Deism In Colonial America

by James Breig
On Christmas Day in 1769, Charles Pyne, a bookseller in England, 
perhaps with an eye to enlarging his stock without increasing his 
overhead, swiped several books from one Thomas Roberts. Pyne grabbed a 
three-volume set of works by Jonathan Swift, filched a history book, and
 walked off with two volumes titled Deism Reveal’d. Arrested, he pleaded
 guilty and was transported out of England, perhaps to America. About 
four years later, Philip Fithian began tutoring the children of Robert 
Carter—a wealthy and powerful man who lived on a Virginia plantation and
 owned a large home next door to the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg. 
When Fithian catalogued Carter’s library, he listed a treatise on 
government by Sir Francis Bacon, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and
 The Canterbury Tales. He also noted that resting on a shelf between 
books about William Congreve and William Shakespeare was a two-volume 
work: Deism Reveal’d.
Whether in the hands of a thief who knew what would sell or in the 
library of an influential Virginian, the volumes testify that people of 
the eighteenth century addressed the ideas of what was sometimes 
denominated “theological rationalism,” a reason-based faith. Broadly 
speaking, the idea is that a first cause is responsible for the universe
 and that the universe runs, like a clockwork, on its own. Some would 
adopt deism’s precepts; others would reject them.
Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, wrote that “some books 
against Deism fell into my hands; . . . The arguments of the Deists . . .
 appeared to me much stronger than the refutation; in short, I soon 
became a thorough Deist.”
Sir John Randolph, one of the leading legal lights of Williamsburg 
and the only Virginia-born colonial to be knighted, made sure that his 
1735 will clearly described his religious beliefs: “I have been 
reproached by many people . . . and drawn upon me names very familiar to
 blind zealots such as deist heretic and schismatic.” 
Feeling impelled “to vindicate my memory from all harsh and 
unbrotherly censure of this kind,” he professed his sincere belief that 
“Jesus was the Messiah who came into the world in a miraculous manner. .
 . . I am also persuaded . . . that the dead shall rise at God’s 
appointed time.” By detailing his adherence to orthodox Christian 
doctrines, Randolph rebutted accusations that he was interested in 
deism, a sect—if it merits a term implying an organized system of 
tenets—that rejected the incarnation, the resurrection, and the trinity. 
Franklin confessed to some doubts about Jesus’ divinity, and Thomas 
Jefferson razored his way through the Gospels, keeping words that seemed
 to him to be authentically Jesus’, but cutting what he took to be the 
corruptions of other New Testament contributors.
As a cultural movement, deism was strongest from, roughly, the 
mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth—but it is with us yet.
Still debated more than 200 years after the Constitution was written 
is the question of whether the United States was ordained by 
Bible-believing Christians or Bible-doubting deists, who held that God 
was a disinterested being with a hands-off view of the universe he 
created. Such debate, which can raise hackles and voices in our times, 
engendered fierce emotions in the 1700s, as Randolph’s will, and a May 
20, 1773, issue of the Virginia Gazette, published in Williamsburg, 
testify. The Gazette carried an advertisement placed by Joseph Kidd that
 said in part, “Whereas it is publickly reported that I accused the 
Reverend Mr. Henley of Deism . . . I do hereby, out of Justice to Mr. 
Henley’s Character, declare that I never had reason to believe that such
 were his Principles.”
 
That being called a deist was cause for such a newspaper notice 
suggests how contentious the concept was. Contentious, yes; complicated,
 no. Deism was defined with sixteen words in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 
dictionary: “The opinion of those that only acknowledge one God, without
 the reception of any revealed religion.” To some, the term was a 
synonym for atheist. A sermonist said in 1670: “We have a generation 
among us . . . called Deists, which is nothing else but a new court word
 for Atheist.” But the word deism derives from deus, the Latin word for 
god, and its practitioners accepted a supreme cause responsible for all 
that exists.
