What 'Deist' Meant to Thomas Jefferson

In the 18th century, deist did not always entail the idea of an absent "clockmaker" god. I addressed this point in a post at Cato Unbound: People in 18th-century Anglo-America did not always use our textbook definition of a deist. Deist could mean a person who denied God's providence, but it could mean other things as well. Sometimes it referred to a person who was critical of Reformed theology and its emphasis on humankind's lack of free will. Or someone who did not believe that the whole Bible was the Word of God. Sometimes "deism" meant monotheism. Sometimes the use of deism had no skeptical connotations at all, such as when it was used as an antonym for "atheism." Ben Franklin and others rarely unpacked all those variant meanings, but it would have surprised few people in Revolutionary America to find that a "deist" also believed in God's providence.