Bradley J. Birzer
D.G. Hart perceptively notes that Benjamin Franklin was not a Deist, as popular memory claims, but rather a “cultural Protestant.” As such, he “applied much of what Protestants taught about work and study in the secular world without accepting all that the churches taught about the world to come.”

Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant (270 pages, Oxford University Press, 2021)
Several times at The Imaginative Conservative, I’ve had the chance to reflect on my early reading habits and loves and the little library—a detached trailer at Wiley Elementary School in Hutchinson, Kansas—that provided me with so much joy and so much bibliographic fervor, even in my pre-teens. The first book I ever checked out and read was a child’s biography of Lewis and Clark. I can still see that book, and I hold tight to it in memory.
When the school librarian realized that I loved early American history, she kindly recommended Ben and Me, a historical fantasy about a mouse who lives in Ben Franklin’s hat and advises him, especially in matters scientific and material. I devoured the book, quickly falling in love with it, Ben Franklin, and the colonial period of America. Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin By His Good Mouse Amos originally came out in 1939 by author and illustrator Robert Lawson, but I encountered it sometime in the middle of the 1970s.
Jump forward a half century, and I find myself having fully enjoyed a much more recent biography of the great man, Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant, by D.G. Hart. Sadly, no mice appear in Hart’s extraordinary biography, but it might somewhat peculiar if they did. Still, there is lots of adventure as Franklin restlessly and purposefully moves to Philadelphia, leaving restrictive Boston behind, apprentices as a printer, founds his own very successful business,  » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/01/benjamin-franklin-cultural-protestant-d-g-hart-bradley-birzer.html