The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine

2 Faith and Reason, Human Nature and Sociability

CHAPTER 2 FAITH AND REASON, HUMAN NATURE AND SOCIABILITY Paine’s faith that God is a benevolent creator provided a firm moral foundation for his political thought, a faith evident as early as Common Sense and running throughout his writings over the next three decades. Despite his own repeated assertion of his faith, a historic controversy has raged over whether his theology actually figures at all in his politics.1 Some commentators have argued that Paine used religion purely for rhetorical purposes to appear sympathetic to his readers as a way to persuade them of the truths of his argument.2 Others have argued, along with Theodore Roosevelt’s famous characterization, that we might dismiss his profession of faith because he really was “a filthy little atheist.”3 The way to cut through this controversy is to understand Paine’s distinction between established organized religions , especially those religions linked to government, and an individual ’s private religious faith, which he claimed was a right inherent in every human being. His most controversial work, The Age of Reason, comprised his harshest evaluation of organized religion, and yet, like all of Paine’s writing, we find here a careful attempt to set forth his belief in God, which was consistent throughout his life. Priests, he thought, had designed organized religions to blunt human reason as a trap to trick people into believing that God speaks only through them. Catholic or Protestant, they were nothing more, in the words of Jonathan Israel, than “manipulators of popular credulity and vendors of magical formulae couched in incomprehensible terminology.”4 28 ;l: Indeed, all established formal religions—Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—attempt to control their followers so their adherents will not think for themselves.5 Paine first argued this point as early as 1776. John Adams recorded in his diary that Paine told him of his plan sometime in the future to write formally about organized religion, but Paine thought “it will be best to postpone it to the latter part of life.” Adams wrote that even then he suspected that Paine was an atheist who hated Christianity, noting that such aspiration to write about religion was “daring impudence.” The “profligate and impious ” Paine, he declared, “could not write about Christianity, which was the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity. Let the blackguard Paine say what he will. It is resignation to God—it is goodness itself to man.”6 Adams distinguished himself from Paine when he said that he was a serious self-identified Christian and that no greater religion than Christianity existed in the world. Yet, for Paine, a person could believe in God without the dangerous trappings of a religious order or organized religion . Just a year later, he wrote that “a man may be religiously happy without modes,” meaning that religious faith was a private matter without the mediation of a church.7 All organized religions are “no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit” (AR, 1:464). As a result of statements like this one, for two centuries Paine has been branded an atheist. His theological views were attacked in his own time not just by John Adams but also by many leading authorities, such as Gilbert Wakefield, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Erskine, the lawyer who defended him when he was tried for sedition for libeling the king and thus committing treason for publishing the second part of the Rights of Man. Even more ruthless than John Adams’s vitriol against Paine was Erskine ’s attack. When Paine heard that Erskine had prosecuted Thomas Williams, a London publisher and bookseller, arrested for selling copies of The Age of Reason, he summarized his religious position with these words: “Mr. Erskine is very little acquainted with theological subjects, if he does not know there is such a thing as a sincere and religious belief that the Bible is not the Word of God. . . . It is not infidelity. . . . It is a pure religious belief, founded on the idea of the perfection of the Creator.”8 Faith and Reason, Human Nature and Sociability 29 God and Political Transformation This idea—man’s faith in the “idea of the perfection of the Creator ”—permeates Paine’s writings from the beginning.9 More importantly, because his faith in God was consistent throughout his life, his shift from Quakerism to deism was...