Check it out here. A taste:
Joseph Waligore’s The Spirituality of the English and American Deists: How God Became Good marvels at all the possible assumptions of deism by primarily studying identified and unidentified deist scholars during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Waligore prides himself on evaluating nearly six hundred of these scholars as he surrounds his argument into four elements: “deist believed in an inactive deity, the deists’ most fundamental commitment was to reason, they were secularists advocating or moving toward the modern, scientific worldview that explained everything by purely natural processes, and they never prayed because they had no meaningful relationship with their distant and inactive deity.” These elements Waligore bases his argument upon are ultimately constructed from the overarching assumption that God’s distance from mankind automatically makes Him unfair and unjust.
Every deist, no matter what affiliation, held a “deep commitment in God’s fairness and goodness. They often rejected Christian doctrines because these doctrines portrayed God as less than perfectly good and fair, not because the doctrines were irrational.” God’s overarching goodness, to a deist, meant that He is fair to every individual on earth. Waligore, for examination purposes in comparison to deist doctrine, says Christians raise the argument that God strategically targets vulnerable people groups. By contrast, deists “argue that a good and just God would never have ordered the ancient Israelites to kill every man, woman, child, and baby of neighboring nations.” God’s overarching goodness now means that He is fair to every individual on earth because He does not discriminate. In the Western world, deists were the first religious group to believe God was totally good, and they tried to convince those around them to partake in this belief. Deists were not anti-divine. Instead, they were spiritual individuals that were safeguarded by a God that truly loved and cared for them.
There is quite a bit to this book. Though I think the chief point is that the notion of a Providential Deist is NOT a contradiction in terms. Yes, the French Deists were less "Christian" than the English and American Deists. But even the French Deists were often Providential. In their case they believed God favored the French Revolutionaries in their cause.
Here is the URL to the Amazon page.
