Introduction

This study reinterprets the significance of a group of important but neglected writers known as the English deists. It attempts to enhance the understanding of these writers by locating them in the context of unfamiliar forms of cultural life. If this is done, then it is possible to take a historically nuanced approach to their texts. To do justice to these writers and their texts, it is necessary to avoid monolithic patterns of interpretation which reduce them to resting points in a teleological history of secularization and to resist locating them within a framework of changing religious identities. Instead, there is a need to problematize the notion that these writers had single religious identities – that they were either Christians or deists, and to avoid confusing the label ‘deist’ with a single religious identity. For these writers had multiple, and not always separable identities, sometimes without the sharp distinctions between them that a contemporary reader might assume. Here this study supplements and extends the exemplary work of Justin Champion in The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (1992) and Republican Learning (2003) in ways which enrich and complicate our understanding of the Enlightenment.

The writers known as the English deists need to be read in light of the different personae and social roles which they adopted, and with regard for the multiple audiences which they addressed. The fact that all these writers were involved with deism, and all of them took deism seriously, has led many historians to assume that they had single religious identities, explicable in terms of deism. This view, though superficially plausible, is problematic, and reads Romantic conceptions of religious identity into a period in which it was lacking. The fact that these writers took deism seriously does not mean that they accepted deism as a totalizing outlook, or that they advocated deism as a religion that could replace Christianity.