This is a dispute between conservative Christians, not an outbreak of soggy, believe-what-you-like European deism.
Many were not.The modern religious activists like Mr Pawlenty, though, commit the worse intellectual crime of effacing the secularism, deism and disestablishmentarianism of so many of the founders, baldly claiming they meant to put (Christianity's) God at the centre of American public life.
Yet she seems numb to both her own feelings and theirs.Her own beliefs, drawing on many faiths, have become an appealing if slightly woolly blend of sensibility to poetry (T.S. Eliot in particular), ethics and deism.
This natural religion, also called deism, was the intellectual counterpart to the more emotional antidogmatic faith of the Pietists, who advocated "heart religion" over "head religion".
Theism, with its equal stress on divine transcendence of the universe and immanence within it, constitutes a somewhat uneasy conceptual midpoint between deism and pantheism.
For a survey of systematic interpretations of the divine or sacred, see agnosticism; atheism; deism; dualism; monotheism; nature worship; pantheism; polytheism; theism; and totemism.
Yet his work testifies to his having gone through a religious crisis, and he progressed relatively slowly from Roman Catholicism to deism and then to atheism and philosophical materialism.
His contention, however, that the human mind could not attain to any positive conception of the nature of God or his goodness provoked considerable controversy, and Mansel, who meant to attack deism, rather than theism, was accused of agnosticism.
Among the French philosophes and Encyclopaedists, Voltaire (1694 1778) espoused an anticlerical deism, which viewed the genesis of polytheism in the work of priests a point also developed by another Encyclopaedist, Denis Diderot (1713 84).
The first wave occurred in England in the form of Deism.
Enlightenment deism first arises in England.
