The Enlightenment, Catholics, Jesuits, Freemasons, and Revolutionaries

Washington in his Masonic Apron

An important aspect of the Enlightenment that needs to be looked at before we can return to our series on the history of the Church of England is Freemasonry.  Freemasonry is a system of lodges to which men belong in fraternal organization for purposes of business and social alliance, charitable works, and political activity.  Historically it also had much to do with intellectual discussion and exchange of knowledge.

According to Masonic myth and legend, Freemasonry has an ancient history going back to the geometer Euclid, the construction of the monuments of ancient Egypt, the building of the temple of Solomon, the construction of the medieval cathedrals etc.  Historical data is far more mundane however.

The medieval craft system of guilds organized professionals by craft for the training of new members for that craft as well as for charitable outreach, pious devotion, the regulation of the craft and its business practices, and socialization.  One such guild was the stonemason’s guild.  In Britain the guild system survived the Reformation and, in fact, the professional classes which the guilds represented were overwhelmingly in favor of the new Protestantism.  Being of the professional classes and able to send their male progeny to universities, the guilds were composed of men of above average education who were very much alive to the scientific developments and philosophical/theological currents of the day.  In Tudor and Stuart England, guildhalls were often the scene of lively conversations and political intrigue.  They were as much gentlemen’s clubs as they were professional fraternities. 

A stonemasons’ guild “lodge” in Edinburgh, Scotland –the Ancient Lodge of Edinburgh, Mary’s Chapel (so named because it met in Mary’s Chapel, Niddry’s Wind, Edinburgh) –was the first of these lodges that took in members who were not, in fact, stone masons.   The minutes of the lodge show that in 1634 Lord Alexander, Sir Anthony Alexander, and Sir Alexander Strachan were admitted to the lodge as “speculative” members (as differentiated from “operative” members who were actual stone masons).  Some claim that this lodge had been accepting these sort of honorary members since at least 1600.  It is notable that these recorded members are from the aristocracy as it shows both a desire to participate in the intellectual and charitable life of the lodge on the part of men whose own social class lacked this sort of cohesion, and a certain liberality of mind in these nobility being willing to participate in activities with men of wealth but without title. Incidentally, Sir Alexander Strachan, one of these speculative members, was closely connected to King Charles I, which certainly made his membership politically advantageous to the lodge, at least until the Civil War. 

It is difficult to say exactly why the Stone Mason’s guild became the nucleus of these new associations.  There could be a number of factors.  Stone Masons were a more mobile profession than most other guilds with masons moving around the country—indeed around Europe—wherever work was to be found and thus they had a stronger tradition of welcoming new members than the more settled guilds such as goldsmiths or furriers.  Also, because they worked for contract rather than owning their own business, they were not so much in competition with one another as members of those guilds whose businesses in the same town encouraged a certain rivalry and mistrust.  For whatever reason, through the seventeenth and certainly in the eighteenth century, there were fewer and fewer “operative” stonemasons and more and more “speculative” masons admitted to membership in English lodges.

And perhaps because masonry involved the sciences—mathematics, geometry, physics, and even a basic knowledge of geology and the different qualities of stone, the lodges drew men of scientific inquiry.  During the years of the English Civil War and the religious chaos that came with the breakdown of English religion into dozens of sects from the orthodox Presbyterians and Congregationalists to the far more outré groups such as the Quakers, and even more the Diggers, Ranters, and Fifth Monarchy Men, many of your more educated and professional men began to question Christian doctrines such as the Trinity which they perceived to be irrational.  We see by the end of the period the rise of Unitarianism and then the jump to Deism which posited belief in a Supreme Being but One who set the “clockwork” of the universe into an eternal motion and then abandoned it to itself. 

Freemasonry spread from England to France in the early eighteenth century, aided by both the partisans of the exiled Stuarts and the commercial and intellectual ties that developed with France despite the political tensions between the two countries.  The French Lodges tended to draw political liberals (as well as scientists and philosophes) and were in many ways the incubators for democratic ideas that would set in motion the French Revolution.  Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot were all Freemasons.  Freemasonry established itself among the American colonists as well and George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, John Hancock, Benedict Arnold, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Sam Adams, and Elbridge Gerry were all Freemasons. 

