The prayers of the Enlightenment deists and the religious Enlightenment

Abstract

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Enlightenment was seen as a period when people used the light of reason and science to free themselves from the shackles of religious beliefs. For example, Henry Steele Commager said, ‘the men of the Enlightenment … are the first fully to emancipate themselves from religious superstition and to understand the nature of man in the light of science and reason’.1 Similarly, Peter Gay stated that there was a unified Enlightenment whose proponents rejected the religious beliefs they grew up with while being on a mission to develop ‘a naturalistic world view, a secular ethical system, and above all a triumphant scientific method’.2 Moreover, the deists were seen as major proponents of secularism, naturalism, and the scientific method. Gay asserted that the deists living in England had a very important role in the Enlightenment mission of developing a secular and scientific worldview because they were ‘the first men in modern times to set out on this mission … they redrew the religious map of Europe’.3

In the decades since Gay's time, his view of a unified Enlightenment has been widely challenged. This challenge was initiated by Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich in their 1982 book, The Enlightenment in National Context. Porter and Teich, and other scholars who follow them, say that the Enlightenment took many different forms in different national contexts and that in many countries religious belief was seen as compatible with ‘the light of science and reason’. The idea that there was a singular, unified Enlightenment has been rejected by many scholars in favour of the idea that there was a ‘family of Enlightenments’, or many different Enlightenments in different countries.4

Jonathan Israel disagrees with the idea of seeing the Enlightenment as a family of Enlightenments. He agrees that there was a moderate Enlightenment whose proponents were motivated by their religious beliefs. However, he argues that there was a much more important and more secular Radical Enlightenment. Israel maintains that the proponents of the Radical Enlightenment were the progenitors of the modern world because they, unlike the proponents of the moderate Enlightenment, advocated equality, comprehensive freedom of thought, democratic politics, and personal liberty. Israel asserts that, ‘the view that there was not one Enlightenment but rather a “family of enlightenments” leads to distraction from the core issues, and even a meaningless relativism contributing to the loss of basic values needed by modern society’.5

David Sorkin adds the concept of the religious Enlightenment to Israel's concepts of the moderate and Radical Enlightenments. Sorkin says that while the Radical Enlightenment flanked one side of the moderate Enlightenment, ‘flanking the moderate Enlightenment on the other side, and significantly overlapping with it, was the religious Enlightenment’. According to Sorkin, this religious Enlightenment consisted of the many Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were religious while ‘using the new science and philosophy to promote a tolerant, irenic understanding of belief that could serve a shared morality and politics’.6

Unlike the scholarly view of the Enlightenment, the scholarly view of deism has not significantly changed since Gay's time. The deists are still seen as believing in an inactive deity who never performed miracles or made revelations, because this deity only created the universe and then left it to run on its own. This is understandable because the most prominent deists, such as Voltaire and Thomas Paine, denied that God ever performed miracles or made revelations. Moreover, the deists who believed in miracles and revelations are generally not very well known nowadays.

Some scholars realise that the deists had religious beliefs that were important to them and shaped their worldview. The most influential person advocating this view is Charles Taylor in his books about the secularisation of Western culture. Taylor is right when he discusses how the deists, by emphasising reason and morality, helped weaken many people's attachment to parts of the Christian worldview, especially the Christian emphases on grace and on Jesus Christ as God in human form. However, I will show that Taylor is mistaken in thinking that all deists believed in an inactive deity and that none of them had any religious feelings for God.7

Through research in eighteenth-century books, pamphlets, and speeches, I have found 95 deists who wrote their own prayers and included these prayers in their writings or speeches.8 Furthermore, there are likely to be more deists in archival sources or in other books and pamphlets of which I am not aware. By focusing on these prayer-writers, this article challenges the common scholarly view that none of the deists had any genuine religious feelings for God. This article focuses on the deists who wrote prayers for several reasons. First, it was illegal throughout Europe for anyone who was raised a Christian to deny Christian doctrines. Thus, irreligious writers would prudently often include perfunctory statements of orthodox belief in their writings to avoid persecution for their irreligious ideas. The deist prayers, though, did not help the writers avoid persecution because the writers used deist terms in their prayers instead of Christian terms, and expressed a deist theology instead of a Christian one. While scholars tend to dismiss any deist who claimed to believe in miracles or revelation, scholars cannot so easily dismiss the deists who wrote prayers.

