DEISM

DEISM, a philosophy often termed "Enlightenment religion," was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, France, Germany, and America. Unlike atheism, which denies the existence of God; polytheism, which recognizes the existence of many gods; and pantheism, which sees God in everything; deism recognizes the existence of a supreme being or God as revealed in Nature and perceived by human reason. While deism can be traced to the Stoics of ancient Greece, modern deism is generally traced to the writings of Faustus Socinus and other sixteenth-century Unitarian thinkers.

Deism, derived from the Latin "deus," or "God," differs from conventional Christianity, Judaism, and Eastern religions in that deism denies the necessity of any special revelation of the existence of God; likewise, it denies the sacred nature of any given text. Instead, deism requires only that the human mind apply logic and reason to come to a recognition and understanding of God, because God is innately logical and reasonable. Consequently, deism also denies the importance of sacred ritual and church tradition and the possibility of miracles, all of which it deems beyond the scope of reason and empirical possibility. Faith, according to deism, is the suspension or abandonment of reason and is therefore incompatible with a God who has created man to be a thinking, reasonable creature. Furthermore, while many deists acknowledge the wisdom and goodness of various traditional religious figures such as Jesus and the Buddha, deism denies the sacred or divine nature of these figures; for such persons to somehow share in God's divine nature would imply a favoritism or special dispensation on the part of God which deists deny as a possibility for a just and logical Creator. Man can exercise his free and rational will, according to deism; sin, defined as the failure to love others and to do good toward the furtherance of the human condition, is therefore possible. Perhaps the most pervasive image of the God of deism is that of God as "the cosmic watchmaker," one who created the universe and peopled it with thinking human beings, and then dissociated himself from his creation.

Early deism grew from the increased interest in natural science exhibited in the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Sir Francis Bacon, and others. Early deist thinkers sought to apply the same principles of the rational study of nature to the study of religion. In his De Veritate (1624; "On Truth"), Lord Herbert of Cherbury set forth Five Articles of English Deists:

1. There exists only one supreme God.
2. Mankind's duty is to revere this God.
3. Adoring worship of God must be practiced in conjunction with applied principles of morality.
4. If man repents his sins and improves his behavior, God will forgive.
5. Good works are rewarded both before and after death.

Anthony Collins (1676–1729) and Matthew Tindal (1657–1733) were prominent English deists; in France the philosophy was taken up and expanded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Voltaire (1694–1778). By the late 1700s, deist philosophy came to include the belief that religious authority could only be derived by the application of reason to Scripture, not by an unquestioning reliance on the inerrancy of that Scripture; the denial of the doctrine of the Trinity; the belief that the teachings of Jesus, not the writings of St. Paul, were foundational; the idea that the importance of the resurrection was in its demonstration of the possibility of immortality, not as Christ's atonement for mankind's sins; the argument against the doctrines of Calvin (total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints); a faith in the innate goodness and reasonableness of humans; and the belief that all religious thought should be free rather than coerced either by fear of threats or by the promise of rewards.

Deism in America

The influence of French and English deists on America's founders was immense. The vast majority of American leaders at the time of the Revolutionary War had read the works of Tindal, Rousseau, and Voltaire, and most of these founders considered themselves deists. John Quincy Adams, Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson were among this group, as was Thomas Paine, who wrote extensively on the topic. Paine's Age of Reason (1794, 1796) has often been singled out as one of the most eloquent statements of advanced deist philosophy, although his blunt attacks on the orthodoxy caused him to be considered a heretic by many of his own day.