Deism’s invention is often credited to Edward, the first Lord Herbert
 of Cherbury, England, who died in 1648. In The Faiths of the Founding 
Fathers, David L. Holmes, a professor of religious studies at the 
College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, catalogues Herbert’s 
“classic five points of Deism”: 
	* That God exists 
* That “he ought to be worshiped”
* That practicing virtue is the primary way so to do
* That sins can be repented of
* That there is life after death
On the fifth point, Jefferson said that the deceased “ascend in 
essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost 
and whom we shall still love and never lose again.” John Adams captured 
much of Herbert’s five points in one sentence: “My religion is founded 
on the love of God and my neighbor; on the hope of pardon for my 
offenses; upon contrition; . . . in the duty of doing . . . all the good
 I can, to the creation of which I am but an infinitesimal part.”
Because deism was never a formal sect and had no hierarchy to fix its
 principles, each adherent could bend it to individual liking, often 
moving it along traditional Christianity continuum as one manipulates a 
pointer along a slide rule. On one end of the scale, Washington could be
 ranked as a deist who attended church services, was a vestryman, quoted
 the Bible, commended religion, and prayed. At the other end stood 
Thomas Paine, who recorded his disdain for Christianity in The Age of 
Reason. In his view, God never communicated with men, Christianity was a
 fable, and miracles were fictions. Nonetheless, he said he was not an 
atheist. In a letter to Samuel Adams, Paine wrote that he penned The Age
 of Reason to keep the French from “running headlong into Atheism” 
during their revolution, and to ensure that they would hew to “the first
 article . . . of every man’s Creed who has any creed at all—‘I believe 
in God.’”
Paine’s use of the word “God” was atypical of deists. The preferred 
terms ran to Almighty Being, Supreme Author, Providence, Superior Agent,
 the Supremely Perfect—a Franklin phrase—and the Great Governor of the 
World, used in the Articles of Confederation.
The vocabulary hints at why deism flourished during the 
Enlightenment, when reason and science were exalted. During the 
eighteenth century, men catalogued animals and plants, charted the stars
 and planets, founded museums to preserve the past, and composed 
dictionaries and encyclopedias to systematize knowledge. When that 
impulse turned to religion, it leaned toward a scheme that accepted what
 was rational and cast off what could not be scientifically 
proved—walking on water, for example, or the notion of a triune deity.
That approach infuriated many Christians. In a 1755 article in The 
Gentleman’s Magazine, an English journal, a writer fulminated against 
what he saw as “all revealed Religion, turned into Ridicule, by Men who 
set up for Sense and Reason.” In 1753, a reader of the Virginia Gazette 
pleaded with the editor to print articles “to shew that the Scriptures 
are the Word of God,” because he had “Reason to fear Deism has some 
Adherents in Virginia.” Writing in 1799 of her husband’s death, Patrick 
Henry’s widow said: He met death with firmness, and in 
full confidence that through the merrits of a Bleeding Savour his sins 
would be pardoned. . . . I wish the grate Jefferson & all the heroes
 of the Deistical party could have seen my . . . husband pay his last 
debt to nature.
Such back-and-forths—“Mr. Paine versus Mrs. Henry”—could be a 
shorthand way of describing it, providing concise but simplistic ways of
 imagining the tension between deism and Christianity in the eighteenth 
century. Deists tended to be all over the place in beliefs and opaque in
 their expression. Like most human beings, they shifted and honed their 
opinions. A one-liner uttered when someone is young does not necessarily
 capture that person’s attitude in middle age or retirement. A deist 
could go to church in the morning, rail against organized religion in 
the afternoon, and pen a speech in the evening praising the salutary 
effects of faith. Considered to have been a deist, James Madison, late 
in life, wrote, “Belief in a God All Powerful wise and good is so 
essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, 
that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.”
Colonial Williamsburg historian Linda Rowe said, “Franklin, 
Washington, and Jefferson all attended church services frequently to the
 end of their lives. They gave money to church building funds of several
 denominations, and attended Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and 
Unitarian houses of worship. Most made no secret of their conviction 
that regular religious practice was necessary to public virtue upon 
which the survival of the republic depended.”
