Waligore: How the Christian-Deists understood themselves

More from Dr. Joseph Waligore here:

Thomas Morgan (d. 1743) was a former minister who later became a doctor and a writer.  Morgan labeled himself a Christian deist, and said Christian deism was the ‘original, real, and indisputable Christianity,’ which ‘was preach’d to the World by Christ and the Apostles.’[ix]  Matthew Tindal (1653?- 1733) was a lawyer, a writer, and was elected to a fellowship at Oxford.  He wrote several times that people with his ideas were ‘true Christian Deists.’[x]  Thomas Amory wrote theological novels in which his characters had extremely complex theological discussions.  He is forgotten nowadays, but he was well known in the eighteenth-century and was compared by one reviewer to Shakespeare and Richardson.[xi]  As I quoted at the very beginning of this paper, Amory thought true Christianity was deism, and he called himself a ‘Christian deist.’[xii]