Another reason this article focuses on the deists who wrote prayers is that these prayers were not short, perfunctory ones. They were often very long prayers regarding extremely serious matters. Many of the prayers were said during the French Revolution when France was being attacked by the combined armies of many European nations, and there was the threat of people starving because of crop failures. During this perilous situation, many French revolutionary deists wrote long prayers that first thanked God for all the help he had already given the French revolutionaries, and then implored God to continue his care and protection of France.

Other serious prayers that were written did not implore God's help, but expressed the writer's adoration of God and their desire to have a closer relationship with God. These prayers were written by many individuals for their private use but, more tellingly, a handful of deists wrote complete deist worship services that were filled with many prayers. While John Toland wrote a spoof of a full liturgy, the deist liturgies were clearly not spoofs because Ben Franklin and David Williams's liturgy was used in a deist worship service for four years in London, and Jean-Baptiste Chemin-Dupontès's liturgy was used in the theophilanthropy worship services for six years in France.9 (The word ‘theophilanthropy’ comes from combining the Greek words for ‘love of God and people’.)

A third reason the writers of prayers are highlighted is that these prayers very strikingly reveal how deeply the prayer-writers loved God and wanted to have a closer relationship with him. Thus, these prayers reveal that the prayer-writers had a much different relationship with God than stereotypical deists had.

Because this article is focused on the deists, it evades the complicated question of the nature of the Enlightenment. However, many deists who wrote prayers were writing in the 1790s during the French Revolution. Many of the prayers of these French revolutionary deists were recited or sung during government-sponsored religious festivals. These non-Christian religious festivals were a singular and striking aspect of the French Revolution, and they have been studied by scholars. Until recently, the religious language in these religious festivals has usually been dismissed by scholars, such as Mona Ozouf and François-Alphonse Aulard, as not about worshipping God but about transferring the sacredness usually associated with God to the newly-founded French Republic.10 However, in the last couple years, Mathias Sonnleithner and I have separately published articles arguing that there are many good reasons to think that these prayers were not about the nation but about worshipping God.11 While much of Gay's vision of the Enlightenment has been questioned, many scholars still see the French experience of the Enlightenment as being a continuous march to atheism and secularisation. The deists’ prayers and the large numbers of people participating in these ceremonies draw into question whether scholars should continue to see the French Enlightenment as this continuous march to secularisation.

Before the numerous deists who wrote prayers can be discussed, there is an important preliminary issue that must be addressed. This issue is that many scholars find the very concept of deism to be so problematic that they doubt the term is even meaningful.

When Gay discussed deism in the 1960s, he just assumed that in the Enlightenment there was a significant group of deists who advocated deism. However, since his time, scholars who specialise in studying deism have come to question the very concept of deism, and some deny that there was such a thing as deism. Robert E. Sullivan discusses how, when people in the Enlightenment used the term ‘deist’, there was a ‘lack of both an agreed concept of deism and intelligible criteria by which to judge an individual's acceptance of it’.12 In a similar way, James A. Herrick starts his discussion of the English deists by stating, ‘the actual religious convictions of the Deists are so varied and complex as to raise questions about the descriptive usefulness of the term Deist’.13 Wayne Hudson, Diego Lucci, and Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth point out that the terms ‘deist’ and ‘atheist’ ‘were shifting designators in this period’ because both terms lacked a stable meaning and were used by different people to mean different things.14 David Pailin has an explanation for why the term ‘deism’ had such differing meanings in the Enlightenment. He says that people of the time used the word to denigrate someone for lacking orthodox Christian beliefs. Pailin asserts: ‘When people describe others as “deists”, they are not in practice conveying much more than they judge the latter to be deficient in unspecified beliefs which the former consider to be essential to authentic religious faith.’15

