This is an old essay of mine that was originally a grad school paper for a course on the history of American religions.
What I did in this is trace how deism went from being a dissident intellectual movement among radical intellectuals in the West centuries ago to becoming the foundation of both American civil religion and popular religion, as well as the pivotal intellectual force that gave birth to the broader secular intellectual culture we find in the Western world today. The question: How can anarchism, currently a dissident intellectual movement among radical intellectuals, achieve over the course of the next few centuries what deism achieved over the past few centuries?
