Deism

The high point of Deism began in Britain in the wake of the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. The conflicts of the 1640s and the republican experiment of the 1650s opened up a social and cultural space in which the nature of government, God, gender, and virtually every other worthwhile topic under the sun were called into question. Countless tracts printed after church and state censorship collapsed in the early 1640s assailed religious authority and gave primacy over religion to reason. When this period of kingless rule ended in 1660 with the return of Charles II (1630–1685), the religious experimentalism and enthusiasm of the 1640s and 1650s came to be associated by many with social and political instability. But Deistic ideas were nevertheless out of the bag. The splintering that would later be evident within the ranks of Deistic thinkers reflects this ambivalence about the midcentury crisis and its larger meaning. On the one hand, moderate Deists, who borrowed conservatively from the various radicalisms of the 1640s and 1650s, sought to maintain a balance between reason and religion in order to make religion less intense, more sociable, and more conducive to social and political stability. On the other hand, radical Deists with more undiluted intellectual links to the midcentury's most extreme ideas—atheism and materialism—were less bothered by the religious consequences of the rigorous application of reason to revelation.

The paragons of moderate Deistic arguments were the Enlightenment's two discursive founders: Isaac Newton (1642–1727), born the year civil war broke out, and John Locke (1632–1704), the intellectual product of the nexus of puritan selfhood, parliamentary government, and experimental science. Newton ascribed supreme importance to his investigations into natural phenomena because they brought him closer to the God who set the universe in motion; how active God was in his creation would continue to be a divisive issue for Newtonians. Locke captured in the title of his The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) his basic idea that rational interpretations of our perceptions can lead to the fundamental truths expressed in the Bible. Those same changes we noted with respect to skepticism were also at work here. Both men embraced experimental science and had a stake in securing the stability of the nation after the revolutions of 1688 to 1691, which, like the conflict four decades earlier, also stemmed from religious divisions. And if the influence of ancient ideas was showing early signs of waning, Locke was intensely interested in cultural variation, which led him to seek basic truths about the human mind that held in varied cultural conditions.

Almost as soon as Newton and Locke defined their moderate brand of Deism, radicals began to apply reason to religion more strenuously. A "Deist controversy" in printed tracts and sermonic literature erupted with the publication of Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) by the Irish-born Protestant convert and likely son of a Catholic priest, John Toland (1670–1722). His work appeared not accidentally a year after censorship became a nonissue after the lapsing of the Licensing Act of 1695. Toland drew from radical thinkers such as Spinoza, Gerrard Winstanley, Epicurus, and Giordano Bruno (none of whom should be classified as a Deist), but he was also the logically extreme product of Newton and Locke. Newton and Locke had argued that by reason we come to a closer understanding of the fundamental truths of Christianity; Toland deduced that if a religion's reasonableness could not be established, one had license to explore better—more reasonable—religious or even nonreligious options.

More than anyone, Toland gave Deism a deconstructive edge. He questioned the authenticity of the New Testament and argued that the Jews were originally Egyptians, while also controverting Britain's legally institutionalized anti-Semitism. Toland himself became, by his own neologism, a "pantheist," but his ideas were picked up by others who shared his Whig politics, animosity for priestcraft, and gifts for persuasive writing. Another son of a cleric, Matthew Tindal, undercut biblical authority when he wrote that "it's an odd jumble to prove the truth of a book by the truth of the doctrines it contains, and at the same time conclude those doctrines to be true because contained in that book" (p. 49). William Wollaston used Lockean logic to solve the conundrum of whether or not God can create a mountain he cannot destroy—"God cannot be unjust or unreasonable in any one instance"—while another Lockean, Anthony Collins (1676–1729), reasoned that Christianity was a mere sect, a self-fulfilling Old Testament prophecy that the passage of time gave global prominence (Wollaston, p. 205). Even the pious skeptic Thomas Woolston claimed in the spirit of radical Deism that the supposed miracles of Jesus were, if actually anything other than pure fiction, the products of wizardry rather than divinity.

These authors and utterances did not go unchecked or un-challenged. The moderate Deists who more closely followed Newton's and Locke's intentions, particularly the late-Stuart "latitudinarians" Richard Bentley (1662–1742), Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761), John Tillotson (1630–1694), and Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), upheld religious belief through a combination of rationality (directed against religious enthusiasm more than the Bible), faith, and reliance on textual authority. High-and low-church traditionalists alike more critically saw Deism as one of many heterodox ideas that threatened the fundamental meaning of the church, if not religion itself, while from a very different point of view the diehard skeptic David Hume (1711–1776) viewed it as a "license of fancy and hypothesis" in a realm of philosophical thinking he thought should be devoid of religious belief (1779, 94).

Around the time the minister John Leland (1691–1766) published his four-volume Principal Deistical Writers that Have Appeared in England in the Last and Present Century (1754–1756), an antagonistic work that nevertheless largely determined the canon of Deists, the controversy had cooled—but not before Deism "cross-examined religion naturalistically, socially and psychologically" (Porter, p. 122). "If Mankind had never Sinn'd, Reason would always have been obeyed, there would have been no Struggle for Dominion, and Brutal Power would not have prevail'd," wrote the protofeminist Mary Astell (1666–1731), longing for the world's return to a more reasonable state (Astell, p. 97). Edmund Burke may have rhetorically asked, Who reads Toland, Tindal, Collins, and so on? But William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated (1724) sold 10,000 copies while radicalizing the already Deistic religious outlook of the printer who set the type for its third edition, Benjamin Franklin. Equally important, Deism became, via Newton, Locke, and their followers, the de facto religion of science, which encouraged the rationalization of religion among scientific practitioners in the British Isles, North America, and Europe's learned academies.