The Age of Reason (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Thomas Paine and Joseph Carrig

Thomas Paine’s primary object in writing The Age of Reason was to call into question the conventional understanding of religion and to undermine the power of the Christian church. As provocative and controversial today as when Paine first wrote it, this incendiary work suggests what is necessary to transform religion into a social force that has its foundation in reason.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428362

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (1736-1809) was an English born American activist, philosopher, and author. Before moving to America, Paine worked as a stay maker, but would often get fired for his questionable business practices. Out of a job, separated from his wife, and falling into debt, Paine decided to move to America for a fresh start. There, he not only made a fresh start for himself, but helped pave the way for others, too. Paine was credited to be a major inspiration for the American Revolution. His series of pamphlets affected American politics by voicing concerns that were not yet intellectually considered by early American society.

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INTRODUCTION

THE AGE OF REASON, BY THOMAS PAINE, IS AN uncompromising critique of organized religion and an impassioned plea to throw off the intellectual bondage of the church and embrace a new theology grounded in rational and scientific inquiry. Paine was one of the most influential thinkers of the American Enlightenment, and he played a key role in the American war for independence. The success of this revolution and the establishment of a limited government, based in the rule of law and committed to the protection of individual liberty and the rights of man, reflected the institutionalization of liberal political principles. According to Paine, this development marked the beginning of a rationalization of politics that eventually would be reproduced around the world. However, the horrifying events of the French Revolution, and of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror in particular, reminded Paine that political revolution is not an innocuous occurrence but has the potential to release forces that, if left unchecked, might result in the absolute self-destruction of society. He believed that it was vital that there be some counterforce to moderate the effects of revolution. Religion might provide such a counterforce, if it sufficiently conforms to the principles of human reason. But, as Paine argues in The Age of Reason, Christianity could never serve this purpose because it has no rational basis. What is necessary is a religious revolution, one that would reconceptualize the very nature of religion. The Age of Reason lays the groundwork for such a revolution. Paine’s primary object in writing this incendiary work was to call into question the conventional understanding of religion and to undermine the power of the Christian church. He believed that individual liberty requires the mind to be freed from its attachment to what he saw as the irrational beliefs inculcated by revealed religion. In The Age of Reason, Paine suggests that the properly free mind should instead be directed by opinions that emerge from a reasoned devotion to the true theology. Without this freedom, the liberty achieved in political revolution could never be complete. As provocative and controversial today as when Paine first wrote it, The Age of Reason demonstrates, in simple, candid, and compelling language, the irrationality of Christian doctrine; and it suggests, with equal directness, what is necessary to transform religion into a social force that has its foundation in reason.

Though less influential than some of his other works, The Age of Reason was arguably the most controversial of the many pamphlets that Thomas Paine published during his lifetime. More than twenty years earlier, Paine had written a short pamphlet called The Case of the Officers of Excise, which advocated raising the salaries of British excise officers as a barrier to corruption. This pamphlet ultimately led to his dismissal from the excise service. His most famous pamphlet, Common Sense, written shortly before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, advocated the creation of an independent American republic at a time when it was quite dangerous to make such suggestions publicly. And Rights of Man, written in 1791 and 1792, defended the principles of the French Revolution and called for the overthrow of the British monarchy. Its publication resulted in the establishment of laws in Britain banning the pamphlet and prohibiting its sale; British loyalists hanged and burned Paine in effigy; and eventually he was convicted in absentia for seditious libel. In spite of these reactions to his earlier writings, however, the effect of The Age of Reason was more severe and more personal. The pamphlet was generally regarded as a support of atheism, and Paine himself an atheist and infidel. Printers who tried to sell the pamphlet were condemned for blasphemy. But, more significantly to Paine, he lost many of his friends (including Samuel Adams and Benjamin Rush); his request to be buried in a Quaker cemetery was refused; and he suffered a damaged reputation following his death to the point that, well into the nineteenth century, he was unjustly excluded from the ranks of those considered to be among the major leaders of the American Revolution.

As might be gathered even from this brief account, Paine did little to avoid confrontation. However, it is unlikely that he acquired this taste for controversy from his parents. He was born on January 29, 1737, in Thetford, England. His mother was a practicing Anglican and his father a Quaker. As a boy, Paine frequently attended Quaker meetings with his father, and this exposure had a lasting influence on him. Later in life, even as he was writing The Age of Reason in condemnation of organized religion, he remained sympathetic to the Quakers and characterized Quakerism as the religion that approaches most closely the true, rational religion. This is not to suggest that, in his youth, Paine had a particularly strong interest in questions of religion. He was drawn rather to the study of history, mathematics, and science; and it was these interests that ultimately had the greatest influence on his thinking.