Franklin, whose life almost spanned the eighteenth century, mutated 
from defining himself as a deist to saying that deism had “perverted” 
his friends. In his forties, Franklin commended “the excellency of the 
Christian religion above all others ancient and modern.” As a senior 
citizen at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, he suggested 
in vain that the participants pray for God’s guidance. “The longer I 
live,” he said, “the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that 
God governs the affairs of men.” The same Jefferson who clipped the 
miracles from the New Testament also said, “I am a Christian, in the 
only sense in which” Jesus “wanted anyone to be: sincerely attached to 
his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every 
human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.”
As some eighteenth-century Americans moved the pointer on the slide 
rule of belief, what pulled them toward deism might have been its 
“allowing belief in God without assigning divine responsibility for 
natural disaster and horrendous human behavior,” wrote Jon Butler, a 
professor of American history at Yale University and author of Awash in a
 Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. In addition, he said,
 being a deist avoided “the vicious strife produced by denominational 
discord and religious war that had disfigured the ‘Christian’ world for 
centuries.” Rowe said that “the appeal of moderate deism for Franklin, 
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and others was that it allowed for belief 
in a God who deserved to be worshipped by human beings but was not 
dependent upon biblical revelation, prophecy, and miracles as matters of
 faith. I say ‘moderate deism’ because none of these men completely 
abandoned the religious lessons upon which they were raised. They could 
be very critical of organized religion and theological twists and turns 
precisely because, in their view, these man-made institutions had 
corrupted the simple message of Jesus and obscured the best way to 
follow his teachings.” Gary Scott Smith, author of Faith and the 
Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush, said deism’s 
appeal lay in how well it comported with . . . Enlightenment-influenced
 belief in the importance of reason as the principal mode of discovering
 and discerning truth. Moreover, such people preferred Deism’s 
contention that God was a watchmaker who did not interfere with the 
operation of the universe he wound up as well as its rejection of the 
deity of Christ, miracles and the authority of the Bible. Finally, those
 who accepted Deism relished its focus on Christ’s moral teaching rather
 than on theological speculation, personal conversion and religious 
experience, which orthodox Christianity emphasized.
Alf J. Mapp Jr., author of Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s 
Founders Really Believed, sees deism’s lure “in its presentation of a 
world whose organization and material manifestations were expressions of
 pure reason.”
To some modern historians, “deism” is too simple a term to describe 
the complexity of the belief system of some Americans in the 1700s. The 
Reverend Thomas Buckley, SJ, professor of American religious history at 
the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, said that belief is more 
complex than saying a person shrugged off Christianity and put on deism:
 “Too many historians keep calling the ‘founding fathers’ Deists. Even 
Thomas Jefferson on his worst days was not one of their ranks.” A better
 term than deist for most of them, Buckley said, is “rationalistic 
Christian.” Agreement on that point comes from Dreisbach, who said he 
thinks “there were relatively few Deists in America. There were a few 
elites who gravitated to a form of theistic rationalism, but we’re 
talking about a relatively few, albeit influential, elites.”
Toward the end of his life, one of those elites, Franklin, composed 
what was, in effect, his religious creed. As a quondam deist, man of 
science, and Enlightenment figure with an open mind, he believed in what
 could be proved. So he wrote: “As to Jesus of Nazareth . . . I have . .
 . some doubts as to his divinity. . . . I expect soon an opportunity of
 knowing the truth.”
James Breig,, is an 
Albany-based writer and editor who contributed to the winter journal an 
article on the eighteenth-century’s East India Company.''
Suggestions for further reading:
* Brooke Allen, Moral Minority Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Chicago, 2006).
* Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
* David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (New York, 2006).
* Alf J. Mapp Jr., Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed (Lanham, MD, 2003).
* John Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York, 2006).
* John T. Noonan Jr., The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley, CA, 1998).
* Michael Novak and Jana Novak, Washington’s God (New York, 2006).
* Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason 
* Gary Scott Smith, Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford, 2006).
* Colonial Williamsburg, Religion 
For an hour-long discussion by historians on the question 
“Washington: Devout or Deist?” conducted at the National Constitution 
Center in Philadelphia in 2007, go to the podcast.
For a series of Colonial Williamsburg’s religion-based podcasts, go to podcasts