WEBVTT NOTE 30. The Growth of Deism 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.120 Volume 2, Chapter 30, The Growth of Deism 2 00:00:05.120 --> 00:00:11.520 Liberal religion, strong for several decades in Massachusetts, was intensified in the wake 3 00:00:11.520 --> 00:00:18.660 of reaction against the emotional frenzy of the New Lights. Rationalists were horrified 4 00:00:18.660 --> 00:00:25.980 at tendencies among extreme New Lights to consider themselves perfect and immortal, one 5 00:00:25.980 --> 00:00:55.980 Shadrach, Ireland, Charles Town 6 00:00:55.980 --> 00:01:04.500 Books of two English Arminians, the Rev. Daniel Whitby, an Anglican, and the Rev. John Taylor, 7 00:01:04.500 --> 00:01:14.180 a Presbyterian, both of whom attacked Calvinist orthodoxy in behalf of optimism and free will. 8 00:01:14.180 --> 00:01:20.300 The first Arminian work, following swiftly after Charles Chauncey's violent attack on 9 00:01:20.300 --> 00:01:27.600 on the Great Awakening, was Grace Defended, published by the Reverend Experience Mayhew 10 00:01:27.600 --> 00:01:35.040 in 1744. The Arminian movement came to full flower with the Reverend Lemuel Briant's The 11 00:01:35.040 --> 00:01:44.360 Absurdity and Blasphemy of Deprecating Moral Virtue, 1749. Briant, a minister at Braintree, 12 00:01:44.360 --> 00:02:09.160 The Armenian credo stressed the importance of a man's adoption of those moral principles 13 00:02:09.160 --> 00:02:12.720 that would advance his happiness on earth. 14 00:02:12.720 --> 00:02:33.640 Brion's essay led to a wave of Armenian liberalism, soon called the liberal theology, among the 15 00:02:33.640 --> 00:02:38.480 congregational churches, especially in the vicinity of Boston. 16 00:02:38.480 --> 00:02:47.120 The Rev. Ebenezer Gay of Hingham advanced liberalism still further to a virtual deism and anticipation 17 00:02:47.120 --> 00:02:56.640 of Unitarianism. In a lecture at Harvard College in 1759, Gay, a staunch believer in free inquiry, 18 00:02:56.640 --> 00:03:02.960 called for natural religion as distinguished from revealed. Natural religion was to be 19 00:03:02.960 --> 00:03:10.400 be discovered by reason alone and consisted in worshipping God and His natural laws. If 20 00:03:10.400 --> 00:03:16.880 Christianity was inconsistent with natural law, gay, boldly proclaimed, then the former 21 00:03:16.880 --> 00:03:23.280 must be discarded. Yet gay, in common with the other English and American deists of the 22 00:03:23.280 --> 00:03:29.480 period, did not launch any open attack on the Christian religion. Instead, they held 23 00:03:29.480 --> 00:03:42.480 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. 24 00:03:42.480 --> 00:03:49.480 The veteran leader of Massachusetts liberalism, Charles Chauncey, pressed even further into deism. 25 00:03:49.480 --> 00:03:56.480 God being the epitome of love, declared Chauncey, he would not damn sinners eternally. 26 00:03:56.480 --> 00:04:03.480 Furthermore, man using his reason was capable of pursuing the good and obtaining happiness. 27 00:04:03.480 --> 00:04:07.480 One of the great leaders of the deist movement in Massachusetts, 28 00:04:07.480 --> 00:04:37.480 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. 29 00:04:37.480 --> 00:04:44.800 Historians. Son of the Reverend Experience Mayhew, Jonathan had a good start in developing 30 00:04:44.800 --> 00:04:50.360 his liberal views. He spent his formative years at Harvard College, which had become 31 00:04:50.360 --> 00:04:56.640 increasingly more advanced, and studied there under the great liberal teacher Edward Gutz 32 00:04:56.640 --> 00:05:03.920 Holyoke, for three decades a thorn in the side of orthodox Calvinism. At Harvard, young 33 00:05:03.920 --> 00:05:09.960 John Mayhew eagerly imbibed the political philosophy of John Locke and the religious 34 00:05:09.960 --> 00:05:16.700 views of the English deist Samuel Clark, and then went on to complete his development under 35 00:05:16.700 --> 00:05:24.100 the Reverend Ebenezer Gay of Hingham. What emerged was a man who by 1755 was the first 36 00:05:24.100 --> 00:05:31.280 New England minister explicitly to reject the Trinity. Rejecting Calvinist determinism 37 00:05:31.280 --> 00:05:38.040 Rationalism and pessimism may use rationalist philosophical outlook rested squarely on a 38 00:05:38.040 --> 00:05:46.440 belief in natural law and a natural law morality. Truth and moral rectitude are things fixed, 39 00:05:46.440 --> 00:05:54.140 stable and uniform, having their foundation in the nature of things. And it is rooted 40 00:05:54.140 --> 00:06:01.120 in the nature of man that each person is endowed with reason and with free will, and that he 41 00:06:01.120 --> 00:06:03.120 The Theory of Money and Credit 42 00:06:31.120 --> 00:06:41.120 For Mayhew, the God that so endowed man was clearly a being of divine goodness and love. 43 00:06:41.120 --> 00:06:52.120 By the mid-1750s, deism had swept through eastern Massachusetts, centering around Boston, especially among the more civilized citizens. 