Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (W.W. Norton & Co., 2014), 308-309.
[T]he idea that charity is piety – that God is love – finds expression in all of the world’s religious traditions and in particular within the Christian tradition. John famously says in his first Epistle, “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God”; “whoever does not love does not know God; for God is love.” James makes the point in the negative: “Faith without works is dead.” Many deists, from [Baruch] Spinoza to [Thomas] Jefferson, cite John and James favorably on precisely this account. [Benjamin] Franklin in particular appeals to James regularly – especially in the course of his irate polemics against abuse of clerical power.
The Amateur Exegete 