These scholars are right that if we try to understand deism by looking at how the non-deists in the eighteenth century talked about deism, the word has no stable meaning and was used in different ways. However, the non-deists writing about deism were not scholars trying to be objective. Almost all these writers were Christian clergy who despised deism and saw it as a dire threat to Christianity. These Christian clergy considered heterodox thinkers to be deists, even if these heterodox thinkers were very different from other people who were considered deists. Furthermore, many conservative Christian ministers would attack more liberal Christian ministers as deists because the conservative ministers believed the liberal ministers were abandoning true orthodox Christianity and leading people to deism.

As long as we look at the books and pamphlets written by non-deists, the word ‘deism’ will always be a shifting designator without a single, stable meaning. However, there is another eighteenth-century source for understanding deism. This source is the writings and speeches of people who proclaimed that they were deists, asserted that they advocated deism, or equated their religious beliefs with deism. As was mentioned earlier, it was illegal throughout Europe to ridicule or deny significant Christian doctrines, and those who committed this crime were often severely punished. Deism was seen as denying Christianity, and so, up until the 1790s and the French Revolution, the only people of sound mind who would say that they were deists or in any way associate their religious beliefs with deism were committed deists.

Through my research, I have found 43 unorthodox thinkers who declared that they were deists, asserted that they advocated deism, or equated their religious beliefs with deism. A couple of examples are Allan Macleod, a Scottish editor, and James Boevey, an English merchant. Macleod discussed some biblical passages that portrayed God as immoral and cruel, and then Macleod declared, ‘those shocking untruths impelled my avowal of perfect deism’. Boevey wrote an unpublished manuscript explaining his religious beliefs, The Deists Reflections Upon Religion.16

These 43 deists were writing from the 1680s to the 1820s and came from many different countries. Some of them were deeply steeped in the late Renaissance humanism of the seventeenth century, while others were writing during the early part of the Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, despite their cultural differences, these 43 self-identified deists meant the same thing when they called themselves deists, and they shared a basic set of religious beliefs. Most importantly, they believed that there was an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good God who always treated every person in a good and fair manner. Unlike their Christian contemporaries, these deists did not maintain that the way to worship God was by performing rituals or believing certain doctrines. Instead, these deists asserted that the appropriate way to worship God was to love him with a pure heart, fulfil one's familial and social duties, and act charitably and kindly to everyone. These self-identified deists maintained that their beliefs about God and how to worship him came from their purely natural faculties, such as their reason, their conscience, and their feelings. During this period, the religion that people knew about purely through their natural faculties before they were taught about a supernatural revelation was called ‘natural religion’ or the ‘religion of nature’. These deists equated deism with believing that the moral principles inherent in natural religion had more authority than revealed religion. The English deist, Peter Annet, asserted: ‘Deism, or the religion of nature has no Equal, even by those that would set up something [supernatural revelation] above it, which is repugnant to it.’17

This definition of deism as giving natural religion more authority than revealed religion fits with the way many scholars have traditionally defined deism. For instance, Gotthard Victor Lechler, the first scholar to write a history of English deism, asserted, ‘deism is essentially an elevation of natural religion, supported by free examination, to the norm and rule of all positive [revealed] religions’.18 However, because this definition was given by the deists themselves, it has more authority than any scholarly definition of deism. Furthermore, this definition separates the deists from the liberal Christians, including the Latitudinarians and the Unitarians, who also emphasised natural religion. I argue in my book that only the deists consistently emphasised the moral principles inherent in natural religion, while these liberal Christians often gave more authority to the Bible than to the moral principles of natural religion. This can most clearly be seen in the deists’ different reaction than the liberal Christians to the Old Testament's portrayal of God as a wrathful and jealous deity who cursed entire ethnic groups for the sins of their ancestors, and who chastised immoral cities and nations with plagues, earthquakes, and other punishments. The deists did not accept that a good and fair God would do these things. On the other hand, the eighteenth-century Latitudinarian and Unitarian theologians and ministers not only accepted that God had done these things, but they gave reasons why God was justified in doing them.19