It was many years, however, before Paine began to articulate his thoughts in writing. He spent almost the whole of his first forty years in England, seemingly without any consistent direction to his life. At thirteen years of age, he became an apprentice to his father as a corset maker. Eventually, he established himself as a master corset maker and remained in this profession, off and on, for many years. Somewhat later, he studied for the excise service, and in 1764 was appointed as a permanent excise officer, only to be dismissed a year later on minor corruption charges. He returned to corset making for a short period, gave that up again, and moved to London to become a teacher. In 1768, he was reappointed as an excise officer; however, by 1774, he had been dismissed again, this time in response to his pamphlet petitioning Parliament for higher salaries.

To this point, Paine’s life was neither easy nor uncomplicated. He was not particularly successful or satisfied in any of his chosen professions, and he was regularly in financial difficulty. Nor was his personal life much better. His first marriage (in 1759) ended, after less than a year, with the death of his wife. His second marriage (in 1771) lasted only slightly longer, this time ending in a formal separation following his second dismissal from the excise service in 1774. But in that same year, his life took a new direction. He returned to London, where he was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, who at that time was acting as representative of the American colonies in Great Britain. With a letter of introduction from Franklin to his son-in-law, Paine sailed to the colonies, arriving in Philadelphia at the end of 1774.

Once in Philadelphia, Paine quickly became aware of the volatile political conditions in the colonies; and he began to write pamphlets recommending policies he thought were necessary to ameliorate these conditions. By 1776, he had decided that American independence was the only adequate resolution of the political and economic crisis resulting from the continued injustices perpetuated by Great Britain. In order to advocate this course of action, he published Common Sense. This pamphlet was very widely read and brought him immediate recognition as one of the most skilled rhetoricians of the period. With its publication, Paine’s fame was established, and the direction the remainder of his life would take was more or less set. During the revolutionary war, he wrote a series of influential political pamphlets called The American Crisis, in which he continued to support the American cause against Great Britain, and in which he further developed his views on republican government. Later, he turned his attention to France, and in 1791, after the outbreak of the French Revolution, he published Rights of Man as a response to the British statesman Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the revolution. In this pamphlet, Paine gives a powerful defense of the right of the people to rebel against an unjust regime. He vindicates the specific actions taken by the French revolutionaries, and argues more generally against the inevitable corruption of monarchic governments and the inherent threat such governments pose to human rights. Rights of Man is perhaps Paine’s most coherent and comprehensive articulation of his political theory, and it establishes him as one of the most important intellectual heirs of the seventeenth-century liberal theorist, John Locke.

Like Common Sense, Rights of Man was very widely read. The enormous influence of these two works was due in large part to Paine’s straightforward writing style, which was intended not only to win over public intellectuals and political elites, but more importantly to be accessible to the ordinary citizen and to rouse his passions. This direct style is characteristic of all of his writing, including The Age of Reason, and perhaps helps to explain how he rose to prominence in so short a period of time after his arrival in the colonies. Nevertheless, Paine’s success and popularity as an author did not translate into success in political affairs. Although at the time he was considered one of the leading figures of the revolution, once the war was over and the republic was established, Paine’s involvement in politics was only peripheral. Whether due to temperament or circumstance, he never achieved success as a public official or political figure, as did Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or even Alexander Hamilton. He died in 1809, in New York City, at the age of seventy-two.

Paine’s writings as a whole are an important part of the heritage of liberal political thought. Common Sense and Rights of Man focus on two of the central concerns of political liberalism—the abuse of political power by non-liberal governments, and the rights of individuals in the face of that abuse. The Age of Reason voices the closely related concern that there is a similar abuse of political power within the sphere of religion. In The Age of Reason, Paine makes an argument similar to that articulated by John Locke in The Reasonableness of Christianity and in the letters on toleration. As Locke did a century earlier, Paine maintains that religion must be based upon rational principles; and that, as a political matter, individual liberty requires the separation of church and state and a general adherence to the principle of religious toleration. So, in spite of its overtly religious theme, and in spite of the fact that almost half of the work involves careful scriptural exegesis, The Age of Reason is a political tract with a very definite political object.

