He walked down Market Street with three bread rolls. One under each arm. One in his mouth.
A seventeen-year-old runaway. Hungry. Tired. Nearly broke. Three hundred miles from home and not a single recommendation in his pocket.
That boy would become Benjamin Franklin. Inventor. Diplomat. Founder. The soul of America.
However, before he was any of that, he was a young man asking the most important question a young man can ask: how can I become both good and great?
He asked it at age twenty on a ship sailing home from London, and the answer he wrote down would shape the American character forever.
The Three Streams of Virtue
Franklin made a list.
He did not pull it from one tradition. He pulled it from three. Ancient virtues. Christian virtues. Commercial virtues. Then he stitched them together. Then he added a method.
Industry. Frugality. Temperance. Justice. Humility. Faith. Hope. Charity.
He combined them because he knew no single tradition was sufficient on its own. The ancients gave him courage and prudence. The Christians gave him love and grace. The merchants gave him industry and thrift. He gave the new world a method to live them out.
Here is the part most people miss. Franklin did not believe you could war against human nature and win. He said human nature must be cultivated like a garden.
He even compared Philadelphia to a garden.
That is a profoundly biblical instinct. God placed the first man in a garden. The first commandment was to tend it. The first marriage happened in it. The first family started there.
The garden is where life is cultivated. Not conquered. Cultivated.
The Republic Requires the Family
Franklin understood something many Americans have forgotten.
A Republic does not run on laws. It runs on virtue, and virtue is not manufactured in courthouses or capitals. It is cultivated at kitchen tables. It is grown in marriages. It is harvested in families.
John Adams said it plainly: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Adams was right, and Franklin lived it.
He helped found civic associations, the library, the fire brigade, the hospital, and the militia. He believed self-interest could be channeled into public good. However, all of it stood on a deeper foundation. The family.
When the family thrives, the Republic thrives. When the family fails, no Constitution, no committee, no piece of parchment can hold the nation together.
That is the truth Franklin understood. That is the truth America has forgotten.
That is why I believe my call is to become a Mister Rogers for adults to heal broken marriages and save the family. Because saving the family is how we save the Republic.
Four Purposes. One Garden.
Recently I listened to a sermon by Pastor Joel Friend at New Community Church in Wexford, PA. He preached on the four purposes of marriage as God designed it.
Read these four slowly. They are the seedbed of a free people.
- Marriage is God’s earthly system for childbearing. Trust. Safety. Security. Faithfulness until death. A man and a woman vowing to stay so children can grow. This is not a private preference. It is a public good. A Republic that cannot produce stable families cannot produce stable citizens.
- Marriage is a picture of Christ and the Church. Paul calls it a “profound mystery” in Ephesians 5:32. Every faithful marriage is a living parable. A wife and a husband display to a watching world the love of the Bridegroom for His Bride. When marriage breaks, the parable breaks, and a generation grows up never having seen the love of God in human form.
- Marriage is for our sanctification, not our glorification. It is the workshop in which God shapes us into the image of His Son. Patience. Forgiveness. Sacrifice. Mercy. You cannot become like Christ in isolation. You become like Christ in covenant.
- Marriage keeps the resurrection about Christ. There will be no marriage in heaven. Why? Because the picture will give way to the reality. Christ is the point. Always. Marriage is the rehearsal. Heaven is the wedding.
Four purposes. One garden, and Franklin would have understood every one of them.
The Errata of a Nation
In his autobiography, Franklin called the moral failures of his life errata. While the term comes from the printing trade, referring to mistakes in a proof that a printer or editor can correct in a second edition, Franklin used it metaphorically to describe correctable mistakes in his own moral and life choices. He wanted to correct them. He wanted to live well.
America has its own errata.
We have torn up the garden. We have called marriage a contract instead of a covenant. We have outsourced fatherhood to screens. We have outsourced motherhood to the marketplace. We have told children that their identity is whatever they feel on a Tuesday afternoon.
We have, as Franklin warned at the Constitutional Convention, become like the builders of Babel trying to build a nation without divine aid.
Franklin said it with tears in his eyes. The same men who had prayed for unity during the Revolution had forgotten how to pray for unity at the founding. He moved that the clergy of Philadelphia lead the sessions in prayer.
The motion did not pass.
But the warning still stands.
The Method
Here is the good news. Franklin gave us not only a list of virtues, but a method to live them.
He practiced. He measured. He confessed his failures. He tried again.
Sanctification is the same. We do not arrive. We tend. We cultivate. We weed. We water. We wake up tomorrow and do it again.
The same is true of marriage. The same is true of the Republic.
That is why my family reads The Family Wins Devotional. Not because we are perfect, but because we are gardeners. Because the Word of God is the seed, Neighborly Love is the soil, and Christ is the sun and the rain.
A few minutes a day. A husband and a wife. A father and a mother. Children listening. The Word breaking ground in young hearts.
That is how a marriage is saved. That is how a family is awakened. That is how a Republic is renewed.
The Stretch Dream
I am not a pastor. I am not a politician. I am a husband and a father trying to be faithful in the work God has given me.
However, I have a stretch dream: To become a Mister Rogers for adults. To speak softly and clearly to grown-ups who have forgotten how to love. To sit on the porch of the American soul and remind a tired generation that the family is worth fighting for. That the marriage you have today can be healed tomorrow. That the children watching are watching closely.
Mister Rogers understood that the most important conversations in America happen between adults and the children they love. Franklin understood that the most important institution in America is the family that raises those children. Pastor Joel reminded us that marriage itself is a garden God Himself planted.
Three voices. One garden.
The Two Wolves
Inside every American beats two wolves. One wolf wants ease. The other wants endurance. One wolf wants self. The other wants sacrifice. One wolf wants the Republic without the virtue. The other wolf wants the virtue that makes the Republic possible.
Which one will we feed?
Franklin fed the Good Wolf. He did it imperfectly. He confessed his errata. He cultivated his garden. He gave us a nation.
Now it is our turn.
Feed your marriage. Feed your family. Feed the Word into the next generation. Feed the Republic with the only fuel that has ever sustained it, a moral and religious people who love God first, others second, and themselves third.
Feed the Good Wolf.
– Coach C
A Note of Gratitude
The Franklin story in this post was inspired by the latest episode of The Story of America: Benjamin Franklin, featuring Kevin Slack, Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College. The episode traces Franklin’s path from humiliation at the hands of British nobles to revered statesman, including the lesser-known facts that Franklin once aspired to be governor of Ohio and was instrumental in helping Thomas Jefferson edit the Declaration of Independence.
The Story of America is a co-production with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education in celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.
Watch the full episode: The Story of America: Benjamin Franklin on YouTube.
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