From Ben Franklin to Bob Dylan

My American history teacher in high school, relishing 18th-century gossip about Benjamin Franklin’s wenching, referred to him as Bed Franklin. Later, when I did my own history-writing, I thought the elderly Franklin’s request for prayer at the Constitutional Convention 230 years ago was a political device.

Maybe it was more than that. Baylor historian Thomas Kidd, who admirably covered organized religion for WORLD for two years and is now investing all his work time in academic pursuits, is educating me and others through his excellent Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father (Yale, 2017). Franklin had a lot of religious discussion with his loving sister Jane and with famed preacher George Whitefield, and it’s hard to know what sunk in.

Many older Christian parents today worry about their millennial children imbibing anti-Christian ideas in college, de-churching in their 20s, and maybe never coming back. That’s a legitimate concern, but here’s a consolation from Kidd: “Franklin’s early exposure to skeptical writings undermined his confidence in Christianity. But books alone could not erase Franklin’s childhood immersion in Puritan piety.”

Kidd notes that Franklin and Abraham Lincoln—“both self-educated sons of Calvinist parents, both of whom had much of the Bible committed to memory—gravitated toward a revitalized sense of God’s role over history, as war and constitutional crises racked America in the 1770s and 1860s. Neither man’s beliefs could escape the influence of their daily relationships and stressful experiences.”

Parents can pray for God to give covenant children good relationships and useful stress, as He did for Franklin and Lincoln—and other notables are also hard to pin down. Scott Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life (WND, 2017), the latest attempt to figure out the singer, includes lots of incidents and quotations. It’s not a smoothly organized or mellifluously written book, and Dylan seems to have melded elements of Jewish identity and Christian understanding in ways unclear to his followers—but God had drawn and knows his arc.

For a clearer—perhaps too clear—view of God’s action, Michael Medved’s The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic (Crown, 2016) is worth reading: High-school students who have heard only about Bed Franklin could use Medved’s rousing storytelling about Washington, Jackson, Sam Houston, Lincoln, and others.

For those who like fictional plots with as many twists and turns as complicated lives, Joseph Kanon’s Defectors (Atria, 2017) is a delight: It’s a Moscow cat-and-mouse game where we don’t know until the end who has the big claws and who is mostly squeak. The novel, set in 1961 12 years after a CIA agent betrays his country and his friends by defecting to the Soviet Union, has the ex-agent wanting to go home—or is he hatching a fresh betrayal? (Occasional bad language and remembrance of a sexual encounter.)

BOOKMARKS

Victor Lee Austin, author of Losing Susan (Brazos, 2016) could have become bitter about the death of his wife before she entered old age, but his subtitle explains why he did not: Brain Disease, the Priest’s Wife, and the God Who Gives and Takes Away. In the course of Susan’s fatal disease, Victor became a victor as he came to conclude that his previously favorite Bible book, the Song of Solomon, was second to the book of Job.

Joy Pullmann’s The Education Invasion (Encounter, 2017) is true to its subtitle: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids. So is Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted, edited by Laura Caldwell and Leslie Klinger (Liveright, 2017), a book that includes 14 sobering stories of people who spent long stretches in prison.

American Religion, American Politics: An Anthology, edited by Joseph Kosek (Yale, 2017), is a handy collection for college students of classic documents—Winthrop, Penn, Madison, Jefferson, Rauschenbusch, etc.—and some recent ones: Heschel, Schlafly, Schaeffer, Sam Harris, Wendell Berry. —M.O.