Introduction

By the early 1730s Toland, Collins and Tindal were dead, and, according to the standard accounts, deism declined in England. However, these accounts may need to be qualified. Although doctors, lawyers, tavern philosophers, soldiers and young rakes were reported to make remarks critical of Christianity, there was never any deist social movement and it may be more accurate to think in terms of a diffusion of critical attitudes. The scale of controversy was reduced, but there were further erosions of Christianity's claims and a significant diffusion of disbelief in particular theological points to extensive audiences in England and America. There was no major deist thinker after Tindal, apart from Bolingbroke, whose philosophy was not much taken up, but there was a extensive impact on thinkers of the first rank, including Hume, Bentham and Kant, who shaped future intellectual developments. Further, while clandestinity seems to have declined, criticism of revealed religion became increasingly explicit between 1730 and 1760, and reached a wider and less educated public. Non-Christian perspectives on politics, law and morality were also more freely expressed. On the other hand, the radical Renaissance deism of the seventeenth century, based on a God who was Nature or the Soul of the World, played a reduced role and in the 1730s and early 1740s there were fewer charges that deists were atheists.

Although home-grown heterodoxy had surfaced in various London clubs, religion was still a public matter. Christianity was part of the common law of England, the established Church was, on some accounts, vibrant, and public manifestations of disbelief were repressed. Walpole's regime imposed tight controls on religious deviance and almost nothing openly advocating disbelief was allowed to appear in print. Theology was still an important part of intellectual life, and theological debates, which were widely followed, were surprisingly technical.