"Founding Sources: A New Book Examines The Philosophical Underpinnings Of America's 'Heretical'

[Dawson Leery]

Republic"

https://www.au.org/church-state/julyaugust-2014-church-state/books-ideas/founding-sources-a-new-book-examines-the


http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-jc-matthew-stewart-20140629-story.html

"Jefferson was one of many deists appalled by the Calvinist God, doling out salvation and damnation in a manner human beings must accept but could not understand. In place of this punitive figure, deists proposed "Nature's God ... a God of publicly promulgated laws, not of private and inscrutable acts." For them, Stewart states, "belief [was] a matter of evidence, not choice." When American deists applied that concept to the civil sphere, they found contemporary political systems as unsatisfactory as revealed religion."