Belief in a God that created our universe but does not bother to intervene in the lives of human beings or the environment that surrounds them. This God is only a creator, not a scorekeeper or a maintenance worker. This Deist God was followed by some of early America’s most influential men. The colonial period of American history was filled with several types of religions and religious institutions. These institutions could be abhorrent in their religious zeal, as in the Salem.
Salem hosted witch trials that had, “lasted longer, jailed more suspects, condemned and executed more people, ranged over more territory,” than any other witchcraft response in colonial America (1). On the opposite side of the spectrum of religious fervor sat Deism. Deism was a defense of a god, while making way for explanations describing recent scientific discoveries, “Earthquakes could be explained through inquiry and reason. So, could the flow of the oceans” (2).
A self-proclaimed Deist, Benjamin Franklin whose, “humility came not from Biblical commands and injunctions, but from reason, from thought,” influenced the colonies with his inventions and his participation in public life. (2) His belief in a disinterested god moved him to think differently than other colonists about nature and how man lived in it.
A lightning strike was considered an act of God’s anger, “lightning is the arrows of God, which He hurls to the earth in His anger (e.g., II Sam. 22:15; Ps. 144:6; Zech. 9:14),” until Franklin associated lightning and electricity leading to the invention of the lightning rod. (3). Before the lightning rod, “houses and whole neighborhoods had no fire protection whatsoever when thunderstorms rumbled overhead,” but God’s angry arrows could be quelled.
Colleges in colonial America were traditionally a training ground for clergy but Deism found itself discussed and believed despite reproach. Beginning with liberal or alternative thinking by the likes of Johnathan Edwards who still associated himself with the, “Anglican Church, but his approach diverged radically from established church practices,” at Yale (2). Edwards never considered himself a Deist, but Yale soon had administrative body members philosophizing about the school of thought in Thomas Clap.
Basing, “his moral philosophy upon the deistic Wollaston’s Religion of Nature,” Thomas Clap was soon a president at the prestigious university (4). Colonial American universities were without pause studying enlightenment thinkers with upsurge in political independence, and the radical religious movements of the time happening. John Locke, Voltaire, Matthew Tindal, and even Leonardo da Vinci claiming to be Deist, these names and their thoughts on nature were influencing the colonies, knowingly or not. And school of thought in Thomas Clap.
Deism begins to impact the colonies throughout the Revolutionary War and founding of the United States of America. Claiming men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and the above-mentioned Benjamin Franklin, Deism plays a significant role in the future of Colonial America. And a defense of a god, while making way for explanations describing recent scientific discoveries.
