What We Were Before We Forgot

The lodge as Enlightenment laboratory

The Enlightenment-era lodge wasn’t producing deep thinkers so much as housing them. Men already engaged in serious inquiry about governance, morality, and human nature found in the lodge a protected space to do that work alongside others.

That claim deserves more than a passing reference. So here’s the longer version, with sources.

(This is a companion piece to my recent essay reflecting on the Working Tools Podcast. That one raised the question. This one digs into the historical record.)

The Safe House

In 1717, four London lodges formed the first Grand Lodge. By 1723, James Anderson’s Constitutions had laid out the foundational principles: reason, virtue, and a deistic “Supreme Architect” that allowed men of different faiths to stand together under moral improvement rather than doctrinal agreement.

This matters because of what lodges weren’t in that era. They weren’t social clubs. They weren’t service organizations. They were, in Margaret Jacob’s phrase, laboratories for democratic self-governance.

Jacob’s Living the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1991) puts it plainly: lodges “reconstituted the polity and established a constitutional form of self-government, complete with constitutions and laws, elections and representatives.” By the eighteenth century, they had “discarded their guild origins and become an international phenomenon that gave men and eventually some women a place to vote, speak, discuss and debate.”

Every member received one vote regardless of social standing. Officers were elected and rotated through term limits. The blackball system ensured anonymous voting on membership. Written constitutions defined rights and procedures. In an age of absolute monarchies, these were radical practices. Men rehearsed self-governance inside a voluntary institution before democratic nations existed to practice it in.

What They Actually Did in There

The Old King’s Arms Lodge No. 28 in London held lectures in the 1730s and 40s on anatomical dissection, fermentation of intoxicating liquors, and natural philosophy. Dr. Oliver described eighteenth-century lodges with “an air pump, armillary sphere, and a small philosophical apparatus” on their meeting tables. Topics included architecture, astronomy, history, art, and science.

Martin Clare’s 1735 oration to London Freemasons drew over half its content directly from John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. The intellectual connection between Enlightenment philosophy and Masonic discourse was explicit, not decorative.

James Van Horn Melton’s The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001) explains the structural innovation: “Membership in a lodge was voluntary, not ascribed, and was defined by criteria that were independent of the individual’s formal legal status. Lodges cut across boundaries of occupation, confession, and class.”

The 1723 constitutional charge forbade members from bringing “Quarrels about Religion, or Nations, or State Policy” into the lodge. The rule created a boundary condition rather than making lodges apolitical in any simple sense: the lodge was meant to be a place for moral formation, sociability, and disciplined conversation, not a site for factional warfare. That design choice mattered in a period when regimes and churches suspected secretive associations of coordinated political influence.

The combination of secrecy and cross-boundary membership created recurrent suspicion. Pope Clement XII’s 1738 bull In eminenti describes lodges as groups spreading “far and wide,” open to “men of any Religion or sect,” bound by oaths and “inviolable silence.” Precisely the combination that produced both the lodge’s usefulness and its persecution.

Franklin, Voltaire, Washington

Benjamin Franklin’s Masonic career spanned over sixty years beginning with his 1731 initiation in Philadelphia’s St. John’s Lodge. He became Grand Master of Pennsylvania in 1734 and published the first Masonic book in America.

When called to France, Franklin joined the Lodge of Nine Sisters (La Loge des Neuf Soeurs) in 1778 and served as Worshipful Master from 1779 to 1781. The Scottish Rite Masonic Museum documents that Nine Sisters “boasted an elite and international membership” including philosophers, scientists, statesmen, and artists. Under Franklin’s leadership, the lodge published translations of the Declaration of Independence and constitutions of American states, revealing to French subscribers “American perceptions of natural liberties.”

Voltaire’s initiation on April 7, 1778, at age 83, with approximately 250 members present and Franklin serving as one of his ritual guides, represents the intersection of Enlightenment philosophy and Masonic practice. A contemporary verse captured it: “At the name of our Illustrious Brother, today all Freemasons triumph. If he receives from us the light, the world had it from him.”