44 00:06:52.120 --> 00:06:59.520 Skepticism abounded toward the miracles of the Bible, and the work of the English deist 45 00:06:59.520 --> 00:07:07.760 Thomas Morgan, The Moral Philosophers, 1737, circulated throughout the area. Morgan had 46 00:07:07.760 --> 00:07:14.240 called for a return to the allegedly deist teachings of the original Jesus, short of 47 00:07:14.240 --> 00:07:21.960 miracles and of messianism. While most prevalent in the Boston area, deism was by no means 48 00:07:21.960 --> 00:07:29.080 non-existent in the other colonies. The transplanted Bostonian Benjamin Franklin was a deist from 49 00:07:29.080 --> 00:07:35.840 his early years. Considering Franklin's overriding concern with the opinion of others and with 50 00:07:35.840 --> 00:07:43.800 seizing the main chance, one is not surprised that he carefully cloaked his deist views. 51 00:07:43.800 --> 00:07:49.880 Always hypocritically willing to abandon principle for the sake of keeping his public image bland 52 00:07:49.880 --> 00:07:57.400 and Inoffensive, Franklin not only continued to attend a church in which he did not believe, 53 00:07:57.400 --> 00:08:02.700 but also pressured his daughter to do the same. For the worried Franklin suspected that 54 00:08:02.700 --> 00:08:09.660 her failure to attend church would be used to discredit him politically. In private letters, 55 00:08:09.660 --> 00:08:15.980 however, Franklin made clear his deist belief in a natural rather than a revealed religion, 56 00:08:15.980 --> 00:08:23.500 and Free Will, in an Ethic of Human Happiness and in a God of Goodness. 57 00:08:23.500 --> 00:08:31.100 Franklin's fawning posturing was a conscious rule of his life. I made it a rule to forbear 58 00:08:31.100 --> 00:08:37.820 all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others and all positive assertion of my 59 00:08:37.820 --> 00:08:45.420 own. I even forbade myself the use of every word and expression that imparted a fixed 60 00:08:45.420 --> 00:09:06.340 When another asserted something that I thought in error, I denied myself the pleasure of 61 00:09:06.340 --> 00:09:08.540 contradicting him sharply. 62 00:09:08.540 --> 00:09:14.480 In answering, I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances that his opinion 63 00:09:14.480 --> 00:09:21.760 could be right, but in the present case there appeared or seemed to me some differences 64 00:09:21.760 --> 00:09:28.000 and so forth. And as a result, for these fifty years past, no one has ever heard a dogmatic 65 00:09:28.000 --> 00:09:35.200 expression escape me, and I had early so much weight with my fellow citizens and so much 66 00:09:35.200 --> 00:09:42.120 influence in public councils. Philadelphia, in fact, was a center of deistic and skeptical 67 00:09:42.120 --> 00:09:49.640 Opinion. Thus, in the mid-1750s, the Rev. William Smith, leader of the Proprietary Party 68 00:09:49.640 --> 00:09:56.480 in Pennsylvania and head of the College of Philadelphia, later the University of Pennsylvania, 69 00:09:56.480 --> 00:10:02.360 stressed the importance of a reasoned and natural religion. And in New York, William 70 00:10:02.360 --> 00:10:08.960 Livingston called for more rationality in religion, while Cadwallader Colden, one of 71 00:10:08.960 --> 00:10:17.840 The most eminent men of the province espoused in 1746 a deism closely akin to atheism in 72 00:10:17.840 --> 00:10:24.240 its questioning of the concept of an immaterial first cause. 73 00:10:24.240 --> 00:10:29.600 There was little articulate deist leadership in the South in the first half of the century, 74 00:10:29.600 --> 00:10:36.680 but widespread deism was found in Georgia in the late 1730s, and North Carolina had 75 00:10:36.680 --> 00:10:41.360 have always been pervasively indifferent to religious concerns. 76 00:10:41.360 --> 00:10:47.000 Deist and rationalist thought did not, of course, spring up full-blown in America. As 77 00:10:47.000 --> 00:10:53.020 we have indicated, the influence of English thinkers was dominant. Like their counterparts 78 00:10:53.020 --> 00:10:59.720 in America, the English writers made no attempt to mount a direct assault on Christianity. 79 00:10:59.720 --> 00:11:05.380 Leaders of the English rationalist movement were, in the seventeenth century, Lord Herbert 80 00:11:05.380 --> 00:11:13.060 of Cherberry, John Locke, Charles Blount, Lord Shaftesbury, Archbishop John Tillotson, 81 00:11:13.060 --> 00:11:19.340 and John Toland, a disciple of Locke, and in the early eighteenth, Samuel Clark, John 82 00:11:19.340 --> 00:11:26.940 Taylor, Dr. George Chain, William Wollaston, Matthew Tindall, Anthony Collins, and Lord 83 00:11:26.940 --> 00:11:33.700 Bollingbroke. These writers were read and cited in the American colonies. Archbishop 84 00:11:33.700 --> 00:11:40.220 Ludwig Tillotson, Locke, always widely read in America, Chain and Clarke were deists 85 00:11:40.220 --> 00:11:47.900 typical of the Anglican latitudinarian movement, which tried to establish Christianity by rational 86 00:11:47.900 --> 00:11:56.540 means and to use revelation only as a supplement. Much more frankly deist and aloof from Christianity 87 00:11:56.540 --> 00:12:02.660 was Lord Shaftesbury, who believed that the masses needed Christian superstition to live 88 00:12:02.660 --> 00:12:32.660 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 89 00:12:32.660 --> 00:12:38.660 The supposedly simple and deistic gospel of Jesus founded on natural law.