Ben Franklin, Electricity, & the Wrath of God

“Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain,
    and a way for the thunderbolt,
26 to bring rain on a land where no one lives,
    on the desert, which is empty of human life,
27 to satisfy the waste and desolate land,
    and to make the ground put forth grass?

                               Job 38: 25-27 NRSV

2 O tell of God's might, O sing of God's grace,

whose robe is the light, whose canopy space,

whose chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,

and broad is God's path on the wings of the storm.

                                               Voice United 235

 There are times when I wonder "did I write about....?" Of course there are subjects to which I have returned a multitude of times over the past nearly 16 years of this blog. The seasons of the church year, areas of ongoing interest from a faith perspective, stories that remain open wounds, are all reasons to write about them again.

Then there are the ones I just can't recall getting to because...because. Three weeks ago I watched a two-part, four-hour exploration of the life of Benjamin Franklin on PBS -- Ken Burns strikes again. Ruth got about ten minutes in, said some encouraging words, then departed for a good book. I didn't think I'd hang in with it, but I did in the end. I realized that without Franklin there may not have been a United States of America because of his persuasive diplomacy to enlist the considerable support of France. While he received virtually no formal education he was celebrated in Europe as a man of letters, he was the definition of a polymath, a scientist and inventor who was revered for his rather risky experiments with electricity. 

Three things stood out among many insights from the programs. One was that the strongest opposition to his work in understanding lightning as electricity came from the religious community. Lightning was regarded as the wrath and justice of God, so explaining it secularized a powerful threat of punishment. In the face of criticism Franklin observed:“Surely the thunder of Heaven is no more supernatural than the rain, hail, or sunshine of Heaven, against the inconvenience of which we guard by roofs and shades without scruple.” The irony was that thousands of churches, usually the tallest buildings in communities, were saved by his invention of the lightning rod. 

A second was that while Franklin owned enslaved persons, as did so many of his peers, he came to realize that this was morally wrong. When the colonies were coming together as uniting  states the most significant compromise was on slavery to ensure the participation of the South. Franklin, the pragmatist, was not happy with this, and worked to amend the Constitution in the years after, to no avail. 

The third thing was that Franklin was "spiritual but not religious" in a strikingly modern way. While he seemed to be wary of Christian denominationalism he was convinced that there was a Creator to whom humans would answer, regardless of religion or creed, and that we are all called to do our utmost for the benefit of humanity. 

I am glad I watched and I will be grateful to my last breath for his invention of bifocal eyeglasses.