While the deists agreed about a set of basic religious beliefs, they had differences about some lesser doctrines. The American deist, Elihu Palmer, however, maintained that the differences among the deists were considerably less than the differences among the Christians. Palmer, who was simultaneously both a pantheist and a deist, said, ‘among those who believe that the religion of nature is the only true religion, there are shades of difference in their opinions; but these differences are inconsiderable—less, much less, than those which are every day exhibited in every part of the christian world’.20

The deists who wrote prayers shared the religious beliefs of the other deists, but the prayer-writers felt especially close to God. It was their deep love and devotion that led these deists to write prayers. The writers of prayers saw God as a loving and caring father, not a distant and cold deity with whom people had no relationship. The prayer-writers adored God, were very grateful to God, and thought that God treated people so wonderfully that people had a duty to love and serve God by following his will. The deists who wrote prayers did not belong to an organised religious group that performed group rituals and believed common doctrines, and so these deists were not religious in the way that their contemporaries thought of religion. But if we take a more modern concept of being religious, a concept that emphasises having a close and loving relationship with God, these deists were religious.

I will argue that these prayers show that the deists who wrote them were religious. These deists emphasised tolerance and supported their religious beliefs by reason. Sorkin's concept of the religious Enlightenment has been extended by Ulrich L. Lehner to include many eighteenth-century German Benedictine monks. Moreover, Jeffrey D. Burson includes many Jesuits in a variant of the religious Enlightenment that he calls the ‘Theological Enlightenment’.21 Similarly, the deists who wrote prayers should be seen as part of the religious Enlightenment.

The most important part of understanding the religiosity of the deists who wrote prayers is that they saw God as a being who was actively involved with their lives. Furthermore, they often called him ‘father’. Peter Annet wrote a prayer that started: ‘O Father of Heaven, Creator and Governor of the universe, praised be thy name! Endue me, O Lord, with the goodness of heart, which will enable me to act in this life with that honest sincerity, and uprightness of conduct, as is agreeable to thy sight.’ After asking God for help to accept his lot in life gratefully and forgive his sins ‘upon proper contrition’, Annet also asked God to help him be free of malice and to be charitable to all people. Annet finished the prayer by saying: ‘Grant this, O heavenly Father, to whom alone belongeth all honour and praise, for ever and ever. Amen.’22

Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, a major French economist and political figure, shared Annet's view of God as a father. Dupont wrote prayers that were meant to be said before and after eating. The pre-meal prayer reads: ‘Our heavenly father, bless the way we will use the nutrition that your providence has given us. We owe it not just to our work, but especially to your kind protection and also to the work of our brothers. Preserve us from intemperance, which rends us less capable to acquitting ourselves to them and to feel your benefits. So be it.’23

Many other deists who wrote prayers believed that God performed miracles. In fact, thirty of these deists maintained that God performed miracles to help people, with the large majority of them saying that God performed miracles in their own time to help people who were fighting against tyrannical kings.26 Moreover, 27 of the prayer-writers who did not explicitly state that they believed in miracles implored God to perform a miracle, thus implying that they thought that God performed miracles.27 Conversely, only four of these deists denied that God performed miracles.28 Furthermore, the four deists who denied that God performed miracles explicitly described God as a father who lovingly cared for people.29 For example, Julius Friedrich Knüppeln denied miracles but asserted that all the laws of nature are ‘an immediate outflow of God's will. Without your father's will, no thunder falls from heaven and no hair from your head’. Moreover, Knüppeln said that God was our ‘loving father, provider and friend, who … enlivens our actions, improves our heart, makes us strong against temptation, brave against every danger’.30

