American Deism--1776
Good evening,
This is Madalyn O'Hair, American Atheist, back to talk with you again.
The Right Honorable J. M. Robertson in reviewing the history of Atheism is fascinated with America. Robertson is an Englishman viewing America and its phenomenon of political life from afar, and he is aghast at what he sees, including our history.
Speaking of what he sees in our founding, back in 1776 and that era, listen to this:
In a country which is to this day the most generally orthodox of the more progressive nationalities, it is difficult to predicate at any period a religious reaction; but it was in the nature of things that the anti-revolutionary reaction in Europe should affect American thought, as the previous critical movement had done...
1. Perhaps the most signal of all the proofs of the change wrought in the opinion of the civilized world in the eighteenth century is the fact that at the time of the War of Independence the leading statesmen of the American colonies were deists. Such were Benjamin Franklin, the diplomatist of the Revolution; Thomas Paine, its prophet and inspirer; Washington, its commander; and Jefferson, its typical legislator. But for these four men the American Revolution could hardly have been accomplished in that age; and they thus represent in a peculiar degree the power of the new ideas, in fit conditions, to transform societies, at least politically. On the other hand, the fashion in which their relation to the creeds of their time has been garbled, alike in American and English histories, proves how completely they were in advance of the average thought of their day; and also how effectively the mere institutional influence of creeds can arrest a nation's mental development. It is still one of the stock doctrines of religious sociology in England and America that deism, miscalled atheism, wrought the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution; when as a matter of fact the same deism was at the head of affairs in the American.
2. The rise of nationalism in the American colonies must be traced in the main to the imported English literature of the eighteenth century; for the first Puritan settlements had contained at most only a fraction of freethought; and the conditions, so deadly for all manner of devout heresy, made avoved unbelief impossible...The superstitions and cruelties of the Puritan clergy, however, must have bred a silent reaction, which prepared a soil for the deism of the next age. "The perusal of Shaftesbury and Collins," writes Franklin, with references to his early youth, "had made me a sceptic,"...This was in his seventeenth and eighteenth year, about 1720, so that the importation of deism had been prompt. Throughout life he held to the same opinion, conforming sufficiently to keep on fair terms with his neighbors, and avoiding anything like critical propaganda; though on challenge, in the last years of his life, he avowed his negatively deistic position.
3. Similarly prudent was Jefferson, who, like Franklin and Paine, extolled the Gospel of Jesus and his teachings, but rejected the notion of supernatural revelation...His experience of the New England clergy is expressed in allusions to Connecticut as having been "the last retreat of monkish darkness, bigotry, and abhorrence of those advances of the mind which carried the other States a century ahead of them"; and in congratulations with John Adams (who had written that "this would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it"), when "this den of the priesthood is at last broken up." John Adams, whose letters with their "crowd of scepticisms" kept even Jefferson from sleep, seems to have figured as a member of a Congregationalist church, while in reality a Unitarian.
4. Still more prudent was Washington, who seems to have ranked habitually as a member of the Episcopal Church; but concerning whom Jefferson relates that, when the clergy, having noted his constant abstention from any public mention of Christian religion, so penned an address to him on his withdrawal from the Presidency as almost to force him into some declaration, he answered every part of the address but that, which he totally ignored...It is further established that Washington avoided the Communion in church. For the rest, the broad fact that all mention of deity was excluded from the Constitution of the United States must be historically taken to signify a profound change in the convictions of the leading minds among the people as compared with the beliefs of their ancestors. At the same time, the fact that they as a rule dissembled their unbelief is a proof that, even where legal penalties do not attach to an avowal of serious heresy, there inheres in the menace of mere social ostracism a power sufficient to coerce the outward life of public and professional men of all grades, in a democratic community where faith maintains and is maintained by a competitive multitude of priests. With this force the freethought of our own age has to reckon, after Inquisitions and blasphemy laws have become obsolete.
5. Nothing in American culture-history more clearly proves the last proposition than the case of Thomas Paine, the virtual founder of modern democratic freethought in Great Britain and the States. It does not appear that Paine openly professed any heresy while he lived in England, or in America before the French Revolution. Yet the first sentence of his Age of Reason, of which the first part was written shortly before his imprisonment, under sentence of death from the Robespierre Government, in Paris (1793), shows that he had long held pronounced deistic opinions.
I refresh your memory of that first sentence by reading it to you now. Paine states, "It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion." In passing, we should also note that Thomas Paine was the first person to use the expression "the religion of Humanity." Now Robertson again,
[These ideas] were probably matured in the States, where, as we have seen, such views were often privately held,...
Paine did an unequalled service to the American Revolution by his Common Sense and his series of pamphlets headed The Crisis; there is, in fact, little question that but for the intense stimulus thus given by him at critical moments the movement might have collapsed at an early stage. Yet he seems to have had no thought there and then of avowing his deism. It was in part for the express purpose of resisting the ever-strengthening attack of atheism in France on deism itself that he undertook to save it by repudiating the Judeo-Christian revelation; and it is not even certain that he would have issued the Age of Reason when it did appear, had he not supposed he was going to his death when put under arrest, on which score he lfet the manuscript for publication.
Indeed this is seen in the preface to his work. There, Paine wrote briefly:
To my fellow-citizens of the United States of America.
I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinion on religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust that I never shall.
To return to Robertson's essay:
[The Age of Reason's] gradual effect was much greater in Britain, where his Rights of Man had already won him a wide popularity in the teeth of the most furious reaction, than in America. There, to his profound chagrin, he found that his honest utterance of his heresy brought on him hatred, calumny, ostracism, and even personal and political molestation. In 1797 he had founded in Paris the little "Church of Theo-philanthropy," beginning his inaugural discourse with these words: "Religion has two principal enemies, Fanaticism and Infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality; the other by natural philosophy." These were his settled convictions; and he lived to find himself shunned and vilified, in the name of religion, in the country whose freedom he had so puissantly wrought to win. The Quakers, his father's sect, refused him a burial-place. He has had sympathy and fair play, as a rule, only from the atheists whom he distrusted and opposed, or from the thinkers who no longer hold by deism.
6. The orthodoxy reaction against him in the States was of course the natural result of his uncompromisingly aggressive tone. That had greatly pleased his compatriots when it was directed against the British Government. Turned upon their own beliefs, ti was as repellent to them as to their British contemporaries. To neither did it occur to recall that this unsparing temper was exactly that of the Christian Fathers against pagan beliefs and lore, or to realize that it was essentially the tone of the religious man, offended...Neither then nor now has this aspect of Paine's work been perceived by the religious world. His stringency of tone is in fact exactly paralleled by that of the Unitarian Priestly in the same period. In both cases the man of religious conviction attacks the convictions of others with the fervor of faith; though Paine, with his hearty humanity, lacks elements of fanaticism revealed by the other...
7. The habit of reticence or dissimulation among American public men was only too surely confirmed by the treatment meted out to Paine. Few stood by him; and the vigorous deistic movement set up in his latter years by Elihu Palmer soon succumbed...All the while such statesmen as Madison and Monroe, the latter Paine's personal friend, seem to have been of his way of thinking, though the evidence is scanty.
Thus it came about that,...the American deism of Paine's day was decorously transformed into the later Unitarianism, the rapid advance of which in the next generation is the best proof of the frequency of private unbelief among the more educated. They took the "line of least resistance."
And that from Robertson's Short History of Freethought is a sad commentary on the courage of the American doubter.
But, more about this next week.
Source: Our Constitution: The Way It Was, by Dr. Madalyn O'Hair
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