In Europe Freemasonry became associated with opposition to the Catholic Church as part of the ancien regime.  The alliance of “Throne and Altar” which characterized pre-revolutionary France proved all but fatal to the Catholic Church.  While Freemasons are not associated with the Jacobins and the extremes of the Terror, the French lodges had long served as breeding grounds of democratic ideals.  The intellectual curiosity characteristic of Freemasonry also made the Masons question many Catholic beliefs and practices that represented the medieval world and had grown into an outdated ridiculousness by the Enlightenment.  The papal bulls of Clement XII and Benedict XIV proscribing membership in the Freemasons had never been ratified by the French Crown and consequently many French clergy belonged to the Freemasons.  Some lodges were exclusively clerical. 

Freemasons, who found the rigid intellectualism of the Jesuits to be opposed to their own spirit of intellectual inquiry, played critical roles in having the Jesuits expelled from Portugal (1759), France (1764), the Spanish Empire (1767) and Malta (1769) leading up to the suppression of the Order in 1773.  By no means,  however, should they be credited (or blamed) entirely for the downfall of the Society of Jesus as the Jesuits had entire coalitions of enemies working against them. 

In the nineteenth century, Italian Freemasons were very active in both the revolutions against the papacy in the Papal States and the move for Italian unification and the ending of temporal power for the Popes.  Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “George Washington of Italy” whose military genius was able to bring down the power of the various Italian princes—including the papacy—was a vehement Freemason.  All in all, the relationship between Freemasonry and Catholicism has not been a happy one.  

Continued Reflections on the Enlightenment

Awaiting the Encyclical 

Well, back to our critical look at the Enlightenment, perhaps timely as we await the much anticipated encyclical on the environment, Laudato Sii and we see how various Catholics regard the relationship between science and Christian faith.  Actually, I initially had a picture of Caitlyn Jenner posted on this entry for reasons that will become clear towards the end of the posting, but I think Francis' upcoming Encyclical might be even more controversial, at least for those who are trying to live in the pre-modern world.  

As I wrote in the previous entry, the Enlightenment has certainly irrevocably shaped the way we think in Western culture and there is much good for that.  While the medieval universities of Catholic Europe were noted for their freedom of scientific inquiry and philosophical debate, in the sixteenth century religion increasingly tried to impose an intellectual stranglehold over European culture.   It was no accident that this was also a time of political absolutism with the rise of nation states and absolute monarchies throughout much of Europe.  The Protestant Reformations and the scientific and philosophical revolutions of the 17^th and 18^th centuries resisted that absolutism in matters both political and intellectual but in some ways, we shall see, there was an attempt by Enlightenment thinkers to impose a monolithic intellectual framework on Western culture that was as tyrannical and exclusionary as the absolutism as that against which the philosophes were rebelling.

I grew up, as I mentioned in the previous posting, in a thoroughly Catholic environment and yet in one that also idolized Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette.  As I have grown older and studied more—and remember, I am a historian by training, but an Europeanist—I am having some second thoughts about the philosophical basis of our Republic.  Don’t get me wrong.  The cause for independence was a just one and the idea of a Republic remains a good one.  But I think there are some serious bugs that were programmed into the American myth that we need to reexamine and perhaps change the future course of our society by a few degrees. 

The Englishman John Locke (1632-1704) is a pivotal figure in the Enlightenment and in the development of our national culture.  Locke was a physician and so had a scientific training.  He was a member of the Royal Society and worked with Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, and the polymath, Robert Hooke. Religiously he was Low Church and politically he was a Whig (one of the first) and opposed to Royal prerogatives.  He supported the cause of William and Mary against James II not only out of distrust of James’ Catholicism but because he was opposed to the sort of absolutism represented by the senior branch of the Stuart line.  Locke was, in addition to his being a medical man,  a philosopher and was especially concerned about the philosophy of government.  Locke believed that life, liberty, and property are natural rights to which all are entitled.  He also believed that the human person was by nature reasonable and tolerant and that our rational nature would lead us to make moral decisions.  This confidence in the goodness of human nature is reflective of a certain Pelagianism that overlooks the effects of original sin in the human person and it would influence later philosophes and help produce the un-self-reflective moral naïveté of a Jefferson and Franklin.  Although Locke had begun as an orthodox Christian, he soon devolved into Unitarian rationalism that rejected the philosophical conundrum of a Trinitarian deity and the consequent dependent doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. 