George Washington’s Masonic engagement was substantive. Mount Vernon’s documentation shows he entered the Fredericksburg lodge in 1752 and progressed through the three degrees in 1753. Many brothers from his lodge served as Continental Army officers. On September 18, 1793, Washington laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol in full Masonic regalia, the commemorative plate declaring the date “in the thirteenth year of American independence... and in the year of Masonry, 5793.”

The same Mount Vernon source stresses that while individual Masons participated in revolutionary politics, Freemasonry “as an institution” remained politically neutral. This distinction matters. Lodges were often adjacent to political innovation because they drew politically active elites and taught a disciplined associational ethic, but they maintained internal rules that limited overt partisanship.

The point here isn’t that Freemasonry made these men Enlightenment thinkers. A lodge could be one node in the social circuitry through which Enlightenment elites coordinated, socialized, and legitimized certain ideals of improvement, learning, and civic virtue.

The Golden Age Paradox

The period from 1870 to 1920 represented the most dramatic expansion of fraternal organizations in American history. By 1897, over 5.5 million men belonged to at least one secret fraternal society. Albert Stevens’ 1901 Cyclopaedia of Fraternities documented total fraternal membership exceeding 40% of the adult male population.

Lynn Dumenil’s Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930 (Princeton, 1984) documents a fundamental transformation during this era. The nineteenth-century ideal understood Masonry as having “separate standards and concerns from the immoral, competitive, and commercial world,” providing “a sacred asylum in which men could ignore the social, political, economic, and religious conflicts of their time while cultivating love of God, bonds of fellowship, and improvement of the individual.”

This character began shifting toward what Dumenil calls secularization. “As the United States moved from Victorian values to those of modern consumerism, the religious component of Freemasonry was increasingly displaced by a secular ideology of service (like that of business and professional clubs).”

A Detroit secretary’s description of typical 1920s lodge night reveals the transition: meetings now “divided into thirds, ritual in the lodge room, family dining in the restaurant, and sociability in the billiard room or ballroom.” Ritual was “trimmed and rushed to make space for social events.”

Even during this growth period, Dumenil found that attendance at lodge meetings was rarely more than 15% of the membership. The tensions between quality and quantity, ritual and sociability, exclusivity and mass recruitment all emerged during the Golden Age and would intensify dramatically after the war.

Newton Saw It Coming

The term “degree mill” isn’t mine and isn’t a modern invention by disgruntled reformers. It appears in nineteenth-century Masonic literature, used by thinking Freemasons who worried that lodges had become places where brethren performed ritual, put the business behind them, and simply socialized. The Square Magazine’s history of Masonic research notes that “fork and knife Masons” was already a term of criticism over a century ago.

Joseph Fort Newton recognized the danger of rapid expansion without intellectual foundation before the post-war crisis ever materialized.

Newton was raised to Master Mason in 1902 in Friendship Lodge No. 7, Dixon, Illinois. He initially “entered seeking knowledge, and finding none, drifted away.” Only after discovering the Iowa Masonic Library did he find the engagement he sought. This experience drove his life’s work.

In 1914, at the behest of the Grand Master and Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Iowa, Newton published The Builders: A Story and Study of Freemasonry. The book went through more than forty editions, was translated into six languages, and remains a classic in Masonic literature. For decades, the Grand Lodge of Iowa gave it as a gift to newly raised Master Masons.

The same year, George L. Schoonover founded the National Masonic Research Society under the Grand Lodge of Iowa’s authority. Schoonover recognized that “among the three million Masons in America were a rapidly-increasing number of Masonic students; and that newly-made Masons, imbued with the spirit of the time, were more and more demanding to know ‘what it is all about.’”