In addition to the principles they inherited from the Greeks and their European forebears, American deists re-fined and added to the list of beliefs they shared. One of the Americans' major refinements included a practical disavowal of any group being God's "chosen" people: they espoused a direct denial of American Puritans' notion of the new nation as the setting for a jeremiadic mission. Americans held a strong yet somewhat modified denial of the occurrence of miracles, although many did recognize and appreciate what they felt were occasional but inexplicable interventions of "Providence." The founders of the United States demonstrated a strengthened and identifiably democratic insistence on the need for practical morality and an increased belief in the obligation to prayerfully adore and offer thanks for the goodness shown by the beneficent Creator. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine were especially critical of the emphasis traditionally accorded the writings of Saint Paul of Tarsus. They also strongly disavowed the subsequent traditional Trinitarian theology concerning the substitutionary theory of atonement which states that Christ as part of the Godhead was required to die in payment of the death penalty of sin borne by all mankind as a direct result of their kinship to Adam. While Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine all recognized the necessity of doing good works, none saw this as a way to purchase salvation; however, neither did they accept the idea of original sin or the proxy of Jesus's death as substitution for man's own individual sins. Rather, they believed that each man must exercise his own thought and will to act appropriately toward others and that salvation could be gained by simply seeking God's forgiveness and forgiving others in turn. Such a concept of self-responsibility and independence rang true to many of the early American inhabitants.

In a similar fashion, American deists devoutly denied the necessity of any intercessory priesthood to mediate between God and man, not only in terms of receiving salvation, but also in terms of coming to an intellectual understanding of God and the universe he created. Rather than relying on church tradition, polity, or pronouncements, deists instead averred that God's true nature was obscured by what they saw as the pretensions of a traditional clergy or canonical hierarchy. By employing the gift of reason and examining the wonders of nature in the new land in which they had settled, American deists precluded their own dependence on traditional faith, preferring instead to question the workings of the world around them. They often referred to traditional constructions of faith as "superstition" or "magic" or as a reliance on "divine revelation" and saw this as being directly in opposition to the notion of all they believed about God. According to deism, it made no sense to posit a Creator who would have given man a mind with which to think and reason but who later would have arbitrarily punished man simply for not suspending that reason in the name of faith. By extension, not only the individual deist should exercise his own will and reason in making decisions, but every man should also do likewise. Each person, then, should depend on his own reason and free will, and should also take into consideration the fact that his fellow man was doing the same. As a result, the democratic ideals of the young nation were espoused in common with deist philosophy. That is, deists expressed virtually no preference for or prejudice against any organized religion, preferring instead to live in tolerance of all faiths and to give full play to each individual's decisions and actions.

America's founders had been raised in a Christian society, generally in orthodox Christian or Calvinist families; as a result, they came to deism with a strong knowledge of Christian ideology and of the practical workings of church polity. While deism does not advocate wholesale rejection of tradition, often these men's primary departure from Christian teaching was based in their studious consideration and subsequent rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity and of traditional Calvinist dogma. The deist commitments to social justice and individual responsibility were also attractive to the leaders of the young nation, as was the concept of religious tolerance. These ideals are most clearly illustrated in the First Amendment's insistence on the free exercise of religion, but the overarching concern of deism with man's exercise of reason as a free and thinking being is foundational to most of American legal, social, and cultural experience.

Deism's major attraction was to the well-read American intellectual of the late eighteenth century. While deism certainly never replaced orthodox Christianity as Americans' majority religion, it is telling that many of the nation's founders did indeed subscribe to this philosophy and incorporated it into the framework of the young republic. By the early-to mid-nineteenth century, deism in Europe and in America had become colored by skepticism, perhaps most notably as a result of the rapid spread of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity. It has also been argued that Romanticism was a reaction to deism and was a possible cause for its decline by the 1830s. In the late twentieth century, deism appeared to undergo something of a revival, although the lack of an organized polity or structure renders precise measurements of the number of practitioners impossible. Many contemporary deists label themselves "practitioners of no religion" or align themselves with liberal Unitarian or Universalist congregations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davidson, Edward H., and William J. Scheick. Paine, Scripture, and Authority: The Age of Reason As Religious and Political Idea. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1994.

Koch, G. Adolf. Religion of the American Enlightenment. New York: Crowell, 1968.

May, Henry Farnham. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

McDermott, Gerald R. Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason. Design Philip Sheldon Foner. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1989 [rprt. 1792 ed].

Rinaldo, Peter M. Atheists, Agnostics, and Deists in America: A Brief History. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Dor Pete Press, 2000.

Walters, Kerry S. The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

———. Rational Infidels: The American Deists. Durango, Colo.: Longwood Academic, 1992.

Barbara SchwarzWachal