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher who very much concentrated on economics.  Smith had a passion for the idea of liberty and saw the essential importance of the human person have the liberty needed to acquire wealth.  He recognized the self-interest that motivates the human person and believed that rational self-interest is the foundation of economic prosperity.  While his insights about self-interest reflect the Calvinist environment in which he had grown up, Smith does not see it as sinful but rather as the foundation for strong political and economic good.  Margaret Thatcher carried a copy of Smith’s Wealth of Nations in her purse throughout her political career. Adam Smith had long before left his Calvinist Roots in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland for belief in an impersonal Deity, impervious to our prayers and inattentive to our moral failings, but he was not, strictly speaking, either a Deist or an atheist.

David Hume, another Scots humanist and an intimate of Adam Smith’s, was an atheist however.  Hume and Smith were both convinced that moral behavior was entirely a matter of sentiment without any objective anchoring.  For most Enlightenment thinkers truth did not exist as an absolute, or—for those for whom it did—it existed only as an abstract concept and never in the particulars of human choices.  There was always this radical subjectivity in the realm of the right and the wrong.  Hume saw Catholicism as superstition and most Protestantism as having devolved into nothing more than enthusiasm.  Religion itself, he believed, was rooted in a dread of the unknown.  This would lead later generations of thinkers to see religion, or even faith, merely as a neurotic projection. 

Unlike other Enlightenment figures of whom we have so far written, Baruch Spinoza did not grow up in a Christian—Protestant or Catholic—home, but an orthodox Jewish one in Amsterdam to which his ancestors had fled when the Jews were exiled from Spain in 1492.  Nonetheless, like many of his Christian counterparts, he early parted ways with the doctrinal demands of his religion and by the age of 23 had been expelled from his synagogue.  Philosophically Spinoza was a materialist.  Spinoza saw a mechanistic universe by which nothing proceeds by chance but which is rigidly determined by the laws of nature.  Human ethics, on the other hand, are highly subjective and nothing is either intrinsically good or intrinsically evil but finds its moral worth in the particular context.  Though Spinoza’s work is open to various nuances, most regard him as being a pantheist, that is as holding that the material universe and God are one and the same.  Thus Spinoza’s universe is unbendingly regulated according to its own laws.  Moreover there is a fundamental unity to all that exists.  Only the realm of the material has an objective reality; there is nothing that transcends concrete material existence. 

A final philosopher at whom I would like to look for this posting is Joseph Priestly (1733-1804).  Here we come back to a philosopher who was rooted in the sciences as well as theology and political theory.  As a scientist he had isolated oxygen in its gaseous state. He also invented soda water and, like Benjamin Franklin, experimented with and wrote on electricity.  Coming from a non-Conformist (Protestant but not Church of England) background himself, Priestly developed a strong political argument for religious freedom for every individual stating that the State should stay away from limiting the individual conscience.  Religiously Priestly moved, like many others, from orthodox belief in the Trinity to the more rational Unitarianism.  He was a strong supporter of the French Revolution even as it moved to the excesses of the Terror and the Directory.   He argued with Edmund Burke about the role of religion in society, arguing that religion should play no part in civic life but be limited solely to one’s personal life.  By 1794 his political and religious views had made him so unpopular in England that he and his family moved to the new American Republic, settling in Pennsylvania.