Although Paine was a great supporter of the French Revolution and wrote Rights of Man in defense of the principles of this revolution, he was unquestionably appalled at the actions of Robespierre and his followers during the Reign of Terror. Paine was staying in Paris at the height of the Terror, and he publicly gave his support to the more moderate Girondin revolutionary faction. Because of this support, he was thrown in prison, where he remained for almost a year, in constant fear of execution. Paine wrote the first part of The Age of Reason immediately prior to his imprisonment. Only after his release, at the end of 1794, was he able to complete the work. It is likely that Paine’s immediate experience of the excesses of the Terror led him to begin writing The Age of Reason, lest, as he says there, in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true. This, Paine’s stated purpose in writing The Age of Reason, belies the criticism of his contemporaries that he was a proponent of atheism. Again, Paine’s primary concern is political, not theological—the threat to human liberty and the rights of man that exists when the power of the state is united with the power of the church. His attack on organized religion is not an expression of antagonism to the belief in God per se. It is, rather, an attempt to destroy the authority of the church and to remove it as an oppressive political tool of the state.

Paine states explicitly that all revealed religion (by which he means the church as an institution) is a human invention designed to terrify and enslave mankind and to monopolize power and profit. Just as governments maintain their power by keeping individuals in ignorance of their natural and political rights, the church maintains its power by keeping individuals in ignorance of their rightful place in relation to God. Paine argues that most everyone believes in God. Where people differ is with respect to what he calls the redundancies of that belief, by which he means that people disagree over the trappings of revealed religion. But it is commitment to and dispute over these redundancies that gives rise to religious wars and religious persecution. More important, the power and authority of the church, and of the governments that co-opt this power and authority, rest in the position of the church as interpreter and adjudicator in cases of religious redundancy. In this way, the church sets itself up as intermediary between man and God, as the locus of moral authority and the determinant of moral truth. A true theology eschews the trappings of religion, and therefore cannot be used by church or government as a basis for political and social control. Revealed religion, on the contrary, embraces religious redundancy precisely in order to exercise such political and social control. Historically, the Christian church consolidated its power by attaching itself to the sword of the state; and it has preserved its position by means of religious persecution and an increasing and calculated insistence on the impotence of human reason. According to Paine, even the Protestant Reformation did little to shake the foundations of Christian power or to alter the basic relationship between the individual and the church. The authority of church leaders was, perhaps, diminished; but the close connection between church and state, as well as the status of the individual in relation to both institutions, remained effectively unchanged. The eradication of religious power requires a religious revolution, which can occur only after a political revolution has taken place, moving society toward republican and democratic forms of government.

Initially, Paine thought that the American and French revolutions would be followed by just such a religious revolution. But, by 1793, he began to worry that political revolution might go too far. The French Revolution, as it played itself out in front of his eyes, suggested the possibility that a political revolution, if sufficiently radical, might involve a religious revolution that, in its wholesale rejection of the power and authority of the church, could result in a society left unconstrained by any system of morals whatsoever. Anticipating Nietzsche, Paine argues in The Age of Reason that institutionalized religion (and the Christian church in particular) tends to weaken a true belief in God. To the extent that revealed religion is based upon beliefs that run counter to and are, in fact, antithetical to reason, it tends to breed either fanatics or atheists. The implication is that, once it is discovered that God is dead, there is little to fill the moral vacuum left by the rejection of religion. To Paine, the Reign of Terror exemplified this problem. France was beginning to exhibit the characteristics of a completely amoral society.

The Age of Reason was written in reaction to this perceived state of affairs. Paine’s intent was to help give shape to the religious revolution by publicly dismantling the supposed truths of Christianity, but by doing it in such a way as to indicate what the principles of a true theology might be. Paine’s most powerful argument against Christianity is that the moral system presented in the Bible is fundamentally perverse. The Old Testament, he points out, is filled with horrific stories as shocking to humanity, and to every idea we have of moral justice, as any thing done by Robespierre . . . or by any other assassin in modern times. He describes Moses as among the most detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, who committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation. As an example of his character, Paine singles out one instance in which Moses orders his captains to return to a city they have recently defeated and to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters of the enemies of the Jews. Similarly, the book of Joshua is described as a military history of rapine and murder, as savage and brutal, as those recorded of his predecessor in villany [sic] and hypocrisy. The two books of Kings are little more than a history of assassinations, treachery, and wars, practiced in this period by the Jews against themselves. Paine characterizes the reputedly wise King Solomon as witty, ostentatious, dissolute, and at last melancholy, ending his life at the age of fifty-eight after having committed one thousand debaucheries (calculated on the basis of the Bible’s own account of his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines). With the exception of Job, Paine spares no one in the Old Testament. The kings are murderers, the prophets are liars and political opportunists, and all are hypocrites. Far from providing any examples of moral goodness, according to Paine, the books of the Old Testament give a historical account—one that any truly moral individual must be ashamed to acknowledge—that has been the inspiration and justification for a good part of the bloody persecutions and tortures unto death, and religious wars that have occurred since the time of its acceptance as the word of God. This alone should be sufficient to call into question whether the books of the Bible were written by God’s authority.

