Volume 2, Chapter 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
Shadrach, Ireland, Charles Town
Books of two English Arminians, the Rev. Daniel Whitby, an Anglican, and the Rev. 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 Chauncey's violent attack on
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,
The Armenian credo stressed the importance of a man's adoption of those moral principles
that would advance his happiness on earth.
Brion's essay led to a wave of Armenian liberalism, soon called the liberal theology, among the
congregational churches, especially in the vicinity of Boston.
The Rev. 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
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
In the beginning of the 20th century, Charles Chauncey wrote 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 Chauncey, pressed even further into deism.
God being the epitome of love, declared Chauncey, 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,
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, hesitant biographers.
Historians. 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 Gutz
Holyoke, for three decades a thorn in the side of orthodox Calvinism. At Harvard, young
John Mayhew eagerly imbibed the political philosophy of John Locke and the religious
views of the English deist Samuel Clark, 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
Rationalism and pessimism may use 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
The Theory of Money and Credit
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
non-existent 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,
and Free Will, in an Ethic of Human Happiness and in a God of Goodness.
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
When another asserted something that I thought in 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
and so forth. 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. Philadelphia, in fact, was a center of deistic and skeptical
Opinion. Thus, in the mid-1750s, the Rev. 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
have 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 Cherberry, John Locke, Charles Blount, Lord Shaftesbury, Archbishop John Tillotson,
and John Toland, a disciple of Locke, and in the early eighteenth, Samuel Clark, John
Taylor, Dr. George Chain, William Wollaston, Matthew Tindall, Anthony Collins, and Lord
Bollingbroke. These writers were read and cited in the American colonies. Archbishop
Ludwig Tillotson, Locke, always widely read in America, Chain 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
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 Deist, scorned Christian theology completely and called for a return to the supposed
The supposedly simple and deistic gospel of Jesus founded on natural law.