I think we can see the fatal cracks in the Enlightenment beginning to show.  A healthy spirit of inquiry is gradually being replaced by a cynicism towards any received tradition.  There is no attempt to integrate new discoveries with established knowledge, but only to reject out of hand that which does not fit the new world view.  Whereas in the physical sciences  there is an observable objectivity to which the newly discovered must measure and against which the old ideas can be judged, for many of the philosophes of the Enlightenment raw subjectivity was often the only measure required for their philosophical abstractions. And if in the world of Counter-Reformation absolutism, theological rigidity held learning bound, now cold rationalism, or subjectivity masquerading as rationalism, exercised that same stranglehold.   

I am not sure that we do not see some of the same uncritical thinking today.  For many neo-trad Catholics Pope Francis’ concern about the environment is the result of his having drunk the pseudo-scientific Kool-Aid of the political left when in fact like so many krazies they themselves ignore the vast body of scientific evidence that threatens their pre-existent world-view where the industrialized nations by right exploit the developing societies.  But such stupidity is not the only fault today.  Even for main-line Catholics there is a hesitancy to look at the scientific questions needed to better understand the complex issues of gender identity, embryonic and fetal development, same-sex attraction, and other questions that have an intense social urgency.  On the other hand, we see main-line Protestant churches blithely overthrowing established moralities solely on subjective argument and without serious theological reflection, and we see our larger secularized society totally adrift and at the mercy of fast-changing public opinions when it comes to complicated issues regarding human life and dignity.  “Right” and “wrong” are mere social constructs and any sort of ethical cohesion in society is coming apart at the seams.  And the average citizen gets his political and moral compass from sound-bites that do not require any deep critical reflection. 

We have a huge amount of work to do in our society to build a future in a rapidly evolving world.  The information explosion has opened up what seems to be an infinite amount of information that needs to be examined, reflected on, and integrated into a consistent socio-political philosophy that can give us a common ground to build a society in which the common good is the guiding principle and the rights and dignity of all and of each can be established and protected.  This requires the scientific exploration of the Enlightenment but it also requires a philosophical discipline that was for the most part lacking and which has left us in 21^st century America in a house built on sand.  

We All Need To Wake Up!

George Whitefield--preacher
of the First Great Awakening

In my last posting I made a reference to the Second Great Awakening and the consequent dumbing down of American Religion with the rise of biblical fundamentalism.  I want to explore this further, but to do so we need to go back to the First Great Awakening and American Revivalism in the 18^th century.  The First Great Awakening, an evangelical revival among English and (American) Colonial Protestants had an intellectual integrity lacking in its 19^th century successor—the Second Great Awakening—and the spinoff movements that (unfortunately) stamped most American Protestantism—and now, by contagion, Catholicism—with an anti-intellectualism which is increasing undermining the foundations of Christianity in American society.

What really distinguished the First Great Awakening is the quality of the preachers who engendered it.  Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Samuel Davies, and the Wesleys were all men of high culture and unparalleled education and the movement they started never deviated into the rank theological subjectivism of later American religion.

Perhaps we need to begin with the Anglican priest George Whitefield (1714-1770).  Whitefield, an Englishman, had been a fellow at Pembroke College Oxford where he knew the Wesleys and, like them, had been part of the Holy Club.  The Holy Club was an association of devout scholars at Christ Church, Oxford who devoted themselves to prayer, study, and works of charity among the poor and sick.  It was the spiritual fountain from which Methodism—originally a movement within the Church of England—sprung.  Whitefield, like the Wesleys, decided to come to the American colonies to work as a missionary.  After an initial trip to Savannah Georgia to assess the needs of what he thought would be his future parish, he returned to England to be ordained.  While in England raising money for a proposed orphanage in the new parish, he began preaching to large crowds.  His preaching was so effective that no church was large enough to hold the assembled crowds—mostly of working class people in the factories and mines of Industrial Revolution Britain.  Whitefield presented the Gospel to them in a way that spoke to their everyday lives with their frustrations, poverty, and suffering.  Returning to North America in 1740 he was invited to preach up and down the colonies, again drawing huge crowds wherever he went. 

