The English Deists by Wayne Hudson (review)

275 decessor are the brevity of the Index and the lack of a list of manuscripts consulted . Thus, for example, it would have been very valuable to be able to track, via the Index, some of the polemical language used at election times, and to access the fascinating material on the colors favored by rival political groupings : Tories, red; and Whigs, shades of blue. It is also frustrating not to have a clearer account of the local archives consulted and what they contain; for example , the remarkable series of political purges carried out at Canterbury in the 1660s involve not just the corporation, but the freemen and company officeholders . This, nevertheless, is a first-rate book. Nicholas Tyacke University College London WAYNE HUDSON. The English Deists. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. Pp. 224. £ 60. Mr. Hudson sets out to change the way we read the deists by providing a fuller sense of their intellectual influences , social environments, personal connections, and political goals. No longer are these notorious enemies of the faith principally religious polemicists . He writes, ‘‘Against the tradition which reads them as deists writing against Christianity, I have read them as intra-Protestant thinkers, for whom pol itics, religion and philosophy were to a large degree civil concerns.’’ Mr. Hudson has in view here early writers such as Blount, Toland, and the early Collins, each of whom emerges as a complete character in a highly nuanced story. Indeed, for readers who appreciate meticulous intellectual histories animated by complex characters adopting various personae as circumstances demand, Mr. Hudson’s book will be a pleasure to read. For those looking for clearly drawn ideological oppositions , sharp demarcation between rival camps, and earnest personalities in pitched rhetorical battles, The English Deists is either an education or a frustration . Regardless, this novel and well researched history of early English deism contributes to an impressive body of recent scholarship on these often underestimated writers. These deists are not anti-religious zealots, but liberal Protestants motivated by convictions more political than spiritual . Indeed, the term deist fades into obscurity as the argument of The English Deists develops. Mr. Hudson is fond of speaking of deisms and forms of deism, occasionally employing several adjectives to modify the noun on a single page. Thus, we grow accustomed to reading of Renaissance deism, English deism, a mild form of deism, and even ‘‘multiple deisms.’’ This insistence on fine distinctions is perhaps admirable, but will for some readers prove cumulatively disconcerting by later chapters. Definitional issues become acute when additional religious and political categories are layered onto these deisms. Rendering matters even more opaque, few at this masquerade continually wear any given mask. Mr. Hudson prefers to describe strategic deist shape-shifting as prudence or even politeness rather than, as David Berman once argued, theological lying. I tend to follow Berman on this. Though Mr. Hudson acknowledges ‘‘a degree of subterfuge’’ in several of his deists, he is remarkably willing to take them at their word. A critical method favoring situational over discursive analysis may be at the root of the tension I felt reading this 276 book. In The English Deists, it is not what you wrote about religion that matters ; it is who you knew, where you spent your time, what you read, and, of course, your politics. Mr. Hudson grants the deists what can only be termed a generous reading of the actual religious polemics for which most people know them, for example, their all out assault on revelation. Deists receive temperate interpretation even when writing as if they might actually be sworn enemies of traditional Christian faith. Thus, the deists ‘‘retreated to the claim that Christianity was capable of coinciding with true religion, provided it was sharply distinguished from priestcraft.’’ Granted, but priestcraft was shorthand for everything the deists detested in established religion—authority, miracles, prophecy, revelation. Their clerical contemporaries certainly saw them as a real threat to orthodox belief. But, for Mr. Hudson, deists sought not to destroy revelation as the basis of Christianity, but to liberalize English politics by reinventing Christianity as broad liberal Protestantism. He refers several times to clandestine clubs, lodges , and cabals that attracted deists, references that beg for fuller...