The New Testament is equally perverse, to Paine, though for somewhat different reasons. In Paine’s view, the Christ story is incomprehensible as the basis for a moral system. The account of his birth describes the Almighty committing debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith. Aside from the fact that this story is little more than a minor variation on Greek myths about the philandering of Zeus, it overtly contravenes most accepted moral practice. Similarly, the account of the end of Christ’s life is a story, as Paine puts it, of a father putting his innocent son to death, an even greater contravention of accepted morality and a tale that would be particularly difficult for a parent to use as moral guidance in raising his children. Paine’s point is that morality, if it is to be applicable to all, must be comprehensible to all. But the account of the life of Christ cannot serve as a moral paradigm because, if taken literally, it does not establish proper moral rules; and, if taken metaphorically, its meaning is not accessible to ordinary individuals. More important, the story as a whole destroys the principle of justice, since it indicates that the archetype of moral goodness (as exemplified in the life of Christ) is the innocent being punished and suffering in the place of the guilty, which is the direct opposite of what is generally understood as justice.

Paine finds Christ’s teachings suspect, too. The golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is perfectly acceptable as a moral tenet; however, it is taught in many different moral systems and cannot distinguish Christianity even from the non-religious systems of classical philosophy. What sets Christian teaching apart is the additional precept that if a man smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also, and the doctrine that a man should love his enemies. To Paine, these are examples of false, or feigned, morality. The former precept sinks man into a spaniel, whereas the latter is impossible to be performed. He argues that this makes Christianity untenable, since there can be no moral obligation to follow rules that, in general, cannot be fulfilled. Furthermore, the presence of such rules at the center of Christian morality inevitably breeds a population of hypocrites, since clerics and laypeople alike will only be able to live a life of pretended goodness.

To complement his attack on Christian doctrine, in the second part of The Age of Reason Paine provides a systematic, book-by-book analysis of the dubious authorship, logical inconsistency, and historical inaccuracy of the Bible. He argues that the authority of the Bible is based upon the claim that it is the word of God. But, he says, there is no external evidence that this claim is true; for there is no documentation of when the various books were written, who wrote them, or how their words might legitimately be attributed to God. In fact, all that is certain about the compilation of books in the Bible is that a committee of church fathers determined by vote what should be considered the word of God and included in the Bible, which can hardly be seen as evidence that they are authorized by God. The internal evidence, derived from a reading of the Bible itself, clearly shows that the different books could not have been written by Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Mark, Luke, or any of the others who are generally accepted as their authors. As Paine points out, many of the events described occurred at times during which the authors could not conceivably have been present—Moses’ death and burial, for example, is described in one of the books of Moses. Some of the names of towns given in the various books were not the names of those towns until after the lifetimes of the supposed authors of those books. And there are grammatical indications throughout the Old Testament that the books were written later than the periods in which the supposed authors lived. But, if they were not written by the authors to whom they are attributed, on whose authority are we to accept that the events actually occurred or that the accounts reflect the word of God?

In the New Testament, the four gospels purportedly give parallel accounts of the same events. Here, Paine points to the contradictions among the various accounts—regarding the circumstances surrounding the crucifixion, for example, as well as those surrounding the resurrection and the actions of the apostles following the resurrection. Paine also points to the fact that some of the accounts inexplicably omit important details. Mark and John do not even mention the immaculate conception. Only Matthew tells the story of Herod’s destruction of all the children under two years old, the warning of the angel, and the flight of Jesus. According to Paine, it is hardly likely that there would be significant contradictions or that important details would be left out, if the gospels were written by individuals who were