The Founders Were Deists
What if the people who built America mostly didn’t believe in a god who answered prayers?
They didn’t. Jefferson took a literal razor to his Bible and cut out every miracle, keeping the ethics. Franklin called himself a deist and meant it. Paine wrote The Age of Reason basically to argue the universe was the only scripture worth reading. They believed in a God who designed a machine and stepped back to let it run.
This is the most underrated fact about the founding. These weren’t mystics. They were engineers of a sort — men who saw the world as a mechanism with discoverable rules, and figured the highest form of reverence was understanding the rules rather than begging the operator to break them.
What does a deist actually believe? That the system was set in motion with good design, and the design is where the divinity lives. You don’t pray for the bridge to hold. You build it to hold. The respect you pay the universe is competence.
That’s a builder’s theology and it transfers directly. When you design a protocol, a company, a constitution, the deist ambition is right: make a thing that runs without you. The amateur builds a system that needs constant intervention and calls that importance. The deist builds a system so well-designed his absence is invisible. Jefferson and company were trying to write a machine still running two centuries after every author was dead. They mostly pulled it off, which is more than I can say about most of my code.
People hear “deism” and think arrogant Enlightenment men. The arrogance runs the other way. The interventionist is the one who thinks the system can’t run without him reaching in. The deist sets the rules carefully because he intends to leave. He’s planning his own irrelevance from the first line.
I think about this whenever I’m tempted to make myself necessary. The urge to be indispensable is the instinct of a small builder. The founders wanted to be dispensable — to build something that didn’t depend on their mood or their being alive. That’s the real ambition. Not the hand that keeps reaching in, but the mind that made reaching in unnecessary.
Build the clock. Then have the nerve to walk away from it. Or at least don’t volunteer to be the second hand.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.