Did 18th century Deists like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson consider themselves also Christians?

Question

Deists disavowed the divinity of Jesus. They regarded the accounts of miracles in the Bible as just ignorant superstition. Wouldn't they be insulted at being labeled a "Christian?"

Answer 1

yep liberal Christian...

Answer 2

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

Yes they would be insulted

Answer 3

I don't know about Paine, I'm not as familiar with him as I should be.

I suspect Jefferson didn't consider himself a Christian. And I think that no devout Christian would have come up with the idea of taking his scissors to the Bible in order to separate the words of Jesus from all the other crap in there. (You can read the "Jefferson Bible" at the link below.)

Answer 4

i'm not really sure what they thought of themselves in private, but believeing god created the universe and then left it alone i don't think you'd consider them christians in the fundamentalist sense. i don't think they'd have anything to do with the church now, except maybe jefferson(politician) going to church to look good to christian voters. i have a funny feeling that if the founding fathers knew the religious right would come along, most of them being deists anyway, they would have tried rewording the constitution.

Answer 5

In summary, then, Jefferson was a deist because he believed in one God, in divine providence, in the divine moral law, and in rewards and punishments after death; but did not believe in supernatural revelation. He was a Christian deist because he saw Christianity as the highest expression of natural religion and Jesus as an incomparably great moral teacher. He was not an orthodox Christian because he rejected, among other things, the doctrines that Jesus was the promised Messiah and the incarnate Son of God. Jefferson's religion is fairly typical of the American form of deism in his day.

Some believe Paine may have begun to form his early views on natural justice while listening to the Puritan mob jeering and attacking those punished in the stocks. Others have argued that he was influenced by his Quaker father. In The Age of Reason – Paine's treatise in support of deism – he wrote:

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers … though I revere their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at [their] conceit; … if the taste of a Quaker [had] been consulted at the Creation, what a silent and drab-colored Creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.

Paine advocated a liberal world view, considered radical in his day. He dismissed monarchy, and viewed all government as, at best, a necessary evil. He opposed slavery and was amongst the earliest proponents of social security, universal free public education, a guaranteed minimum income, and many other radical ideas now common practice in most western democracies.

With regard to his religious views, in The Age of Reason (begun in France in 1793), Paine stated:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
He described himself as a "Deist" and commented:

How different is [Christianity] to the pure and simple profession of Deism! The true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical.
Paine published an early anti-slavery tract [1] and was co-editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. [2], [3]

Answer 6

when I see for the time of this quote from Thomas Paine, the grossest of exaggeration and a range of the most dogmatic assertions, not born out with assistance from an complete interpreting of the Bible, i might want to not so dishonor the Bible with assistance from believing this quote. i do not imagine the Bible is inerrant, in spite of the undeniable fact that it would not deserve this. it truly is were given a impressive form of reliable in it. My project is to discover some thing extra effectual!

Answer 7

I don't know. I haven't had the pleasure of talking to them.