In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin recalls reading a few books written against Deism when he was about fifteen. The arguments the authors meant to refute struck him as stronger than the refutations, and, as he put it, “I soon became a thorough Deist.” Few people of his century wrote anything that plain about their own beliefs. That is the first thing to understand about any list of famous Deists: some people told us directly, some left strong hints, and many left almost nothing.
Lists of “famous Deists” circulate widely online, and many of them are careless. They name Robert Boyle, who spent part of his fortune endowing lectures to defend Christianity. They name Jonathan Edwards, a Calvinist revival preacher, or George Berkeley, an Anglican bishop who wrote against freethinkers. Kant, Carlyle, Luther and Calvin turn up too, and none of them fits. A list padded with wrong names makes the right names easier to dismiss. So what follows sorts people by the strength of the evidence, in three tiers.
Those who called themselves Deists
Thomas Paine is the clearest case. The Age of Reason, published in two parts in 1794 and 1795, opens with a statement of faith: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.” He goes on to reject every church’s claim to revealed authority and writes that his own mind is his own church. Paine wrote the first part in Paris during the Terror and finished it shortly before his arrest at the end of 1793. The book made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic and cost him dearly at home, a point we will come back to.
Ethan Allen, best remembered for capturing Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, published Reason the Only Oracle of Man in 1784. It is a long, rough, combative argument that nature and reason are the only reliable guides to God. Much of its thinking came from Allen’s friend Dr. Thomas Young, a Boston physician active in the Sons of Liberty, who had worked on the manuscript with him years earlier. Young was openly Deist at a time when that was rare and dangerous, and he died in 1777, before the book appeared.
Elihu Palmer took Deism further than either. A former Baptist minister who lost his sight to yellow fever in 1793, Palmer lectured on Deism in New York, helped organize a Deistical Society there, and published Principles of Nature in 1801. For a few years he ran Deist newspapers. He is the closest thing early America had to a Deist preacher, and he is almost forgotten.
On the other side of the ocean, the English Deists had already done the groundwork. John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) argued that nothing in true religion could be contrary to reason, and the Irish Parliament ordered the book burned. Anthony Collins defended the right to reason freely about religion in A Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713). Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) argued that the religion of nature was complete without revelation, and it became so central that it was later called the Deist’s Bible. Behind all of them stood Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose De Veritate (1624) set out the “common notions” of religion. Neo-Deism parts company with Herbert on reward, punishment and repentance, but the line of descent is real.
Voltaire belongs here as well. He attacked the churches of his day without mercy, yet he never gave up belief in a creator, and he called his position theism or Deism. His remark that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him comes from a verse epistle of 1770, and his Treatise on Tolerance (1763) grew out of the execution of Jean Calas, a Protestant falsely accused of murdering his son.
Franklin, finally, belongs in this tier for his youth at least. Late in life, in a 1790 letter to Ezra Stiles, he described believing in one God who governs the world by his providence, and said he had doubts about the divinity of Jesus. Belief in providence goes beyond what Neo-Deism holds, so the older Franklin is best described as a Deist-leaning believer with a personal God in the background.
Strongly Deist-leaning: Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson never published a confession like Paine’s, and he was attacked as an infidel in the 1800 election anyway. His letters say a great deal. In 1787 he advised his nephew Peter Carr to question with boldness even the existence of a God, on the grounds that if there is one, he must approve the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear. Later in life he cut the miracles out of the Gospels and kept the moral teaching, a project now known as the Jefferson Bible. He called himself a Christian only in the sense that he admired Jesus as a moral teacher, and in an 1819 letter he wrote that he was “of a sect by myself.” Some scholars call him a Unitarian, some a Deist. Both labels fit parts of the record, and neither fits all of it. What is certain is that he rejected revealed doctrine, trusted reason, and wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he counted among the three achievements worth putting on his tombstone.
Enlightenment-influenced: Washington, Madison and Adams
George Washington attended Episcopal services and served on his parish vestry, yet in his public writing he almost never named Jesus. He preferred “Providence,” “the Great Author” and similar phrases, the vocabulary of rational religion in his day. Historians still argue over what he believed in private, and the honest answer is that he did not say. His 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport promised a government that gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
James Madison wrote the Memorial and Remonstrance in 1785 against a Virginia tax to support Christian teachers, arguing that religion must be left to each person’s conviction and conscience. He said little about his own faith after his student years, which is itself telling for a man who wrote so much.
John Adams was a Unitarian Christian and should not be called a Deist. He rejected the Trinity, distrusted clerical power, and in his long correspondence with Jefferson argued religion as a matter for reason. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate and signed by Adams, states that the government of the United States “is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Why the record is thin
The quiet of these men has a plain explanation. Blasphemy was still a crime in parts of Britain and America. Thomas Aikenhead was hanged in Edinburgh in 1697 for denying Christian doctrine, and Massachusetts convicted Abner Kneeland of blasphemy as late as 1838. Paine’s own fate shows the social price. After The Age of Reason he went from hero of the Revolution to outcast, and a century later Theodore Roosevelt could still call him a “filthy little atheist,” though Paine had affirmed God in the first lines of his book. A politician who wanted to hold office had every reason to keep his doubts in his letters.
Ambition added its own pressure. These were public men, surrounded by Christian voters, patrons, colleagues and neighbors who could help or end a career. Many hushed themselves. Their words about reason, nature’s law and “Nature’s God” tell us more than any public declaration of faith. A public profession of belief, from a public figure, is better read as an act of appeasement than as a window into private conviction. Few public figures today talk openly about their beliefs or doubts, fewer still write about their faith for public consumption, and most keep the subject to close circles.
These people also knew one another. Franklin met Voltaire in Paris in 1778. Jefferson admired Paine and arranged his passage home in 1802. Allen and Young worked side by side. Ideas moved through these circles in conversation and correspondence, and it is reasonable to think that men who read the same books and shared the same friends shared more of the same doubts than they put in print.
So the fair way to speak is in degrees. Paine, Allen, Young, Palmer, Voltaire and the English writers were Deists by their own account. Jefferson leaned hard in that direction. Washington, Madison and Adams worked within the rational religion of the Enlightenment, whatever they held privately. That is enough. A nation whose founding documents speak of “Nature’s God” and unalienable rights was shaped by men who took reason seriously in religion, and some of them paid a price for saying so out loud.
Sources
- Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography (written 1771 to 1790); letter to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790.
- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Parts I and II (1794, 1795).
- Ethan Allen, Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784).
- Elihu Palmer, Principles of Nature (1801).
- Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate (1624).
- John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696).
- Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713).
- Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730).
- Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance (1763); Philosophical Dictionary (1764).
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787; The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth; letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, June 25, 1819; Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786).
- George Washington, letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, August 18, 1790.
- James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785).
- Treaty of Tripoli (1797), Article 11.
- Declaration of Independence (1776).