30. The Growth of Deism

Liberal religion, strong for several decades in Massachusetts, was intensified in the wake of reaction against the emotional frenzy of the New Lights. Rationalists were horrified at tendencies among extreme New Lights to consider themselves “perfect and immortal”—one example being the Reverend Shadrack Ireland of Charlestown. Some New Lights deduced from this a call to promiscuity, some to murder, and one man proclaimed that he himself was the risen Christ.

It is no wonder that liberal and rationalist trends in Massachusetts were intensified in reaction to the Great Awakening. This growth was also advanced by the increasing popularity of the works of two English Arminians, the Reverend Daniel Whitby, an Anglican, and the Reverend John Taylor, a Presbyterian, both of whom attacked Calvinist orthodoxy in behalf of optimism and free will.

The first Arminian work, following swiftly after Charles Chauncy’s violent attack on the Great Awakening, was Grace Defended, published by the Reverend Experience Mayhew in 1744. The Arminian movement came to full flower with the Reverend Lemuel Briant’s The Absurdity and Blasphemy of Deprecating Moral Virtue (1749). Briant, a minister at Braintree, repudiated Calvinist predestination and maintained that “the pure and perfect religion of Jesus” was built on the axiom that the individual was a responsible agent whose happiness depended upon his own actions. Thus the Arminian credo stressed the importance of a man’s adoption of those moral principles that would advance his happiness on earth. God’s aim was to advance man’s happiness. Briant, realizing his position would not find either “popular applause or princely favors,” was determined to cleave to eternal truths.

Briant’s essay led to a wave of Arminian liberalism, soon called the “Liberal Theology,” among the Congregational churches, especially in the vicinity of Boston. The Reverend Ebenezer Gay of Hingham advanced liberalism still further to a virtual deism and anticipation of Unitarianism. In a lecture at Harvard College in 1759, Gay, a staunch believer in free inquiry, called for “Natural Religion as Distinguished from Revealed.” Natural religion was to be discovered by reason alone and consisted in worshipping God and His natural laws. If Christianity was inconsistent with natural law, Gay boldly proclaimed, then the former must be discarded. Yet Gay, in common with the other English and American deists of the period, did not launch any open attack on the Christian religion; instead they held that Christianity is necessary to supplement the sadly deficient reason of the masses and to inculcate proper moral principles amongst them. The veteran leader of Massachusetts liberalism, Charles Chauncy, pressed even further into deism. God being the epitome of love, declared Chauncy, He would not damn sinners eternally; furthermore, man using his reason was capable of pursuing the good and obtaining happiness.

One of the great leaders of the deist movement in Massachusetts and indeed the last of the mighty and influential colonial preachers in America was the brilliant Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew.* Son of the Reverend Experience Mayhew, Jonathan had a good start in developing his liberal views. He spent his formative years at Harvard College, which had become increasingly more advanced, and studied there under the great liberal teacher Edward (“Guts”) Holyoke, for three decades a thorn in the side of orthodox Calvinism. At Harvard, young Mayhew eagerly imbibed the political philosophy of John Locke and the religious views of the English deist Samuel Clarke, and then went on to complete his development under the Reverend Ebenezer Gay of Hingham.

What emerged was a man who by 1755 was the first New England minister explicitly to reject the Trinity. Rejecting Calvinist determinism and pessimism, Mayhew’s rationalist philosophical outlook rested squarely on a belief in natural law and a natural-law morality: “Truth and moral rectitude are things fixed, stable, and uniform, having their foundation in the nature of things.” And it is rooted in the nature of man that each person is endowed with reason and with free will—and that he is able to use free will to employ his reason in order to discover the natural law of what is good or bad for man’s happiness. Furthermore, he is then able to use that free will to choose the good. And since each individual’s choices rest on the convictions of his mind, each man has the right and duty of private judgment over his own life. Thus each individual is morally capable and therefore responsible for his own actions. For Mayhew, the God that so endowed man was clearly a being of divine goodness and love.

By the mid-1750s, deism had swept through eastern Massachusetts, centering around Boston, especially among the more civilized citizens. Skepticism abounded toward the miracles of the Bible, and the work of the English deist Thomas Morgan (The Moral Philosophers, 1737) circulated throughout the area. Morgan had called for a return to the allegedly deist teachings of the original Jesus, short of miracles and of messianism.

While most prevalent in the Boston area, deism was by no means nonexistent in the other colonies. The transplanted Bostonian Benjamin Franklin was a deist from his early years. Considering Franklin’s overriding concern with the opinion of others and with seizing the main chance, one is not surprised that he carefully cloaked his deist views. Always hypocritically willing to abandon principle for the sake of keeping his public image bland and inoffensive, Franklin not only continued to attend a church in which he did not believe but also pressured his daughter to do the same. For the worried Franklin suspected that her failure to attend church would be used to discredit him politically. In private letters, however, Franklin made clear his deist belief in a natural rather than a revealed religion, in free will, in an ethic of human happiness, and in a God of goodness.*

Philadelphia, in fact, was a center of deistic and skeptical opinion. Thus, in the mid-1750s, the Reverend William Smith, leader of the proprietary party in Pennsylvania and head of the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania), stressed the importance of a reasoned and natural religion. And in New York, William Livingston called for more rationality in religion, while Cadwallader Colden, one of the most eminent men of the province, espoused in 1746 a deism closely akin to atheism in its questioning of the concept of an immaterial First Cause. There was little articulate deist leadership in the South in the first half of the century, but widespread deism was found in Georgia in the late 1730s, and North Carolina had always been pervasively indifferent to religious concerns.

Deist and rationalist thought did not, of course, spring up full-blown in America. As we have indicated, the influence of English thinkers was dominant. Like their counterparts in America, the English writers made no attempt to mount a direct assault on Christianity. Leaders of the English rationalist movement were, in the seventeenth century, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, John Locke, Charles Blount, Lord Shaftesbury, Archbishop John Tillotson, and John Toland, a disciple of Locke; and in the early eighteenth, Samuel Clarke, John Taylor, Dr. George Cheyne, William Wollaston, Matthew Tindal, Anthony Collins, and Lord Bolingbroke. These writers were read and cited in the American colonies. Archbishop Tillotson, Locke— always widely read in America—Cheyne, and Clarke were deists typical of the Anglican-Latitudinarian movement, which tried to establish Christianity by rational means and to use revelation only as a supplement. Much more frankly deist and aloof from Christianity was Lord Shaftesbury, who believed that the masses needed “Christian superstition” to live morally.

By 1750, deism had spread widely in England, especially among the educated classes. The high-water mark of English deism was the posthumous publication in the early 1750s of the noted philosopher and essayist Lord Bolingbroke, in which publication he, following the English deists, scorned Christian theology completely and called for a return to the supposedly simple and deistic gospel of Jesus founded on natural law.

*It is not surprising that this great liberal figure, highly important in the religious and political development in America, lacked a modern biographer until very recently, while such fanatics as Mather and Edwards have drawn the fascinated attention of numerous historians.

*Franklin’s fawning posturing was a conscious rule of his life: “I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbade myself... the use of every word and expression... that imparted a fixed opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc. and I adopted instead... I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine, or so it appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him sharply,... in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances that his opinion could be right, but in the present case there appeared or seemed to me some differences, etc.... [and as a result] for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatic expression escape me, and... I had early so much weight with my fellow citizens... and so much influence in public councils...”