eventually in America.
The Jamestown colony in Virginia was settled in 1607 as an enterprise of the Virginia Company, primarily for business purposes but also with some stated evangelistic aims. It soon began paying off, producing tobacco and other resources. Beginning in 1620, America also became a haven for England’s religious exiles, as the Mayflower landed in Massachusetts, bearing a group we know as the Pilgrims. They had obtained a royal charter to settle in northern Virginia but were blown off course.
Many of the Mayflower passengers were Separatists seeking a new home after a brief exile in Holland. Though some took the Mayflower voyage for business purposes, this was a religious quest for many of them; these pilgrims hoped to find freedom to practice their faith in the new world.
Forty-one men aboard that ship signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement setting out expectations for an independent, faith-based community. It read in part: “Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation.”6
This occurred just four score and six years before Ben Franklin was born—and less than fifty miles from his Boston birthplace.
The Great Migration
Meanwhile, back in England, political events were unfolding that created a huge wave of religious emigration. With a number of Catholic-leaning measures, King Charles I alienated the Puritans. Thousands of them sought a new life in America. Happy to get rid of them, Charles granted a charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, situated next to the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Colony. Over the next decade or so, more than twenty thousand Puritans made that journey. Historians call it “The Great Migration.”
This was a grand experiment, a chance to create a society from scratch based on truly Christian principles. The Puritans had bought into the highly structured theology of John Calvin, who was a lawyer before he became a religious leader. Just a century earlier, Calvin had tried to create a similar society in Geneva. Now his spiritual heirs had a new colony on a new continent. Its first governor, John Winthrop, called it “a city upon a hill,”7 invoking Jesus’ comment from Matthew 5:14, which begins, “You are the light of the world.”
All those lofty descriptions of the westward expansion of God’s redemptive activity were once again in play. The Puritans were not just building a new home; they were creating a new Israel, a nation run by God’s principles. This would indeed be a light to the world, showing everybody on earth how to live God’s way. “The eyes of all people are upon us,” Winthrop announced.8
Of course, it didn’t work out so well for everyone. The Puritans had their own discontents. In 1638 Anne Hutchinson was banished from the colony for daring to teach her Bible study group about God’s grace and thus disparaging God’s law. Mid-century, several Quakers found their way to Boston and were severely punished for their charismatic and egalitarian ways. And 1962 saw the start of the Salem witch trials, in which the fear of devilry caused the colony to act in devilish ways—arresting dozens on dubious evidence and executing nineteen of them.
This is the irony of religious freedom. All too often, we want freedom for our religion, but we fail to grant it to others. Puritans rejoiced in the opportunity to break free from the Church of England and to worship in the ways their own consciences dictated, but then they established a colony that imposed religious restrictions on others.
Benjamin Franklin was born into this religious culture, just thirteen years after the end of the witch trials. As a young man, he knew Cotton Mather, who had inspired and advised the Salem prosecutors. While there were a great many positive aspects to Puritan teaching, and we see some of them in Franklin’s character, with the speckled history of the previous century it’s no surprise that Ben became a skeptic—especially with regard to sectarian Christianity.
The Puritans reflected the duality of the European mission to settle America—both religious and economic. Their “city on a hill” was designed to enlighten the world from this new western position, but it would also function as a city, a society, an economic entity in which everyone pitched in for mutual benefit. These two goals were inseparable for those early Puritans as they sought to build a righteous community. They became known for their “Puritan work ethic,” in which citizens served God by doing their part in the local economy.
We see the same duality in Ben and George, except the two strands had come apart. Whitefield bought heavily into the Calvinist theology of the Puritans, with a strong sense of God’s calling. While Franklin rejected Puritan theology, he embraced the idea of a well-functioning society, with each citizen contributing to the economic success of the community.
The Forces at Work
As Puritans and others were setthng Massachusetts in the mid-1600s, there was more fighting in England. Parliament, led by Puritans and Presbyterians, deposed Charles I but ruled for only eleven years before giving way to the exiled Charles II. A backlash followed, targeting Puritans and Dissenters. This is why the independent minister John Bunyan was in prison when he wrote his 1678 classic The Pilgrim’s Progress. And a few years later, a Congregationalist tradesman from Northamptonshire named Josiah Franklin decided to escape England’s religious repression by moving his wife and three children to Boston. Over the next three decades in America, he would father fourteen more children, including Benjamin—and he faithfully took his growing family to the Congregationalist Old South Church. America was a haven for the Franklins, a place to work and worship freely.
Ben grew up in an environment shaped by three major forces: faith, freedom, and fortune. Those forces were still strong when George Whitefield visited America, and they still characterize the United States today.
We have seen that some settlers were motivated by business opportunities in the new world. Jamestown held the promise of new resources and new trade, and the Virginia Company eagerly financed the project. Even aboard the Mayflower there were seekers of fortune side by side with the religious refugees. As the colonies grew, the economic bounties became more apparent. There was land aplenty, and it grew good crops. As Ben Franklin continually expounded, anyone could make a good living here through ingenuity and hard work—and he modeled that in his own life many times over. Even Georgia, the last of the original thirteen colonies to be settled (and the first visited by Whitefield), was largely populated by those freed from debtors’ prisons in England, seeking a chance to start new accounts.
Freedom surely felt sweet to those debtors, but it was religious freedom that beckoned to many. Those who had to worship secretly back in England, who had to cut back on their evangelizing, who had to pay lip service (and taxes!) to a church they didn’t agree with—these believers risked their lives on rickety ships to enter a land where they could be honest before God and their neighbors. Others sought political freedom, where their prospects weren’t determined by the whim of a king. Freedom is always tricky in its application, as Franklin found out in his statecraft and Whitefield in his soulcraft, but liberty’s lure is strong and its rewards are rich.
And finally, there was the powerful faith that flowed through the hearts of many colonists. Some crossed the ocean in order to share their faith with the natives of this new land, or (like Whitefield) with the colonists who preceded them. But the steady migration westward was also fueled, in some way, by a belief that God’s plan was moving in this direction. Poets and philosophers had been hinting at this for some time. Follow the setting sun and a new light would rise there, in the wilderness across the western sea. Deep in their souls, these faithful colonists sensed that the Creator was creating something new in this new land.9