Throughout much of his life, Franklin was ambivalent and on at least one occasion downright agonized about his own religious beliefs. This tension is honestly reflected in his private letters and memoranda, although not so much in his carefully crafted public essays, lectures, and autobiography. A good deal of his ambivalence can be attributed to the fact that he, like so many of his contemporaries, was caught in a worldview clash that muddied religious belief by encouraging competing loyalties.

Born, as he tells us, to strict Calvinist parents, reared “piously in the Dissenting Way” and “religiously educated as a Presbyterian” (A 113), Franklin, as a precocious teenager, quickly became an ardent champion of the so-called New Learning exemplified by the empiricism and materialism of thinkers such as Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. Franklin's enthusiasm for the Enlightenment ethos remained a constant thread throughout the rest of his life, although time and maturity took the edge off its youthful zeal. But he also retained elements of the Calvinism, most notably an interest in the “Conduct of Life,” and perhaps a belief in divine providence, into which he was born and which he thought he had shaken off. Intellectually and emotionally, Franklin was comfortable with the Enlightenment worldview that challenged the earlier Calvinist one. But the influence of his Calvinist tradition never completely disappeared, and to the end of his days he occasionally defended certain positions that sound relatively orthodox.