Franklin just believed in God, no religion? Is that bad? I'm not very familiar with Deists.
Desim is basically the belief that once God created the universe, He put everything in place and did such a perfect job that nothing would ever require His intervention.
This is sometimes called the master clockmaker scenario. A master clockmaker makes such superb clocks, that he doesn't stand over it night and day waiting for something to go wrong so he can fix it. He knows that the clock is of such excellent construction that it will never need to be fixed, so he just goes on and ignores the clock from then on.
So, Deists believed in God as a Creator, but differed with Christians in that they believed God would never, under any circumstance, intervene in any situation.