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Authors: Richard Brookhiser
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taught him—for a while at least—to laugh at Christianity, and he showed him, to his lifelong benefit, how to use laughter in winning arguments.
Paine sits a little uneasily among the founding fathers. He never had serious political or military responsibilities—he was secretary of a congressional committee for two years during the Revolution, a glorified clerk. He led a peripatetic life: born in England in 1737, he migrated firstto America in 1772 on the eve of our revolution, then to France in 1792 in the midst of its, going wherever the winds of change were stirring. In 1802 he returned to the United States, and he died in Greenwich Village the year Lincoln was born.
It was Paine’s writing that gave him his eminence as an American patriot. His pamphlet Common Sense , calling for American independence, appeared in January 1776, half a year before Congress declared it. Common Sense made a sensation, selling 150,000 copies (in a country of 3 million, that was the equivalent of selling 15 million today). The American Crisis was the name Paine gave a series of essays commenting on the progress of the war. The first appeared in the grim December of 1776, a week before the Battle of Trenton; its first paragraph (“These are the times that try men’s souls . . . ”) is the most stirring lede in the history of journalism, the republican equivalent of King Harry’s speech before the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V —Shakespeare in prose.
Paine almost unmade his reputation by his writing, too. The Age of Reason , a book-length attack on Christianity published in the mid-1790s, raised up a swarm of enemies, including a number of his fellow founders. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration, refused to meet him after he returned to America, and Samuel Adams, another signer, wrote him a chiding letter about his religious views: “When I heard that you had turned your mind to a defense of infidelity [i.e., irreligion] I felt myself much astonished, andmore grieved.” Only Thomas Jefferson stayed loyal to him, welcoming Paine to the White House.
But Paine’s works, both patriotic and anti-Christian, stayed in print. Parson Weems included The Age of Reason in the stock of books he sold, though he recommended buying it with aChristian antidote. Lincoln first read Painein New Salem.
Son of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother, Paine was exposed to both faiths when he was a boy. But in The Age of Reason he said that his disenchantment with Christianity began when he was seven or eight years old. Some family member had given a home reading of a sermon on substitutionary atonement—the doctrine that Christ died for oursins. In the Christian notion, the sins of Adam and Eve (which infected all their descendants) were so egregious that they and all men thereafter must die. But Jesus offered His death on the cross to God, His Father, as payment for their offenses. When the sermon ended, young Paine went outside, “and as I was going down the garden steps (for I perfectly recollect the spot) I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and thought to myself that it was making God Almighty act like a passionate man that killed his son when he could not revenge himself any other way; and as I was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not see for what purpose they preachedsuch sermons.”
Paine declared his own mature credo at the beginning of The Age of Reason : he believed “in one God, and no more,” but considered all existing religions “human inventions set up to terrify andenslave mankind.” Paine made some cracks at Islam, and more at Judaism, but he aimed most of his fire at Christianity. He employed three sorts of arguments, each centered on the Bible.
He made much of the contradictions scattered throughout the bible (he always lowercased it). The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah list, tribe by tribe, the Jews who returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity; but the lists disagree
Paine sits a little uneasily among the founding fathers. He never had serious political or military responsibilities—he was secretary of a congressional committee for two years during the Revolution, a glorified clerk. He led a peripatetic life: born in England in 1737, he migrated firstto America in 1772 on the eve of our revolution, then to France in 1792 in the midst of its, going wherever the winds of change were stirring. In 1802 he returned to the United States, and he died in Greenwich Village the year Lincoln was born.
It was Paine’s writing that gave him his eminence as an American patriot. His pamphlet Common Sense , calling for American independence, appeared in January 1776, half a year before Congress declared it. Common Sense made a sensation, selling 150,000 copies (in a country of 3 million, that was the equivalent of selling 15 million today). The American Crisis was the name Paine gave a series of essays commenting on the progress of the war. The first appeared in the grim December of 1776, a week before the Battle of Trenton; its first paragraph (“These are the times that try men’s souls . . . ”) is the most stirring lede in the history of journalism, the republican equivalent of King Harry’s speech before the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V —Shakespeare in prose.
Paine almost unmade his reputation by his writing, too. The Age of Reason , a book-length attack on Christianity published in the mid-1790s, raised up a swarm of enemies, including a number of his fellow founders. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration, refused to meet him after he returned to America, and Samuel Adams, another signer, wrote him a chiding letter about his religious views: “When I heard that you had turned your mind to a defense of infidelity [i.e., irreligion] I felt myself much astonished, andmore grieved.” Only Thomas Jefferson stayed loyal to him, welcoming Paine to the White House.
But Paine’s works, both patriotic and anti-Christian, stayed in print. Parson Weems included The Age of Reason in the stock of books he sold, though he recommended buying it with aChristian antidote. Lincoln first read Painein New Salem.
Son of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother, Paine was exposed to both faiths when he was a boy. But in The Age of Reason he said that his disenchantment with Christianity began when he was seven or eight years old. Some family member had given a home reading of a sermon on substitutionary atonement—the doctrine that Christ died for oursins. In the Christian notion, the sins of Adam and Eve (which infected all their descendants) were so egregious that they and all men thereafter must die. But Jesus offered His death on the cross to God, His Father, as payment for their offenses. When the sermon ended, young Paine went outside, “and as I was going down the garden steps (for I perfectly recollect the spot) I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and thought to myself that it was making God Almighty act like a passionate man that killed his son when he could not revenge himself any other way; and as I was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not see for what purpose they preachedsuch sermons.”
Paine declared his own mature credo at the beginning of The Age of Reason : he believed “in one God, and no more,” but considered all existing religions “human inventions set up to terrify andenslave mankind.” Paine made some cracks at Islam, and more at Judaism, but he aimed most of his fire at Christianity. He employed three sorts of arguments, each centered on the Bible.
He made much of the contradictions scattered throughout the bible (he always lowercased it). The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah list, tribe by tribe, the Jews who returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity; but the lists disagree
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