Benjamin Franklin, the printer and Masonic provincial grand master, worked with Whitefield to expand this religious public sphere. Franklin printed more pamphlets for and against the revivals than any other colonial printer, despite the fact that Whitefield’s evangelical revivalism stood at odds with Franklin’s Masonic Christianity.132 An Episcopalian upbringing but little involvement in the Presbyterian church he joined as an adult informed Franklin’s beliefs. His biographers portray him as a moderate Deist, sufficiently religious to propose that a clergymen pray over the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. “The System of Morals” left to us by Jesus of Nazareth, he told the Yale president Ezra Stiles, was “the best the world ever saw or was likely to see.” Yet Franklin also believed that the Christian moral system had become “corrupted.” Moreover, with regard to Jesus, Franklin had “some Doubts as to his divinity.”133 In contrast to the Philadelphia printer’s lax church attendance and moderate Deism, his Masonic career, which spanned a period of almost sixty years, was extensive. Inducted into Saint John’s Lodge of Philadelphia in 1731, he was elected lodge secretary, junior grand warden, provincial deputy grand master, and grand master of Pennsylvania in his years as a Mason. In 1734, Franklin published the first American edition of James Anderson’s Constitutions. His newspaper frequently included Masonic items. In 1755, Franklin prominently participated in the dedication of Freemason’s Lodge, the first Masonic building in America.134 While serving as an American representative to France in the 1760s, the printer-turned-diplomat became deeply involved in the learned Masonic society known as the Lodge of Nine Sisters.135 This consistent, long-term involvement with the fraternity at least suggests Franklin’s acceptance of Freemasonry’s universal moral teachings. In a 1738 letter to his mother, he defends the fraternity as having “no principles or practices that are inconsistent with religion and good manners.”136 Though Franklin and Whitefield stood apart in their religious perspectives, both believed in settling religious disagreements in a public forum, where thinking men would decide the truth of writers’ rational arguments.137
The men attracted to Freemasonry in the midcentury First Great Awakening encouraged the rational communication of the emerging public sphere. These included the printers who, with Franklin, inaugurated the first newspapers in Charleston and Boston. In 1731, Franklin sent his lodge brother and printing apprentice Thomas Whitehurst from Philadelphia to Charleston with a printing press, which soon published the South Carolina Gazette.138 In that same year the Harvard-educated printer and eventual provincial grand master Jeremy Gridley founded Boston’s Weekly Rehearsal. The past grand master Isaiah Thomas states in his History of Printing (1810) that the Weekly Rehearsal “was carried on at the expense of some gentlemen who formed themselves into a political or literary club and wrote for it. At the head of this club was the late celebrated Jeremy Gridley, who was the real editor of the paper.”139 In the 1730s, the printer and Mason Thomas Fleet began publishing the Boston Gazette, which soon carried Masonic news items. In 1739, it ran a defense of Freemasonry that underscored the fraternity’s vital role in the “Search after Truth” through the communication of knowledge. “By exercising our Tho’ts, and by . . . communicating to our Fellow Creatures we afford them Aid in their Search after Truth. . . . Let every Lover of Reason . . . stir himself up, and put forth all his Powers for setting up such Societies for the investing the Mind with Learning and true Knowledge.”140 In the seven short years after the formal establishment of Freemasonry in colonial America, several hundred men in the new lodges of Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and New York joined these first colonial printers. Many were in the forefront of colonial efforts to establish institutions of higher learning. They included the Harvard-educated Massachusetts governor Jonathan Belcher, who founded Princeton University; the original members and early trustees of the University of Pennsylvania; the first president of the American Philosophical Society; and the organizers of the Philadelphia Library Company. These were men not unlike Gridley, whose “extensive Acquaintance with Classical and almost every other part of Literature, gave him the first Rank among Men of Learning.”141 Within a religious discourse that embraced rational communication as the basis for moral behavior and the ordering of society, the colonial fraternity taught men how to create a society based on Enlightenment principles. As the public sphere rapidly expanded in the 1760s, these habits came to characterize the civic workings of the emerging American society.
“MYSTERIES AND HIEROGLYPHICKS”
Despite Freemasonry’s contributions to colonial society, some continued to question whether it really was Christian. The Reverend John Rodgers pointed to the “strong prejudices . . . against your fraternity” that were “charged to the . . . excesses [of intemperance and profanity] said to be committed” at lodge meetings. He went on to say that there are “those among you, who indulge yourselves in the habitual neglect of the known and great duties of religion.”142 Others worried over the Masons’ adulteration of the Gospel with “foreign mixtures.”143 Zabdiel Adams said, “The very notion of your dealing in mysteries and hieroglyphicks is enough to raise cruel suspicions in many persons.”144 These suspicions were warranted.
On June 24, 1734, for example, the Reverend Charles Brockwell argued that not only did Freemasonry predate Christianity but the Christian story veiled Freemasonry’s deeper meaning. He began his oration by informing the members of Boston’s Saint John’s Lodge that Saint Paul was a Mason. This fact, he argued, was clear to the brotherhood but not to “the learned . . . interpreters of Scripture” who were not Masons and therefore “could not possibly conceive the apostle’s true meaning.” In Corinthians, for example, when Paul mentions his experiences “in the Body or out of the Body” and of the “third heaven or paradise,” he is speaking elliptically about the Masonic degree ceremonies. Rather than reveal the deeper Masonic secrets to outsiders, Brockwell asserted, Paul spoke to his fellow Masons in code through the Christian story. This hidden language of Masonry, moreover, “remain’d unaffected and Intire” when “God confounded the common language of mankind, at the Building of Babel.” This is “a language which none but Masons are capable of learning, a happiness which none but Brethren are capable of enjoying.”145
Most Saint John’s sermons stressed polite Christianity, yet Brockwell’s oration suggests a divergence between it and Freemasonry. Though few outsiders seemed concerned about this at the time, the fraternity had not only its own myth of origin but also its own calendar, which marked time from the creation of the world rather than Christ’s birth. Lodge minutes were dated 5750 rather than 1750, for example, to mark the imagined date, four thousand years prior to Christianity, when the world began.146 Secret words, symbols, and rituals enshrouded the lodge in an aura of mystery. The three rituals of initiation—Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason—had little to do with Christianity and continued to be the primary business of lodge meetings. “Working the craft” through these rites gave the assembled brotherhood a common experience that deepened their commitment to one another and to the fraternity’s ideals but perhaps not to the Christian Church. Margaret C. Jacob has suggested that the apparent contradiction between the fraternity’s enlightened Christianity and the emphasis it placed on its pre-Christian past might best be seen as evidence that it was “living” the rise of