Debating societies [ Clubs & Societies / Associational culture ]
… was that the debating societies offered opportunities for discussing topics rarely, if ever, treated elsewhere, such as deism and the criticism of Christianity; Mary Thale suggests that the danger of prosecution for blasphemy must have contributed to the excitement of debates on deism in 1754. 3 1 . Trevor Fawcett, ‘Eighteenth-Century Debating Societies’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies … In the Robin Hood Society in the 1750s and 1760, some speakers attacked Christianity as a fraud and praised deism, thus giving plebeian audiences access to deist thought they could not encounter otherwise (for lack of access to …
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