Because the deists who wrote prayers thought that God continually did such wonderful things for people, these deists maintained that people had duties towards him. These duties included thanking him, loving him, and worshipping him. Thomas Amory, an English novelist, proclaimed, ‘we are bound, as obliged benficiarys [sic], to love and worship him, to have filial awe, and the deepest reverence for him; to make him the supreme object of our contemplation and affection, and adore him with a true devotion of mind’.31 Another duty to God was following his will. Amory declared that because God showered people with ‘innumerable benefits most gratiously [sic] bestowed; we ought … to obey him, as far as human weakness can go, and humbly submit and resign ourselves and all our interests to his will; continually confide in his goodness, and constantly imitate him as far as our weak nature is capable’.32

The deists’ prayers often showed that these deists not only wanted to follow God's will but had deep religious feelings of love and longing for God. For example, in one of his writings the French deist, Marquis de Lassay, included a prayer that he said every morning and evening. This prayer started: ‘My God, give me the grace to spend my days loving you, serving you, blessing you, and adoring you in the manner in which you wish … Being of Beings, give me a heart which acknowledges the favours that I have received from you and which I receive from you.’ The last paragraph of the prayer started: ‘Being of Beings, have pity on your creature who only wishes you, who only searches for you, who adores you from the best of his heart, and who puts in you his only hope.’33

The deists mentioned so far were obscure figures, often unknown even to scholars studying the eighteenth century. But some well-known deists, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Ben Franklin, also wrote their own prayers that showed how much they had a heart-felt love for God and wanted their wills to conform to God's will.

Rousseau wrote many prayers, and in one of them he said that his strongest desire was to follow God's will. Rousseau prayed: ‘Source of justice and truth, merciful and good God! In my trust in you, the supreme desire of my heart is that your will be done. By joining my will with yours, I do what you do, I acquiesce in your goodness, and I believe myself already a partaker of the supreme felicity which is its reward.’34

Franklin wrote many prayers in London in the early 1770s because he worked with the Welsh deist, David Williams, to open a deist ‘church’. Williams and Franklin met at Franklin's rooms on Craven Street to write the deist worship service and had practice sessions for the service there.35 One prayer they wrote reads: ‘The Lord our God is worthy of universal praise. We acknowledge the immensity of his works; we gladly own our subjection to him, the Lord of all; … We adore and worship him, [he is] a being … in whom all things live and move, and have their being.’36

The deists who wrote prayers were religious because they had a close relationship with a deity that they saw as a loving and caring father.

While many deists prayed to God for miracles, a significant number of the deists saw prayer as a type of spiritual practice to develop a deeper and closer relationship with God. For example, Peter Annet encouraged people to pray because he thought that prayer, ‘keeps up a Dependence on Deity in the Minds of the People, and so may be a Means to help to subdue the Mind to Virtue, and Submission to God's Will’.37 Thomas Morgan, a doctor, encouraged praying because it fostered a person's love and trust for God. Morgan declared, ‘this filial Dependence on, Trust in, and Love of God as a Father, is what, I said, I take to be the Life, Spirit, or Soul of Prayer’.38

Some of these deists felt so close to God that they might be described as having had mystical experiences. For instance, Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, who often prayed and even started his university lectures by saying a prayer to the class,39 wrote that people should not set aside certain times for prayer because, ‘I can be with God constantly, like a child is with his Father. I think God is everywhere present to me, where I go and stand … In brief, every opportunity I think about God and talk with him, without interrupting my remaining work. That is what the old folks call: walking with God’.40

Jean-Baptiste Chemin-Dupontès also sounded like he had a kind of mystical experience. In one of his prayers, he first spent several pages describing the beautiful flowers and birds in spring, and then said: ‘Let us celebrate the father of nature! He is near us! He is present everywhere: in the sky, on the earth, and in the seas! I glorify you and I chant your praise because you are where I am, always near me with your power, your love, and your kindness…. It is in you alone that we find happiness, in you, the only author of all goods.’41

While Chemin-Dupontès felt close to God in nature, three deists—Thomas Amory, Thomas Morgan, and John Henley—discussed mystical experiences of being one with God and partaking of his nature while praying and being in a contemplative state.