The Builder magazine, with Newton as first editor-in-chief from 1915 to 1916, served as “A Journal for the Masonic Student.” Published monthly from January 1915 to May 1930, it carried no advertisements and reached peak membership exceeding 20,000 subscribers in over 40 countries. Many Masonic librarians consider it the best American Masonic magazine ever published.

The intellectual argument Newton and his colleagues articulated was that Freemasonry requires active study and engagement, not merely ritual participation. H.L. Haywood, who became editor in 1921, wrote: “There is no known way whereby, through a kind of magic, we can find light in Masonry. If a man wishes to learn something of history, he studies it; so if a man would learn Freemasonry he must study it.”

The National Masonic Research Society was forced to discontinue in mid-1931 due to Depression-era membership depletion. Its intellectual tradition represented a road not taken. A path that might have prepared American Freemasonry to maintain quality amid growth.

The concerns I’m raising aren’t new. Newton was asking these questions in 1914. The men who worried about degree mills were worried about them before any of us were born.

The Post-War Shock

U.S. Masonic membership peaked at 4,103,161 members in 1959 according to the Masonic Service Association of North America. But John L. Belton’s peer-reviewed analysis in Heredom (Scottish Rite Research Society, 2001) reveals a paradox: new member recruitment actually peaked in 1946, just one year after the war ended. The apparent post-war boom resulted from a strong thirteen-year upward trend beginning in 1933. The seeds of decline were planted at the moment of apparent triumph.

To accommodate the influx, Grand Lodges implemented specific institutional changes.

One-day classes replaced the traditional process of receiving three degrees over months of study. All three degrees were conferred in a single day, with a single “exemplar” candidate going through the ritual while dozens or hundreds watched. Candidates became Master Masons in hours rather than months, with little or no memorization required.

Reduced proficiency requirements eliminated or shortened the memorization of lengthy catechisms, removed the requirement to demonstrate understanding before advancement, and compressed the time between degrees from months to weeks or days.

Relaxed admission standards weakened the investigative process for candidates. Dwight L. Smith, Past Grand Master of Indiana, wrote in his influential 1964 critique “Whither Are We Travelling?”: “We are permitting too many to pass who can pay the fee and little else. We used to be getting petitions for the degrees from the good, substantial leaders in the community. Whether we like it or not, a general lowering of standards has left its mark on every Lodge.”

The degree mill phenomenon turned lodges into production facilities focused on quantity. Multiple degrees were conferred on the same night to different candidates in a production line approach. Smith observed: “We ran a production line; we counted new members by the hundreds of thousands; but we could count the new Masons only by the score.”

The 2013 handbook for a Grand Master’s Class in Ohio frames one-day initiation as a response to modern work schedules. But it includes a caution that goes directly to identity: “If we rush this process and do not educate the new members properly,” new members may form no bond and may “leave the Craft as quickly as they entered it.”

Bowling Alone With the Brethren

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) provides the broader sociological context. Putnam documented that “for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago, silently, without warning, that tide reversed.”

Putnam explicitly tracked Masonic membership, finding Masons down 39% since 1959. A 2019 Congressional Joint Economic Committee report found that membership in fraternal organizations like Freemasons and Knights of Columbus fell 52% from 1974 to 2004, the steepest decline among all organizational categories.

Belton’s academic analysis correlates Masonic membership data with Putnam’s framework, noting that “the peaks and troughs were mirrored in Australia and England—so whatever was happening was global, and it could reasonably be inferred that it was the same global forces at work.”

The institutional changes Freemasonry made to accommodate mass membership may have accelerated rather than prevented decline. Belton found that retention collapsed catastrophically: in the 1950s, average membership duration exceeded 20 years. By mid-1970s it fell below 10 years. By mid-1980s below 5 years.

The men processed through degree mills never became actual Masons in any meaningful sense.

The Observant Response

The Traditional Observance movement emerged in the early 2000s as a conscious effort to restore what the post-war era dismantled. Selective membership. Extended time between degrees. Candidates who write papers and demonstrate understanding before advancement. Festive Boards with structured discussion instead of rushed dinners.