While being a committed Anglican and even having a Calvinist bent in his opinions on pre-destination, Whitefield was willing to preach wherever invited and to work with Protestants of any and all sorts.  He worked closely with the Moravian Brethren in Pennsylvania to establish charity work among the poor Blacks.  Among Whitefield’s admirers was Benjamin Franklin who, though a Deist, was deeply impressed at the moral changes in people effected by Whitefield’s preaching.  He was also amazed at Whitefield’s ability as an orator and at his intellectual skills.  Franklin published a number of Whitefield’s tracts.  Whitefield eventually returned to England where he was never given a church of his own, but where he continued to draw large numbers to open-air revivals.  He made seven trips to America for preaching and died in Boston on the last of his missionary journeys. 

Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor Connecticut in 1703, the son of a Puritan clergyman.  He studied at Yale College (today’s University) where he showed an aptitude in a wide variety of fields, including the natural sciences.  Edwards was fascinated with the discoveries of Isaac Newton and found that, unlike others whose interest in science pushed them away from religion, science to him was a demonstration of the Divine origin of Nature and Nature’s Laws.  Valedictorian of his class, he went on after graduation to study Theology.  After several temporary positions—some pastoring, some academic—he was ordained as minister-assistant to his grandfather who pastored the Church at Northampton Massachusetts.  Both Edwards and his wife—who also came from a family of ministers—were noted for their ascetic lives and devout piety.  Edwards’ grandfather died in February of 1729 and by the summer of 1733 Edwards’ preaching had triggered a revival in Northampton with several hundred new members have been converted and joined the church.  Joining the church was not simply a matter of signing up and getting one’s offering-envelopes; joining the church meant committing yourself to a rigorous discipline of moral life, prayer, fasting, and study.  Yet the revival spread beyond Northampton and throughout New England and even New York.  Edwards standards of Christian living, however, became ever more strict and this eventually prompted his home congregation to dismiss him from the pastorate.  His popularity as a preacher gained him several calls to fill pulpits from Scotland to Virginia, but he finally accepted a church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  From there he went on to the President of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University.  He died there in 1758 after being inoculated for Smallpox.  Given his interest in scientific development, he was a strong proponent of the new vaccine and volunteered for the inoculation, but his health was not sufficiently strong for him to survive the resultant case.  Edwards’ entire ministry had been marked by rigorous scholarship—philosophical, theological, scientific—and yet also stressed, and saw as compatible, a life of religious devotion. 

Whitefield was Anglican, Edwards a Congregationalist, and the third voice of the First Great Awakening was Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian.  Davies' family was too poor to send him on to college—unlike the Oxford educated Whitefield and the Yale educated Edwards—but he was tutored by the Reverend Samuel Blair at his academy in Faggs Manor Pennsylvania.  The education must have stood him well as Davies went on to become the fourth President of Princeton.  Davies was, as I noted, a Presbyterian and served dissenting (non-Anglican) congregations in Virginia, becoming the first non-Anglican clergyman to be licensed to preach in Virginia. He was known as an enthusiastic preacher and served seven churches spread out over five counties, riding from one to another on horseback.  In 1753 Davies went to Great Britain where he preached more than 60 sermons.  Returning to America he beat the drum in Virginia for recruits to fight the British cause in the French and Indian War and in 1759 he succeeded Jonathan Edwards as President of Princeton.  He died two years later, aged only 37 years. 

We will write more about John and Charles Wesley at another time, saying now only that their tenure in the American colonies was too short to have an immediate influence, though long-term they would be the most important shapers of American religion.  Charles spent only one year and John two in the colonies before returning to England.  They both studied at Christ Church College in Oxford with John later becoming a fellow at Lincoln College.  Charles was among the organizers of “The Holy Club” at Oxford—the aforementioned society of devout scholars who wished a more intense Christian life.  Upon their return to England both brothers took up open-air preaching under the tutelage of George Whitefield.  Wesley’s influence will be stronger in the Second Great Awakening when his American disciples will play a significant role in American revivalism.  In England, however, the Wesleys were highly influential in the revitalization of Christian living through the Methodist movement which started in “The Holy Club.”

