Will the Real Deism Please Stand Up?

Joseph Waligore’s The Spirituality of the English and American Deists: How God Became Good marvels at all the possible assumptions of deism by primarily studying identified and unidentified deist scholars during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Waligore prides himself on evaluating nearly six hundred of these scholars as he surrounds his argument into four elements: “deist believed in an inactive deity, the deists’ most fundamental commitment was to reason, they were secularists advocating or moving toward the modern, scientific worldview that explained everything by purely natural processes, and they never prayed because they had no meaningful relationship with their distant and inactive deity.” These elements Waligore bases his argument upon are ultimately constructed from the overarching assumption that God’s distance from mankind automatically makes Him unfair and unjust.

Every deist, no matter what affiliation, held a “deep commitment in God’s fairness and goodness. They often rejected Christian doctrines because these doctrines portrayed God as less than perfectly good and fair, not because the doctrines were irrational.” God’s overarching goodness, to a deist, meant that He is fair to every individual on earth. Waligore, for examination purposes in comparison to deist doctrine, says Christians raise the argument that God strategically targets vulnerable people groups. By contrast, deists “argue that a good and just God would never have ordered the ancient Israelites to kill every man, woman, child, and baby of neighboring nations.” God’s overarching goodness now means that He is fair to every individual on earth because He does not discriminate. In the Western world, deists were the first religious group to believe God was totally good, and they tried to convince those around them to partake in this belief. Deists were not anti-divine. Instead, they were spiritual individuals that were safeguarded by a God that truly loved and cared for them.

It is appropriately important to note Waligore’s definition of deism as “an elevation of natural religion, supported by free examination, to the norm and rule of all positive religion.” Positive religion, according to the founder of deism, Herbert of Cherbury, is the lack “of a supernatural revelation to know about God, and God has fashioned people’s minds so that every person had an innate awareness about God’s existence and how to do his or her religious duty.” God’s action in placing innate objects into His children’s minds then made Herbert conclude that everyone had “a natural way of knowing about God and how to get to heaven,” which is natural religion, or positive religion. There are so many means to see, feel, or hear God’s presence. And it does not necessarily have to be through the supernatural. Herbert made sure to establish this claim, saying mankind’s connection to God can be through a posture of “reason, the conscience, or an inner sentiment of the heart,” not solely through miraculous circumstances or revelations. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century deists wholeheartedly believed in reason being the essence of all explanations. Now it “showed that God was good and kind…therefore, natural/positive religion had an inherent moral quality to it that assumed God’s goodness and fairness.” Through Waligore’s analysis, deism is ultimately the pattern and process that Christians view God as good without the need for supernatural revelation or intervention.

Waligore transitions his argument to assume the position of characterizing French Revolutionary and English and American deists. To Waligore, the French Revolutionary deists are by far the most crucial type of deists; they played a major hand in the French Revolution, and their beliefs derived upon the deists in England. English deists had a classical education based on the teachings from Greek and Roman philosophers. Waligore insinuates that the English desists’ academic and classic knowledge made them spiritual individuals rather than religious. Greek and Roman philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle believed moral goodness had nothing to do with divine entities. This notion was heavily embedded into English deistic thinking from which French deists drew from, then expanded upon.

American deists, natural offsprings of English deists, also inherited this idea and carried it further, explaining the simultaneous nature of being a deist and a Christian. The only drawback was calling themselves secularists—meaning a belief in knowledge of God through natural science and natural reason and not a rejection of God as the term now means. Today’s arguments that refer to American deists and the Founding Fathers as secularists is deeply misleading without this context. Waligore writes, “this narrative leads secularists to think that intellectual culture of the Enlightenment was much more secular and modern than it really was. This view of the Enlightenment then causes the secularists to believe that all or most of the people who founded the United States rejected the miracles and revelations inherent in the biblical worldview.” The American deist sought to unify English deism with a strand of biblical Christianity. Understanding Waligore’s study of deism now helps readers arrive at his final point: deism’s existence since the French Revolution did not affect the United States, the Constitution, or the separation between church and state. Deism developed on different paths, in America the attempted synthesis of deism and Christianity, in France (and Europe more broadly), an anti-Christian spirituality. Secularism, as we use the term today, is the deracinated offspring of French deism and not American deism.

The Spirituality of the English and American Deist: How God Became Good accomplishes a narrative that essentially removes the assumption of all Founding Fathers “creating a wall between church and state” and that they were not spiritually-minded individuals who rejected a God of the universe. Waligore shows why this belief is false and misleading. Once understood, it becomes easier for readers to recognize the importance of the First Amendment and the individual rights given by the state to practice spirituality on their own terms. The many different Christian churches in early America, enclosed in their denominational identities and scholarship, were supportive of the First Amendment not because it would destroy spirituality and religion, but because it was understood to advance (their) spiritual beliefs and scholarship. Ultimately, Waligore’s book argues that the core deist belief wasn’t that God created the universe and then abandoned it to mechanical laws of operation, but that God was good (and just) and that God’s goodness could be known through natural philosophy. Deist theology was, in fact, providential.

The Spirituality of the English and American Deists: How God Became Good
By Joseph Waligore
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023; 346pp

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