Short answers, pulled from the story.
Edward Herbert published the first major statement of Deism in English literature in the year 1624. The book was titled De Veritate and argued that the universe was a self-sustaining machine created by a Supreme Being who then stepped back to let natural laws run their course.
Matthew Tindal wrote Christianity as Old as the Creation in 1730. This work became known as the Deist Bible because it redefined the foundation of Deist epistemology as knowledge based on experience or human reason, effectively widening the gap between traditional Christians and what he called Christian Deists.
The Deistic Cult of the Supreme Being lasted just under three months during the French Revolution from 1789 to 1799. It was established as the new state religion of France, replacing the deposed Catholic Church and the rival atheistic Cult of Reason.
The term Gottgläubig was officially recognized by the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick on the 26th of November 1936. This designation was for German citizens who had officially left Christian churches but professed faith in some higher power or divine creator.
The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey report estimated that the number of self-identifying Deists grew from 6,000 to 49,000 between 1990 and 2001. This represented about 0.02% of the U.S. population at the time.