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