Jonathan Edwards and the Making of America

By Jeff Sharlet

Benjamin Franklin has of late been enjoying some of the celebrity that attended him in life. Doorstop follows doorstop; each tome celebrates the canniest and most pragmatic of the Founders as the first great thinker of America. Franklin deserves his fame, but as Philip F. Gura’s new biography, Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical, reminds us, a mind of unparalleled brilliance preceded Franklin in the colonies, and it is in Edwards’s life and work to which we might more profitably look for clues about our present condition — a period of holy wars, great and small, foreign and domestic, “cultural,” “spiritual,” and actual.

“Historians of the United States,” notes George Marsden, another Edwards biographer, “have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America.” This neglect of Edwards, the author of the 18th-century “Great Awakening” that launched American evangelicalism, explains why conventional histories of the United States cannot account for the ongoing religious fervor of the nation. Although the Christian right has lately attempted to claim Franklin as a forebear — a collection titled American Destiny: God’s Role in America trumpets three apparently pious bon mots of Franklin’s without mention of Franklin’s equal enthusiasm for the sensual life and for a Christless deism — the legacy of his ideas remain staunchly secular. And yet the nation does not. Where does such religiousity come from?

FIND OUT… at Killing the Buddha.com.

Or, get “Naked in the House of God,” with Emily Capps, also new at Killing the Buddha.