According to Walter Isaacson’s biography, Benjamin Franklin believed that God means us all to be happy. An ostensible belief in God, paired with a healthy skepticism toward all forms of organized religion, pretty much sums up Franklin’s spiritual beliefs. Despite the pain of his gout and the other ailments that increased his suffering in his later years, Franklin presumably retained a sunny, simple belief in God as a Supreme Being, and died a happy man. His homespun and tolerant viewpoint both exemplified and codified the tolerance of varied religions and the freedom of religious belief that are enshrined in our American constitution.
Was Benjamin Franklin merely a victim of maya? Did he live a life of illusion despite his enormous accomplishments fighting for America’s freedoms, securing the French alliance that allowed us to win the Revolutionary War, and winning consensus among the contentious delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia? In a broader sense, is the Western commitment to social change and progress merely an illusory preoccupation? Franklin’s religion could be described as a modified version of Deism: God as Deus-ex-Machina, but with a warm, friendly outlook toward man. In effect, Franklin believed in God as a sort of benevolent Chief Executive, somewhat like General and President George Washington himself.
When we contrast Franklin to Mahatma Gandhi, the twentieth-century Indian saint of non-violence who lived the life of a Hindu holy monk while leading his nation out of chains, Franklin appears to be such an ordinary man. Nonetheless, Franklin, who was not above resorting to the violence of war to achieve his ideals of freedom, is a towering Western hero.
Is there any way to reconcile Franklin’s casual belief or casual lack of belief with the holy devotion of a Gandhi, whom Yogananda revered as a saint, or for that matter with a Martin Luther King or a Nelson Mandela? I suppose we would need to resort to sophistry to do so. Nevertheless, perhaps the better question is, can we describe Franklin’s life as a spiritual path? Was this worldly man a spiritual seeker? More generally, does Deism as an essentially philosophical, humanistic stand-in for religion, have any enduring value? Sophistic or not, my answer is yes. In order for humanity to evolve in the direction of Spirit or Truth, we need both Franklin’s pragmatism and Gandhi’s mysticism. In fact, it might be said that Franklin’s life served as a precursor to Gandhi’s, because Franklin was instrumental in creating the American democratic form of government that Gandhi later fought for in India by not fighting for it. How Zen is that?
Gandhi was the cause or “Prime Mover,” as the pre-Deist Aristotle put it, for launching the largest democracy in the world. He did so by orchestrating a mass action of non-violent protest, but I would argue that he was able to do it only because Franklin had achieved the same ends by resorting to violence nearly 200 years earlier. Franklin’s ideal of democracy, transmuted through Thoreau’s notions of civil disobedience, set the stage for Gandhi’s non-violent revolution, not to mention Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights movement and Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. India and the United States have in this way become sisters who overthrew a common mother.
But what does any of this have to do with spirituality or spiritual seeking? Yogananda believed strongly in human evolution—not the evolution of new physical body structures, but the evolution of man’s mind toward God. He deeply admired American pragmatism and science, devoting much praise toward all of India’s scientific advances, which have in recent years coalesced into India’s world leadership in engineering and high-tech computing. I would argue that not only was Franklin’s life and example a “necessary cause” for Gandhi’s non-violent revolution, but the rather bland face of Franklin’s modified Deism provided a catalyst for generating the benevolent form of religious tolerance that exemplifies not only Western democratic societies but also India’s religiously diverse civilization.
Yogananda’s life mission was to bring Eastern spirituality to the West, and specifically to the United States. Perhaps in retrospect we can conclude that Benjamin Franklin’s and Thomas Jefferson’s reformist religious beliefs in particular, as well as the Deism of the Enlightenment in general, fertilized the soil in which this cross-cultural exchange of democracy, philosophy and inter-faith spirituality later grew. Franklin may not have been a spiritual guru with a circle of devotees like Yogananda, but Franklin and Deism nurtured two very different societies in which the individual spiritual quest can flourish openly. Perhaps along the universal human journey to find God, secular humanism is as important an aid as religious mysticism.
Bird of Spirit 