The religious revival of the 1730’s through 1750’s gave a shot in the arm to the Congregational and Presbyterian—and to some extent, the Anglican—Churches which had over time become somewhat staid and, well, comfortable.  They set a higher bar to which Christian men and women found themselves called.  Discipleship could not be taken for granted and tepidity was not acceptable in matters of Christian commitment.  On the other hand, the preachers were educated men, conversant with the intellectual currents of their time.  They knew philosophy.  They knew biblical languages.  They knew the theological traditions of Calvin and the Reformers.  Some, like Whitefield or the Wesleys, knew the Fathers of the Church.  Some, like Edwards, were passionate about the sciences but none were opposed to any field of knowledge or learning.  The anti-intellectualism of today’s Christian right would have disgusted them as much as any sin or moral decay.  Indeed, they would be embarrassed by the uncouthness of many a priest and many a pastor today. 

We need a revival in the Church today, a new evangelicalism but it can’t be the sort of dim-witted fundamentalism of an Andy Gipson or a Jeff Smith or even the coat-and-tie ignoramity of a Franklin Graham.  For that matter we don’t need the gender-bending foppery of a Raymond Burke or a Salvatore Cordileone, much less the glass closet of a Michael Voris spinning the Gospel to their own peculiar tastes.  We need intelligent people, men and women who have their feet on the ground but know both the Scriptures and our Catholic heritage—the Patristic Tradition of Augustine and Ambrose and Jerome and Chrysostom et al—to motivate us intelligently and yet with full hearts to make Christ the center of our lives.  There is a golden opportunity here for a Third Great Awakening—one that calls Christians of every Church and denomination to faithful discipleship in a 21^st century world.

Benjamin Franklin--A Most Unorthodox "Christian"

Onwards with the Judeo-Christian Nation issue to determine whether or not our American heritage is indeed, undisputedly as Ms Barbara Curtis of Mommy Blog asserts, a “Judeo-Christian nation.”  We looked at our colonial roots (December 15) which can give some affirmation to the idea and then to the Founding Fathers where the issue becomes more complicated.  We had two entries (December 16, 17) on Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, as well as being the author of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom which, in turn, influenced the non-establishment clause of the Bill of Rights which lies at the heart of the problem of religious displays in public space.  Yesterday I tried to use the Tim Tebow phenomenon to illustrate the difference between government-space and public space as well as between religious holidays/symbols and cultural celebrations/symbols.  So now back to the Founding Fathers and we will look at Benjamin Franklin to see his religious convictions and what they might say about “Christian Nation.”  Franklin is usually identified as a Quaker but his roots, in fact, were Congregationalist and he was baptized as an infant at the Old South Meeting House in Boston.  His parents destined him for the clergy—a fate for which Benjamin would have been incalculably ill suited.  I don’t know that he ever affiliated with the Quakers—it seems unlikely as having fled to Philadelphia (the seat of American Quakerism) at age 17, then on to London for a brief period before returning to Philadelphia where he joined the Masons at the age of twenty-five and within four years was elected Grand Master of his Lodge.  Quakers eschewed secret societies and while Franklin dressed plain and lived frugally his ties to the Masons would indicate he had already become a rationalist rather than a believer when he settled in the City of Brotherly Love.  Indeed when Franklin wrote his autobiography in 1771 he identified himself as a Deist and claimed to have long been won to that philosophy.  Franklin was very interested in religion.  In 1774, when living in London as the agent of the Pennsylvania Colony, he was present at the founding meeting of Unitarianism.  A decade later while serving as ambassador to France, Franklin gave advice to the Papal Nuncio regarding administration of the Catholic Church in the newly independent United States.  Indeed Franklin recommended John Carroll as superior of the American Mission—the provisional administration of the Church until the establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in 1789.  Franklin had become acquainted with Carroll in 1776 when they journeyed together and with Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll (John’s cousin) to Canada to seek Canadian support for the Revolution.  Carroll, incidentally, was excommunicated for this act by the Bishop of Quebec, but he retained Franklin’s esteem.  Franklin, like so many liberals across the ages, was an elitist and while he admired Jesus as great moral teacher he favored organized religion principally because of its potential to shape the morals of the common people of which he did not consider himself one.  Not only did he not affiliate to any organized religion, but Franklin himself, while exalting moral behavior as the necessary foundation of any civilization, was no moral rigorist and always allowed himself considerable latitude in his personal life.  He was however, the consummate gentleman and charmed all, religious and agnostic alike.  John Adams said of him “The Catholics consider him almost a Catholic, The Church of England claimed him as one of them; the Presbyterians thought him half-a-Presbyterian and the Friends believe him a wet Quaker.” 

