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While historians of the early American republic have long argued that deism disappeared at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this study intends to explore the resilience of a deistic form of free thought as it appears through the spiritual belief system of the communities of the Society for Universal Inquiry and Reform. Highly critical of the American society – which they considered plagued by many evils – these communities advocated a radical refashioning of the social, political and economic structures but sought above all a spiritual regeneration of man by forging a secular religion suffused with panentheistic undertones as the only path to practical happiness.