Deists

Please read Story of Christianity, “Deism, Enlightenment, and Revolution” pages 294-298. Answer the questions below that correspond with your reading.

Important to Know:

The words atheism and agnosticism are forms of Greek words and the prefix a, which means “no” or “none.” Theos is the Greek word for “God,” and theism is the belief in a personal God, so a-theism means either the belief that there is no God or the belief that there is no personal God. Gnosis is the Greek word for “Knowledge,” so an a-gnostic is one who believes there is not enough knowledge to prove either the existence or the non-existence of God.

As ‘children of the Enlightenment,’ many of America’s ‘Founding Fathers’ were deists. There is much debate among historians over which Founding Fathers were or were not deists. This is because many of the writings of our Founders contain varying degrees of deist thought. It is important to keep in mind that deist thinking was often synthesized with Christianity, and also tended to be vague. So historians often disagree over who was an outright deist, and who was a Christian ‘with deist sympathies.’ That said, many of our Founders were influenced by deist thinking to varying degrees.

Thomas Jefferson is generally considered a deist. In fact, he was so skeptical of supernatural occurrences that he took a knife and cut out passages in his Bible that referred to miracles. ‘Jefferson’s Bible,’ as it has been called, is still around today and belongs to the Smithsonian Institute. Benjamin Franklin is also widely believed to have been a deist. James Madison is thought to have been a deist, though there is much debate over this. A leading American deist was Thomas Paine, writer of The Age of Reason, Common Sense, and many other works. How about George Washington? The debate over his religious views is particularly heated. The truth is that no one is really sure. Washington commonly referred to ‘Providence’ instead of ‘God,’ yet he is generally thought to have been an Episcopalian.

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