Deism developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a philosophical movement rather than as an organized church with its own clergy, congregations or fixed liturgy, associated with figures including Voltaire in France and Thomas Paine and, more ambiguously, several of the American founding generation, and it accordingly never developed a shared prayer tradition comparable to the organized religions catalogued elsewhere in this atlas, since its core commitment, that God's existence and character can be known through reason and observation of nature rather than through revealed scripture or church authority, left considerable room for individual Deist thinkers to reach quite different conclusions about whether, or how, prayer made sense at all.
Some historical Deists retained a form of reverent address to God as a rational expression of gratitude for an orderly, well-designed universe, while others, taking the reasoning about a non-intervening creator further, argued that petitionary prayer asking God to alter events was simply incoherent given Deism's premise that God does not intervene in the world's ordinary operation after creation. Several prominent members of the American founding generation, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, expressed views commonly described as broadly Deist in character, though historians caution that their specific personal positions on prayer and religious practice varied considerably and often remained more nuanced or ambiguous than the simple Deist label alone would suggest.