c.j. betts argues that the accounts of deists at lyon (france) suggest that the origin of the term deism lies in the anti-trinitarian movement which was then an important phenomenon in the religious life of europe. using the word 'deist' verit was likely referring to a group of lyonnaise anti-trinitarians.in england the deistical movement seems to be an almost necessary outcome of the political and religious conditions of the time and country. the renaissance had fairly swept away the later scholasticism and with it, very largely, the constructive philosophy of the middle ages. the protestant reformation, in its open revolt against the authority of the catholic church, had inaugurated a slow revolution, in which all religious pretensions were to be involved. the new life of the empirical sciences, the enormous enlargement of the physical horizon in such discoveries as those of astronomy and geography, the philosophical doubt and rationalistic method of descartes, the advocated empiricism of bacon, the political changes of the times--all these things were factors in the preparation and arrangement of a stage upon which a criticism levelled at revelational religion might come forward and play its part. and though the first essays of deism were somewhat veiled and intentionally indirect in their attack upon revelation, with the revolution and the civil and religious liberty consequent upon it, with the spread of the critical and empirical spirit as exemplified in the philosophy of locke, the time was ripe for the full rehearsal of the case against christianity as expounded by the establishment and the sects. the issue of private judgment had split protestantism into a great number of conflicting sects.