     In order to clarify Franklin’s religious stance we perhaps should briefly look at Freemasonry and also at Unitarianism and its relationship to orthodox Christianity and to Deism. 

      Freemasonry rose in Britain in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries.  The oldest lodges were in Scotland but the movement seems to have travelled into the southern kingdom along with the Stuarts when in 1603 James VI of Scotland came to the English Throne as James I.  While the origins seem to have been a fraternal organization of artisans and craftsmen, from the very beginning there was an interest in scientific knowledge.  Indeed the Scots lodge at Kilwinning, considered to be the Mother or first lodge in Masonry, is spoken of in the 1559 Schaw Statutes: the warden of the lodge of Kilwinning …take trial of the art of memory and the science thereof, of every craftsman (fellowe of craft) and every apprentice according to the air of their vocations.”  William Schaw, by the way, was not only one of the leaders of the Kilwining Lodge but the “Master of Works” to King James VI of Scotland before his ascension to the English Throne.  This provides a possible link to the spread of Freemasonry from Scotland to England. 

     Scottish Freemasonry is linked to the (Protestant) Reformation in Scotland and while the Scots Reformation was Calvinistic many of its supporters were no more interested in Calvinism than Catholicism but only wanted the intellectual freedom that the break with Rome seemed to represent.  This is true in both Scotland and England where once papal authority was broken, the Church—now the Reformed Church—was never able to establish control over the belief of the citizenry.  The origins of the separation of Church and State are firmly rooted in the Reformation principles that each individual is the judge of his or her orthodoxy.  Freemasonry attracted inquiring minds that wanted to discuss matters of science, politics, morals, and natural religion without the dominance of hierarchy.  There are strong ties between Freemasonry and the Enlightenment.  While today many Masons are devout members of mainline Protestant Churches with an orthodox appreciation of the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, that would not have been typical in the seventeenth and eighteenth century where Freemasonry was tied to rationalism and Deism—and even agnosticism. 

     Freemasonry requires the belief in a Supreme Being but as a matter of principle leaves that Supreme Being undefined.  There is also the reference to “Sacred Law.”  While in the United States this “volume of Sacred Law” is most commonly the King James Bible, it can be any religious or philosophical text depending on the makeup of the members.  Indeed in Lodges of mixed religious memberships—Christians, Hindus, Muslims—several “volumes of Sacred Law” might be displayed together.  In other words, religion is somewhat of whatever the individual decides to make it.  In a Christian context this not only produces a religious relativism, but it permits the Christian faith to be understood so broadly as to be without substance. In this system natural science rather than revealed truth is the basis of moral behavior and that would be perfectly consistent with the thought of not only of the Mason, Franklin, but the non-Mason Deist, Jefferson. It is not Christian doctrine however in which the teachings of Jesus are not only illustrative of good morals but their foundation.  Well, that is enough for today.  We will save Unitarianism for another day.  Suffice it to say that Franklin was very definitely post-Christian in his own beliefs but thought that organized religion was a good thing for shaping the moral character of individuals less sophisticated than himself and his fellow Deists.  I don’t think one could say that he supported the idea of a Christian Nation, one built on orthodox Christian (or Judeo-Christian) doctrine but while not practicing it himself, he did encourage formal religion for the common citizen.  It would be inconsistent with his thought, however, to claim that he would support special legal or societal status for one religion over another.