Amory spent the most time discussing these experiences. He believed that people who lived a God-centred life, rather than a worldly one, could experience a ‘blessed transforming union’ during which they were ‘made a partaker of the divine nature, by impressions from it’. By getting impressions from God, Amory meant that, ‘bright beams of light [are] cast upon the soul by the present Deity; as he sits all power, all knowledge, in the heart, and dispenses such rays of wisdom to the pious practitioner, as are sufficient to procure a lasting sense of spiritual heavenly things’.42 Amory declared that this experience of God, ‘makes the saints perfectly blessed. By the communication of the divine glories, we come to be, not bare spectators, but theias koinonoi phuseos, partakers of the divine nature’.43 Amory maintained that spiritually oriented people not only could become partakers of the divine nature but could also become a manifestation of God in their daily life. Amory stated that there was a ‘special presence of God in the righteous, as much as the cloud of glory did manifest him in the temple. The power and wisdom and goodness of God are displayed in the holy lives of men. Like the heavens they declare his glory, and are the visible epistle of Christ to the world, written not with ink, but with the spirit of the Living God’.44

Morgan and Henley discussed much more quickly how people could have a very close relationship with God. Morgan asserted that God-centred people who withdrew ‘from the Noise, Darkness and Confusion of a busy distracted World’, could experience a ‘consimilating Love of God, or Transformation into the Image and Likeness of the Deity’.45 Henley asserted that people should pray to ‘partake the divine nature by union’ with God. In one prayer, Henley said: ‘O Thou Supreme, All-powerful, and All-perfect BEING of BEINGS, … give us to partake the Divine Nature by an Union with thee, and a progressive Transformation to thy Attributes, from Glory to Glory.’46

One deist who thought people could get very close to God, Peter Annet, had a mystical way of understanding the Bible and Christ. He said that he was following St Paul in believing that people had two types of understanding: a carnal one and a spiritual one. Annet stated that the carnal understanding viewed the Bible literally and thought that biblical passages that talked about ‘Christ’ referred to the person of Jesus. According to Annet, the deeper spiritual understanding realised that ‘Christ’ referred to the spiritual light within all people. Annet maintained that spiritually oriented people who went beyond the carnal understanding also went beyond their natural reason to have their ‘reason's taper lighted up by God's light’. Annet said this natural reason ‘lighted up by God's light’ was the real Christ, not the person Jesus. Annet said of this Christ-like reason, ‘it is begotten of God; and as this inward illumination is man's only true light from God; ‘tis the only begotten son of God, the God incarnate, or God humanized. ‘Tis human nature uncorrupted’.47 Annet then said that people who got beyond their carnal understanding and became more spiritually oriented could get so close to God that they ‘shalt be filled with God, and the Rays of the Divinity will ennoble thy Thoughts, adorn thy Speech, and direct thy Ways’.48

The deists who had mystical-type experiences were the most religious of all the deists who wrote prayers. Nonetheless, all the deist prayer-writers believed in a kind and loving God who cared for people. These deists thought we had a duty to love and worship God as well as follow his will by being benevolent to other people. These deists’ prayers were a reflection of their deep devotion to and love for God. As one of the leading Theophilanthropists, Pierre Trottier, said about why he prayed and worshipped God, ‘it is an irresistible need of our hearts which caused us to assemble together to do public acts of worship towards our supreme benefactor to whom we owe all that we are’.49 The deists who wrote prayers were religious and should be seen as part of the religious Enlightenment.

The deists who wrote prayers have a major impact on our view of the Enlightenment deists. But before discussing this impact, there is another group of deists who should be mentioned: the 76 deists who wrote hymns to God.50 (Like the prayer-writers, I found the writers of hymns to God through research in eighteenth-century books, pamphlets, and speeches.) I wrote about the prayer-writers first because the hymn-writers did not have as deep a devotion and longing for God as the prayer-writers. The hymn-writers also did not see their hymns as a spiritual practice, and did not talk about becoming one with God or feeling God's very presence. However, the hymn-writers were much more religious than other deists, and the hymn-writers shared the prayer-writers’ view of God as a loving father who performed miracles.

