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Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution
Christopher Grasso
| In Wethersfield, Connecticut, on December 11, 1782, William Beadle, a respected merchant known as a doting father and husband, cut the throats of his wife and four young children and then fired two pistols into his head. It was neither a crime of passion nor a fit of delirium, the article in the Hartford Connecticut Courant explained: In the previous years, Beadle "betook himself more to books than usual, and was unhappily fond of those esteemed Deistical ... and (as he expresses himself), 'renounced all the popular religions of the world, he intended to die a proper Deist.'" By early January that initial article had been reprinted in newspapers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. By the middle of that month, it had reached Virginia. "What a monster of a man was this!" exclaimed the Reverend John Marsh at the funeral for Mrs. Beadle and the children.1 |
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Before the uproar over Thomas Paine's Age of Reason and the Federalist attacks on Thomas Jefferson's deism in the 1790s, deism tested Americans' commitment to religious freedom and complicated the connection between religious doctrines and republican virtue.2 Encounters with deism in the 1780s uncover contests over the place of religion in emerging conceptions of American citizenship and connect everyday concerns and the cultural imperatives of the revolutionary moment to longer-standing theological and philosophical debates. As one of those encounters, the Beadle affair provides a revealing glimpse of people struggling to understand their religious and political lives in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. It also sketches an episode in the formation of American religious common sense—a stance assuming that virtuous citizenship presupposed Christianity and that challenging the divine inspiration of the Bible was therefore not just heterodox but un-American and, perhaps, lunacy. |
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Deism is usually associated with belief in a noninterventionist Creator, reliance on what reason can discern in the natural world, and skepticism about miracles, the scriptures as divine revelation, and the divinity of Christ. It currently has a curious place in the historiography of eighteenth-century Europe and America. In studies focusing on Europe that interpret the Enlightenment as the avatar of secular modernity, deism figures as an important intellectual development in which the West finally began to discard the theological baggage of Christendom. Recent scholarship, however, has challenged that view. One study argues that deism hardly existed in the eighteenth century; it is merely a historiographical mirage derived from a bogeyman invented by Christian propagandists. In studies of America, by contrast, deism has rarely been seen as a powerful force. Perhaps the term is an apt label for the beliefs of a few elite individuals such as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson, and perhaps it encapsulates a more extreme version of ideas that other liberal, rationalistic (though still Christian) Founding Fathers found congenial in a generational trough of piety between the (so-called) First and Second Great Awakenings. Never broadly popular and rarely publicly defended in late eighteenth-century America, deism is usually mentioned and then quickly dismissed in surveys of early American religion. The focus on evangelicalism in recent years has driven deism even further from view.3 |
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It was not so far from view in the 1780s. As states recast church-state relations in their new constitutions, the public role of religion generally and of Christianity specifically became a subject of intense debate. In Virginia, for example, fears of deism motivated both proponents and some of the opponents of religious taxation.4 After the circulation of the initial reports, most of the printed commentary on the Beadle tragedy was published in New England, and it framed the case with that region's distinctive theological concerns. But these New England writers, even if they told the Beadle tale with a regional dialect, knew that the status of deism—barely respectable or beyond the pale?—was a national issue. |
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