Letters to the Editor

Abstract

To the Editor, In the June 2008 issue of the JAH, Christopher Grasso, in “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” seems to follow the conventional wisdom that deism in America was the same as deism in continental Europe, the “watchmaker” theory that God created the world and then forgot about it. He writes, “Deism is usually associated with belief in a noninterventionist Creator…. In studies of America … deism has rarely been seen as a powerful force” (p. 44). But American deism was no more a copy of continental European deism than was American Freemasonry just a copy of continental European Freemasonry. An interventionist God was very much part of the beliefs of several of our “Founding Fathers” as was a belief in an afterlife and the need to worship the Creator. But those who were deists agreed that Christ was not God (just a great preacher) and miracles do not happen. The moral code they followed was a humanistic natural law, without any theological trappings.