What the Hell is Deism?
What I believe has a name and I didn't know it.
When I was in high school and taking apologetics, my teacher mentioned that some people see God as a great watchmaker, who created the universe and then went hands off and let humans either make it nice or screw it up.
And then of course we learned Bible verses to counteract that belief because the God of fundamentalism is an active, alive God who loves Americans the very most.
But after I graduated from high school and got some distance, I realized that the “great watchmaker” was a lot closer to what I actually believed.
Mainly because I thought that there was no way that this supposedly loving God was also this big of an asshole.
Throughout this, I refer to God as him. Which I question now, thinking that really, does God have a gender? But it’s ingrained in me, especially when talking about my past.
ALSO, I am repeating things I was told and formerly believed, not things that I believe to be true now.
There was this whole storyline which I could never reconcile. To make it short, this is what I was taught:
God knows everything.
But people have free will to choose him or not. And if you don’t choose him, you’re going to die a violent terrible death.
God is love.
But also, that dude will absolutely murder you if you don’t listen to him.
But also, you are forgiven for everything in the blood of Jesus.
But then again, don’t do something that will get you in trouble. My school had a contract that said we wouldn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, or have sex.
A girl got pregnant in the year or two ahead of me. She was expelled. Her boyfriend wasn’t. Absolutely true. Where was the forgiveness there?
Jesus forgives, but private Christian schools do not.
And of course the series of colonial beliefs that God lets children in Africa die of famine because they don’t believe in him and missionaries need to go and get these people to believe in the Christian God that we believed in because otherwise they were probably worshipping the devil.
And so I have held on to the idea for ages, without doing any further reading, that yeah, there’s probably a God but also he probably isn’t out there meddling in the affairs of the millions on Earth.
Some time in my late 20s when I started teaching US History, I read that most of the founding fathers (yeah I’ve written about them, too) were Deists. Wait, what? They weren’t Christians? But then also, I learned enough to get through, and no more. My job was not teaching Deism, it was history, and within a few years I had 2 small kids and a husband who was on the road for half the year. I was putting in my brain exactly what I needed to know.
About 15 years later, my friend gave me that book I’ve been talking about and I was reminded that yeah, it turns out I’m probably a deist.
In Finding God in the Waves by Mike McHargue, he breaks down a variety of beliefs in God. When I read this (page 144) my brain seemed to grow exponentially.
To begin with, the most common perception of believing in God is a dichotomy- you’re either theist or atheist.
The ones in the middle don’t have a great PR machine.
Here they are:
But God is a complicated idea, historically and philosophically, and there are an incredible number of definitions for who or what God is. Consider this:
There are atheists, who lack belief in any god or gods.
There are antitheists, who assert that belief in God is harmful.
There are agnostics, who say they don’t know who or if God is.
There are pantheists, who say that the universe is God.
There are deists, who say God made the universe but that God does not intervene in the universe anymore.
There are nontheists, who find both atheism and theism too limiting. They believe God is real but beyond any human understanding or definition.
There are theists, who say that God is a being with specific will, agency, and a plan for humanity.Even among theists, there are thousands of conflicting ideas about God.
…
And let’s not forget polytheists, who believe that there are many—even countless—gods out there.
But going back to the way I was raised, I had always learned that it was our specific brand of Christianity vs. all others. We were absolutely not cool with Catholics or Mormons or even Methodists, heaven forbid we even discuss Hindus or Buddhists.
And by not cool, I mean they were going to hell and we were not.
So again, I could not reconcile this idea in my brain about how this God is love guy was also condemning most of the world to terrible pain and suffering.
As it turns out, the same time I was coming to that realization, I was also trying to have a social life while going to college and working (yes, those are in order of priority) and so it was very easy for me to step right out of the habit of prayer and studying the Bible because I had so many other things to do instead.
The only thing I did miss was the community of people who understood who I was and how I got there. But that didn’t exist anymore, because who I was wasn’t even the same person. More on that next time.
Very interesting and thought provoking…waiting on the rest of the story!