Thomas Paine · Politics
The pamphleteer who attacked kings turned last on the churches - defending belief in God by reason alone while subjecting scripture to fearless criticism, a book that made him a hero to freethinkers and an outcast to the pious.
Having helped overturn kings in two revolutions, Paine turned in 1793–94 to what he regarded as the last and deepest tyranny: the tyranny of established religion over the human mind. He wrote The Age of Reason partly in the shadow of the French Revolution’s violent assault on the Church, and partly from a fear that the revolutionaries, in throwing off Christianity, would throw off all belief in God and morality with it. He wrote much of it, by his account, in haste before his arrest by the Jacobins, expecting to be sent to the guillotine - so the book is in part the testament of a man who thought he was about to die.
Far from being the atheist his enemies branded him, Paine opened the book with a clear profession of faith. He believed in one God; he hoped for happiness in a life beyond this one; he held that true religion consists in doing justice, loving mercy, and trying to make our fellow creatures happy. What he rejected was not God but the churches - the institutions, creeds, priesthoods, and sacred books that he believed had set themselves up between human beings and their Creator, and had used the name of God to enslave the mind, extort money, and justify cruelty. It was a profession of faith aimed like a cannon at organized religion.
The animating principle of The Age of Reason is the same one that runs through all of Paine’s work: that authority must answer to individual reason, and that no institution may stand between a person and the truth. In politics this had meant rejecting kings; in religion it meant rejecting priesthoods and creeds. Paine refused to accept any belief on the mere authority of a church, a tradition, or a sacred text. He would believe only what his own reason, examining the evidence, found credible. ‘I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of,’ he wrote; ‘my own mind is my own church.’
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Paine defended belief in one God while rejecting organized religion and revealed scripture. In your own words, what did he mean by ‘my own mind is my own church’?
Leads to Voltaire.
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