Which founders were deists

Look Inside. Series: American Political Thought. Add to Cart. Were America's Founders Christians or deists? Conservatives and secularists have taken each position respectively, mustering evidence to insist just how tall the wall separating church and state should be.

Now Gregg Frazer puts their arguments to rest in the first comprehensive analysis of the Founders' beliefs as they themselves expressed them—showing that today's political right and left are both wrong. Going beyond church attendance or public pronouncements made for political ends, Frazer scrutinizes the Founders' candid declarations regarding religion found in their private writings.

Distilling decades of research, he contends that these men were neither Christian nor deist but rather adherents of a system he labels "theistic rationalism," a hybrid belief system that combined elements of natural religion, Protestantism, and reason—with reason the decisive element. James Madison, for instance, was vigorously opposed to religious intrusions into civil affairs. In his first term as president, Thomas Jefferson declared his firm belief in the separation of church and state in a letter to the Danbury, Conn.

Washington read it and approved it, although it was not ratified by the senate until John Adams had become president. Finally, and most obviously, if the founding fathers intended to include Jesus, the Bible, or other particular aspects of the Christian faith in the founding of our nation, they would have expressly done so.

However, the two references to religion that are in the Constitution contain exclusionary language. They had no intention to found the country according to Christian doctrines. Having said that, it is important to add that this exclusion in no way devalued the importance of the Christian religion in their minds—nor should it in ours.

Christianity is thriving in America, and so is Judaism, Islam, and other religions. As devotees of natural religion, they rejected all the supernatural elements of Christianity. Miracles, prophecies, and divine portents were all proscribed as residues of superstition, as was the providential view of human history. The doctrines of original sin, the account of creation found in Genesis , and the divinity and resurrection of Christ were similarly castigated as irrational beliefs unworthy of an enlightened age.

For Deists God was a benevolent, if distant, creator whose revelation was nature and human reason. Applying reason to nature taught most deists that God organized the world to promote human happiness and our greatest religious duty was to further that end by the practice of morality.

Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury , a prominent English statesman and thinker, laid out the basic deist creed in a series of works beginning with De Veritate On Truth, as it is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False in Herbert was reacting to the ongoing religious strife and bloodletting that had wracked Europe since the onset of the Reformation in the previous century and would shortly spark a revolution and civil war in England itself resulting in the trial and execution of King Charles I.

Deism, Herbert hoped, would quell this strife by offering a rational and universal creed. Like his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, Herbert established the existence of God from the so-called cosmological argument that, since everything has a cause, God must be acknowledged as the first cause of the universe itself. Given the existence of God, it is our duty to worship him, repent our failings, strive to be virtuous, and expect punishment and reward in the afterlife.

Because this creed was based on reason which was shared by all men unlike revelation , Herbert hoped it would be acceptable to everyone regardless of their religious background. Indeed, he considered deism the essential core religious belief of all men throughout history, including Jews, Muslims, and even Pagans.

But in the years from to , the very height of the Enlightenment in England, deism became a major source of controversy and discussion in English religious and speculative culture. In so doing, they sparked theological disputes that spread across the channel and the Atlantic.

These Enlightened deists capitalized on two critical developments in the late 17th century to bolster the case for the religion of nature. The first was a transformation in the understanding of nature itself. The path breaking work of physicists like Galileo, Kepler, and, especially, Newton resulted in a vision of the world that was remarkably orderly and precise in its adherence to universal mathematical laws. The Newtonian universe was often compared to a clock because of the regularity of its mechanical operations.

Deists seized on this image to formulate the argument from design, namely that the clockwork order of the universe implied an intelligent designer, i. God the cosmic clockmaker. Having denied the existence of innate ideas, Locke insisted that the only judge of truth was sense experience aided by reason.

Although Locke himself believed that the Christian revelation and the accounts of miracles contained therein passed this standard, his close friend and disciple Anthony Collins did not. The Bible was a merely human text and its doctrines must be judged by reason. Since miracles and prophecies are by their nature violations of the laws of nature, laws whose regularity and universality were confirmed by Newtonian mechanics, they cannot be credited. Providential intervention in human history similarly interfered with the clocklike workings of the universe and impiously implied the shoddy workmanship of the original design.

Unlike the God of Scripture, the deist God was remarkably distant; after designing his clock, he simply wound it up and let it run. At the same time, his benevolence was evidenced by the astounding precision and beauty of his workmanship.

Indeed, part of the attraction of deism lay in its foisting a sort of cosmic optimism. True deist piety was moral behavior in keeping with the Golden Rule of benevolence. Tindal insisted that he was a Christian deist, as did Thomas Chubb who revered Christ as a divine moral teacher but held that reason, not faith, was the final arbiter of religious belief.

How seriously to take these claims has been a matter of intense and prolonged debate. Deism was proscribed by law after all; the Toleration Act of had specifically excluded all forms of anti- trinitarianism as well as Catholicism. When Thomas Woolston attacked the scriptural accounts of miracles and the doctrine of the resurrection, he was fined one hundred pounds sterling and sentenced to one year in prison.

Certainly, some deists adopted a materialistic determinism that smacked of atheism. Others, like Collins, Bolingbroke, and Chubb, questioned the immortality of the soul. The Dudleian lecture , endowed by Paul Dudley in , is the oldest endowed lecture at Harvard University.

Dudley specified that the lecture should be given once a year, and that the topics of the lectures should rotate among four themes: natural religion, revealed religion, the Romish church, and the validity of the ordination of ministers. The first lecture was given in , and it continues to the present day.

On the other hand, the rational theology of the deists had been an intrinsic part of Christian thought since Thomas Aquinas , and the argument from design was trumpeted from Anglophone Protestant pulpits of most denominations on both sides of the Atlantic. In fact, Harvard instituted a regular series of lectures on natural religion in Even anti-clericalism had a fine pedigree among dissenting English Protestants since the Reformation.

And it is not inconceivable that many deists might have seen themselves as the culmination of the Reformation process, practicing the priesthood of all believers by subjecting all authority, even that of scripture, to the faculty of reason that God had given humanity.

Like their English counterparts, most colonial deists downplayed their distance from their orthodox neighbors. Confined to a small number of educated and generally wealthy elites, colonial deism was a largely private affair that sought to fly below the radar.

Benjamin Franklin had been much taken with deist doctrines in his youth and had even published a treatise [ A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain ] in England on determinism with strong atheistic overtones.

But Franklin quickly repented of his action and tried to suppress the distribution of his publication, considering it one of the greatest errors of his youth. Like his handful of fellow colonial deists, Franklin kept a low theological profile.