deism
deism. A term derived from Latin deus, meaning belief in a Supreme Being and used to describe the system of natural religion first developed in the late 17th and 18th cents. The classical exposition of deism was John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious (1696), which argued against revelation and the supernatural. Deists asserted the supremacy of reason and denied the validity of miracles, prophecy, and a literal, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. They usually coupled this religious unorthodoxy with political radicalism and were condemned as ‘infidels’ and dangerous subversives. Paine's Age of Reason (1794) spread deism to radical working men, reinforced in the 1820s by Richard Carlile's publications. In the 1830s and 1840s popular deism was represented by Robert Owen and the Owenites; and the Owenite legacy was inherited by the secularist movement, led by G. J. Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh. The term deism was not much used after the 18th cent., and those who adopted its tenets in the 19th cent. were known as free thinkers or believers in rational religion. When Victorian liberals felt that they could no longer accept the teachings of Christianity or the institutions of the church, but were nevertheless reluctant to deny the existence of God altogether, they became in effect deists. But deism never had the influence in Britain that it had in France and Germany.
John F. C. Harrison
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