Although he was raised in a Puritan family, Ben Franklin was a major Enlightenment figure. Discuss how his Project of Moral Perfection and his list of the Thirteen Virtues demonstrates Puritan influence while also embodying Enlightenment thought.

Franklin was, in some ways, typical of his generation and among American intellectuals in general in reconciling his religious upbringing with the secular values of the Enlightenment. Few people of that age or any other, however, had the systematic or organizing mental powers of Franklin that he reveals in the Autobiography were already in action during his youth and young manhood.
It is interesting that another famous freethinker Bertrand Russell stated that his Protestant upbringing not only still influenced him after he'd become an agnostic, but formed in some way the center of his moral values and behavior. Russell cites the text from Scripture "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil" as influencing him in his "most serious actions." A century and a half before Russell, the young Franklin was the same way. The Thirteen Virtues are consistent not only with Protestantism or specifically Puritanism, but with the beliefs of most of the world's religions. But the way they are stated and elaborated is secular, and even the final one, "Imitate Jesus and Socrates," shows Franklin's thinking of Jesus not in terms of the Christian belief in Jesus as the son of God, but as a man of virtue on the same plane with a person like Socrates whose own Greek background was different from that of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Yet, there is nothing in Franklin's list of virtues that contradicts or attempts to negate Christianity either.
During the Enlightenment, intellectuals had to answer the attacks of religious believers who claimed that without religion, people's behavior would have no constraints and the world would descend into chaos. Franklin's Project of Moral Perfection is an attempt to show that morality was possible—or perhaps could become an even stronger force—without the trappings of organized religion to support it. It would be of interest to look into the writings of other freethinkers of the early eighteenth-century, such as Hume and Voltaire, to compare their own views with those of Franklin on how to perpetuate or improve on the moral structure of society without explicit (or any) reference to religion.