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Chapter 2 America’s Deist Future Throughout the late eighteenth century, believers in the Anglo-Protestant world wrote and thought about Christianity’s future with renewed urgency. The era’s political changes inspired broad speculation about religious events yet to come. Ministers and theologians prophesied Christ’s return with scholarly precision according to conventions of biblical exegesis. For others , often ordinary men and women, millennialism was visceral. Prophets in England and North America experienced and understood the unfolding of providential history through dreams, trances, and voices. Republicanism’s ostensible advance in the United States during the 1790s spurred political predictions about Christianity’s future that were less overtly providential but no less pressing.1 Abigail Adams was one such political prophet of Christianity’s fate in the new republic. Writing in winter 1794, Adams openly worried in a letter to her daughter “that there is, in the rising generation, a want of principle . This is a melancholy truth. I am no friend of bigotry; yet I think the freedom of inquiry, and the general toleration of religious sentiments, have been, like all other good things, perverted, and, under that shelter, deism, and even atheism, have found refuge.” Adams feared that republican principles—specifically, freedom of conscience and religious liberty— contained within them sources of Christianity’s demise. By holding the “rising generation” responsible for what would come, Adams revealed the larger political implications of a possible deist future. Within only a few years, groups of self-proclaimed “Theophilanthropists” had organized themselves for the stated purpose of advancing deism over time. Their efforts were inspired by a French society of the same name. For these American deists, Christianity’s eventual decline was a prospect rich with promise. 46 Chapter 2 Abigail Adams and the Theophilanthropists all agreed that a foundation for the republic’s deist future was being set in the world around them.2 Adams and her contemporaries used the term “generation,” in its broadest understanding, to describe relationships between past and future. This might concern lineage or ancestry, both of which identified individuals within the family. This understanding of generation entailed ideas about parental authority and family governance as well as the relationship between children and adults. Contemporaries also understood generation as a collective concept that described groups of individuals who belonged to a larger entity, be it a nation, a society, or even a religious movement. In its collective understanding, the term “generation” entailed considerations about origins and persistence. Why, for example, did a nation exist, and how could its people ensure its existence over time? Both understandings of the term “generation” contained assumptions about responsibility—of individuals to their families, citizens to their country, or believers to their confession. Quite often individual and collective understandings were combined and conflated in the era’s generational discourses. Generational discourses intrigued political writers and observers during the American and French Revolutions. In the 1780s and 1790s, individual and collective aspects of generational thought were combined in ways that raised contentious political questions about the relationship between the past and the future. These debates centered on the meaning of generational rights. Edmund Burke believed that the rights of a living generation were bound by obligations to respect the actions of previous generations and to consider the welfare of future generations. As Burke argued in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, society was “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Writers such as the French political theorist the marquis de Condorcet and Thomas Paine disagreed. As Condorcet declared, “One generation does not have the right to bind a future generation by its laws, and any form of hereditary office is both absurd and tyrannical.” In his Rights of Man, Thomas Paine rejected Burke’s view, declaring that Burke’s philosophy elevated “the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.” Thomas Jefferson viewed the rights of generations in terms very similar to Condorcet and Paine, but he was especially concerned with future generations, concluding that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Jefferson calculated that a generation lasted nineteen 47 Deist Future years. According to him, existing laws and debts should expire after nineteen years so that each new generation could adopt its own laws and contract its own debts.3 Although debates surrounding generational rights reflected largely philosophical concerns, generational discourses were culturally resonant during the...

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