The writers of hymns about God believed that God deserved their adoration and worship because of all the wonderful things that God did for people. These deists expressed their love for God in their hymns. Similar to the prayer-writers, the hymn-writers should be seen as a part of the religious Enlightenment.

The rest of this article will discuss the impact that the deists who wrote prayers or hymns to God have on our view of Enlightenment deism in general. There were 95 deists who wrote prayers and 76 deists who wrote hymns to God. A small number of the hymn-writers also wrote prayers, but when this is adjusted for, there was a total of one 158 deists who wrote prayers or hymns to God. The idea that these one 158 deists indicate anything about the general nature of Enlightenment deism could easily be dismissed if scholars had identified 10,000 deists and only 158 of them had written prayers or hymns. Then, the prayer- and hymn-writers could be dismissed as especially pious deists who indicate little or nothing about the rest of the deists. On the other hand, if scholars only know about 200 deists, then the 158 who wrote prayers or hymns mean that basically all the Enlightenment deists were part of the religious Enlightenment.

There is a major problem, however, with figuring out what percentage of the deists wrote prayers or hymns to God, because scholars in general have not made any effort to identify and count the deists. Instead, scholars have made statements about Enlightenment deism without knowing how many deists there were. This has led scholars to make wildly different assessments of the number of deists. On one extreme is S. J. Barnett, who maintains that during the entire Enlightenment period there were only about ten to twenty deists in total. Barnett argues that eighteenth-century ministers created the idea that there were many more deists to increase support for Christianity.55 On the other extreme is W. R. Ward, who sees the number of deist writers as ‘immense’.56

I have spent a decade trying to identify Enlightenment figures who should be considered deists and getting an accurate count of them. Based on the definition of deism given earlier, through research I have identified a little over 600 deists.57 This means that around a quarter of all the identified Enlightenment deists cared so much about God and praising God that they wrote prayers or hymns to him. The 158 deists who wrote prayers or hymns are a significant enough percentage of the total number of deists to impact our view of the Enlightenment deists.

Scholars have not previously known about the large number of deists who wrote prayers and hymns about God, or how devout these deists were. These writers believed in an active and personal God, not a distant and inactive deity. The scholarly view of Enlightenment deism should change to reflect this fact and recognise that it is inaccurate to characterise Enlightenment deism as a belief in an inactive and distant God who had no relationship with people. This adds to the considerable body of research that shows most people in the Enlightenment believed that Enlightenment values and reasonable religious belief were compatible.

The scholarly view of the Enlightenment has changed significantly in the last several decades such that it is no longer viewed as a period in which religion was seen as incompatible with reason, toleration, and science. Scholars have shown that some religious groups, including many Protestants, Jews, and Catholics, combined their religious beliefs with Enlightenment values. These groups are now seen as being part of the religious Enlightenment.

This article argues that the scholarly view of deism should also change. It makes this argument by primarily focusing on one group of deists, the 95 deists who wrote prayers. These deists did not see God as impersonal or inactive. Instead, these deists saw God as a loving, caring father who often miraculously helped people. These deists had a very close relationship with a kind and caring God that they adored and on whom they felt dependent. They believed that God treated people so well that people had a duty to love him and follow his will. Some of these deists felt so close to God that they could be said to have had mystical experiences. Just as scholars include other small groups, such as the German Benedictine monks, as part of the religious Enlightenment, so too should scholars include the deists who wrote prayers as part of the religious Enlightenment.

There was another group of deists who were very much like the deists who wrote prayers—the deists who wrote hymns about God. Together, these two groups of deists were a significant enough percentage of the deists that the Enlightenment deists should not be seen as people who believed in a distant and inactive God who had no relationship with people. Instead, scholars should see that a significant number of deists were religious and should be included in the religious Enlightenment.