The movement explicitly cites Dwight Smith’s 1964 questions as foundational. Smith asked: “How well are we guarding the West Gate? Has Freemasonry become too easy to obtain? Are we not worshipping at the altar of bigness? What has become of that ‘course of moral instruction, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols’?”

While overall U.S. Masonic membership continues declining, from approximately 4.1 million in 1959 to roughly 900,000 today, TO lodges show counter-trend growth. Between 2016 and 2019, while total U.S. membership fell 9.57%, Observant lodges on the Masonic Restoration Foundation list grew 11.63%.

The growth suggests something simple: when organizations offer genuine engagement, transformation, and community, members respond.

What I’m Not Saying

It would be irresponsible to write a piece like this without acknowledging the counterarguments.

The Enlightenment lodges I’ve described were exceptional. We have records from them because exceptional men wrote things down. The rural lodge in 1780 may have been just as perfunctory as the one in 1980. Selection bias in the historical record flatters the past. I’m comparing the best of the old era to the average of the new one, and that’s not entirely fair.

The post-war boom, for all its flaws, gave millions of men something real. Social networks, mutual aid, community belonging. A man who joined in 1955 and stayed for forty years got something out of it, even if he never read Locke. Measuring the institution by intellectual output ignores what most members actually wanted: fellowship and belonging. By that measure, the post-war lodge delivered.

The Traditional Observance movement is a niche solution. Observant lodges grew 11% while the mainstream declined 9%, but that’s growth from a tiny base. The TO model self-selects for men who already want what it offers. It’s a lifeboat for a particular kind of brother, not a blueprint for institutional renewal.

And Putnam’s whole point is that civic disengagement happened everywhere, to every organization, for reasons beyond anyone’s control. Television. Suburbanization. Women entering the workforce. Two-income time scarcity. The broader demographic decline of the American population. Freemasonry didn’t hollow itself out in isolation. America hollowed out, and Freemasonry got caught in the undertow. The institutional changes I’ve critiqued were attempts to survive forces no fraternity could resist.

There are overlapping influences here that no single essay can untangle. Birth rates. Immigration patterns. The collapse of mainline Protestantism. The acceleration of Masonic population decline against an already declining base of the kinds of men who historically joined. Anyone who claims to have a succinct, actionable answer to all of this is either ignoring the complexity, has convinced themselves of something too simple, or isn’t thinking carefully enough about the problem.

I am one man among roughly a million remaining American Masons. I’m not a messiah. I’m not selling a program. I’m doing the same work of Masonry that our ritual and obligation ask every brother to do. I just happen to be doing mine in a forum that allows others to come along for the conversation.

A follow-up piece will outline the strongest counterarguments to what I’ve presented here and do my best to engage them honestly. Because that’s also part of the work.

What We’re Actually Recovering

The transformation of Freemasonry from Enlightenment laboratory to post-war service club involved more than changing aesthetics or declining enthusiasm. It involved specific institutional choices: one-day classes, reduced proficiency, relaxed admission, the degree mill model. These systematically dismantled the mechanisms by which lodges had historically transmitted knowledge and formed members.

The real age of Masonry, according to scholarly evidence, was an institution that demanded genuine intellectual engagement. Candidates memorized catechisms, demonstrated understanding, and spent months or years progressing through degrees. Lodges held educational lectures, philosophical discussions, and structured deliberative proceedings. Members were selected carefully because the lodge was understood as a transformative space.

We can recover that. Some lodges already are.

As Dwight Smith concluded in 1963: “There is one radical solution to the problem of our Craft which strikes at its root: Try Freemasonry.”

-Brother Rob

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If you’re interested in the interior work of Masonry, my book The Unfinished Temple offers thirty-three meditations following the three degrees. Working tools for daily labor. Available in paperback and Kindle.