Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father - Thomas S. Kidd Audiobook

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• 
  Titus Black
  September 21st, 2023
  

  A history of Franklin’s religious life that fails to explore his masonic religion

  Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd’s “religious life” of Benjamin Franklin is nothing of the kind. On the key points of Franklin’s hidden life: his involvement with Freemasonry, and the Hell-Fire Club in Britain, Kidd’s book is a whitewash.

  Franklin’s masonic involvement barely engages the author (cf. pp. 76-78). He admits that “Freemasonry became like an alternative religion for many members.”

  It follows then, that in a biography centered on Franklin’s religion, that his involvement in the masonic religion would be fully explicated. Not so. Kidd writes, “…in spite of Franklin’s long membership and service in the society, we should not over-emphasize its significance in Franklin’s personal life.”

  Really? Even though Franklin rose to be the Grand Master of the most important masonic lodge in France, and Grand Master of the masonic lodge of Philadelphia?

  Kidd gives the following reason for this judgment of his: “He (Franklin) did not often discuss it (Freemasonry) in his papers or in the “Autobiography…”

  Freemasonry is a secret society. Masons are sworn to secrecy on pain of death. To rely on Franklin’s public pronouncements alone as a reliable indicator of his actual involvement is a joke, but that’s precisely what the author does. He exhibits nearly zero curiosity about the extent of Franklin’s involvement with the Masons as Grand Master of two lodges in two nations, as well as the nature of his leadership role in the masonic religion.

  Where were the editors at the publishing company that issued this book (Yale University Press) when Kidd covered Franklin’s Freemasonry in five pages of what would seem to be something approaching masonic propaganda?

  Prof. Kidd appears to be unaware of the enormous outcry against the Masons after William Morgan was murdered in 1826. The seeds of that populist revolt were planted in Franklin’s time, as his masonic brotherhood used secrecy to gain power in business and government and establish an elite insider organization closed to the “cowans.”

  Kidd appears to be ignorant of the fact that the brotherhood’s pose as a Biblically-derived creed is a farce. With naiveté more typical of a high school sophomore term paper than a Yale University history volume, Kidd writes, “Deistically inclined as many Freemasons were, they still traced their history to the biblical record, and interwove the history of Masonry with events such as the construction of Solomon’s Temple.”

  The preceding is nearly an exact quote from pamphlets written by Freemasons about their order. Kidd takes them at face value. In truth, much of Freemasonry is derived from the rabbinic Kabbalah, with the Old Testament used as a prop for public consumption.

  Moreover, when he was 33-years-of-age Franklin was implicated in the still mysterious masonic murder of Daniel Rees by members of the Philadelphia masonic lodge. The “American Weekly Mercury” newspaper accused Franklin of involvement in the gruesome murder (Rees was set on fire and burned to death). A “Satanic oath” had been administered to Rees. Prof. Kidd does not deny that Franklin boastfully showed the oath to his friends while mocking Rees.

  Franklin was subsequently a witness at a criminal trial of Evan Jones, a Mason believed to have been the one who actually set Rees on fire. Jones was convicted of manslaughter — and then released without fine or imprisonment, or any other punishment for having taken the life of Rees (other than being branded on one hand). Franklin walked free, without being convicted. (Cf. pp. 118-120).

  Prof. Kidd exhibits zero curiosity about how it was that the colonial court set free a perpetrator convicted of manslaughter. What role, if any, did the masonic brotherhood have in this miscarriage of justice? Kidd is oblivious. The Rees case is the most serious major scandal at the center of Franklin’s entire life, whether religious or diplomatic. Kidd deals with it in three pages. As the biographer of Franklin it should be incumbent on the author to do original archival research on the case, searching for letters, diaries and similar evidence. Again, Kidd will have none of it. He insinuates the standard masonic narrative: the affair was unfortunate and Franklin exhibited poor judgement. The circumstances of the murder and the Satanism do not interest Thomas Kidd, who appears to have checked a few published sources and then proceeded no further with an investigation. This is history?

  As for Franklin’s membership in Sir Francis Dashwood’s Satanic Hell-Fire Club, Mr. Kidd assures us that, “…there is no evidence that Franklin himself participated in these lewd activities…” (p. 200). On what basis does Kidd exculpate Franklin? We are not told.

  Of Franklin, the Grand Master of the Paris Lodge of Freemasons, and the associate of the Hell Fire Club, he writes: “Franklin was too rooted in traditional Christianity to sanction overt antagonism of it.” Concerning covert antagonism Kidd is not interested. The reader of this biography of Franklin’s religious life is not supposed to be either.

  Mr. Kidd has a dogma: Franklin the Freemason preserved sufficient vestigial Calvinism from his youth to render him a sincere and lifelong promoter of Christianity. This thesis will not survive the excavation of Franklin’s occult activities, so Kidd does not undertake the excavation.

  Some of Kidd’s other dogmas are also troubling. He is determined to make Cotton Mather a flawed hero by omitting key information about him. He acknowledges that Mather is, to his critics, “one of the chief culprits behind the Salem witchcraft controversy that ravaged Massachusetts in 1692.” However, he adds, “Mather’s defenders have argued he was really ‘peripheral’ to the proceedings at Salem.”

  Peripheral? To maintain this fiction, Kidd omits all mention of Mather’s 1689 book, “Memorable Providences,” which upholds demon possession of the Goodwin children in Boston, for which a woman, Goody Glover, was executed. Mather’s book contributed to the witch hunting hysteria in Salem in 1692, which Mather justified in his 1693 book of nonsense, “Wonders of the Invisible World.” Kidd is silent on all of this. He prefers his dogma: upholding Mather as a medical pioneer responsible for the “courageous defense of inoculation.”

  Lastly, Kidd situates the “English” in a vacuum, as perpetrators who “committed grotesque violence against Native Americans…Puritan fighters slaughtered hundreds of Indians, many of them women and children…” (p. 15).

  Politically-correct “history” is monotonous in the extreme, as is all parroting of clichés. Kidd neglects to mention the horrendous Indian atrocities inflicted on Puritan civilians. Some of the survivors of those attacks were traumatized girls who would be the principals in the Salem hysteria, brought on by post-traumatic stress in the wake of the savage slaughter they witnessed, as Mary Beth Norton demonstrates in her important revisionist history, “In the Devil’s Snare” (2003).

  Thomas Kidd’s “Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father” is a failure. It is a victim of its author’s predetermined axiom that Franklin was not an enemy of Christianity and that he was in some respects a more sincere respecter of the Christian religion than many of the other founders. This notion can only obtain cachet if Franklin’s masonic and Satanic activities are airbrushed out of his curriculum vitae or, where that is not entirely possible, explained away with cosmetic accounts reeking of masonic disinformation.

  The book contains notes and an index but lacks a bibliography.

  Kidd’s scholarly industry is obvious in other parts the book, particularly the section on Franklin and George Whitefield. But in its abysmal neglect of the years of Franklin’s masonic membership, and indeed his leadership of Freemasonry in the U.S. and France, as well as involvement in the Rees case and the Hell Fire Club, all of which are enormously significant for determining Franklin’s authentic religious life, the book fails to fulfill its promise; it is instead a volume of misdirection, and a disservice as such.

  Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father - Thomas S. Kidd
• 
  caesar963
  September 21st, 2023
  

  

  Interesting. Is that review from Amazon? With minor alterations?

  Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father - Thomas S. Kidd

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