The Canon · No. 078
Deism
Natural religion; the religion of reason
c.1624 – c.1800 (as a movement) · Non-Theistic / Philosophical · Living · England, France, the American colonies
VI. REFORMATION & EARLY MODERN — 1500 – 1800
How many
No organised body; small self-identified communities persist online. Historically decisive out of all proportion to its numbers.
Who began it
Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) is usually called the father of English deism. Major figures: John Toland, Matthew Tindal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and among the Americans Jefferson and Franklin.
What it is for
To keep God and discard revelation. Deists held that the endless bloodshed between Christian confessions proved revealed religion was unreliable, and that whatever is true in religion must be available to reason alone.
What it worships
A creator God — the divine watchmaker who designed the universe, set it running under fixed laws, and does not intervene.
What it holds
God exists and should be honoured; the honour due to him consists in virtue; wrongdoing must be repented; there is reward and punishment hereafter. No miracles, no prophecy, no incarnation, no revelation, no priesthood. Nature is the only scripture. Scriptural religion is regarded as, at best, a corruption of the original natural religion and, at worst, priestcraft — deliberate mystification for the benefit of clergy.
What it does
None. Deism is a position, not a practice, and its absence of ritual and community is precisely why it never became a religion in the ordinary sense and dissolved into Unitarianism, liberal Christianity and outright unbelief within a century.
After death
Most deists affirmed a future state of rewards and punishments on the grounds that justice requires it, while rejecting eternal hell as incompatible with a benevolent creator. Paine's position in The Age of Reason — hope for happiness beyond this life — is typical.
Its texts
De Veritate (1624); Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696); Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730); Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary; Paine's The Age of Reason (1794–1807); the Jefferson Bible, in which Jefferson physically cut the miracles out of the gospels with a razor and pasted the moral teaching back together.
Its branches
None formal. Its descendants are Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, freethought, secular humanism, and the modern spiritual-but-not-religious position.
Of note
Deism is the hinge between the age of faith and the secular age. It kept God, removed the church, and thereby made it possible to be publicly respectable and religiously unaffiliated — which is now the position of roughly a quarter of humanity.
Its timeline
- 1624 CE Herbert of Cherbury's five common notions of religion.
- 1690s–1740s CE The English deist controversy; dozens of replies published against each deist book.
- 1751–72 CE The Encyclopédie in France.
- 1776–1789 CE The American founding. Several of the most influential founders were deists or near-deists; the Constitution contains no reference to God and forbids religious tests for office, and the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli states plainly that the United States is not founded on the Christian religion.
- 1793–94 CE The French Revolution's Cult of the Supreme Being — Robespierre's attempt to institutionalise deism by decree, which lasted about two months.
- 1794 CE Paine publishes The Age of Reason; it makes him widely hated and he dies with six people at his funeral.
- c.1800–1850 CE Deism dissolves into Unitarianism, liberal theology, freethought and agnosticism.
Sources
Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.