Thomas Paine, God, and America: Civil Religion and the Gospel of Freedom

Thomas Paine liberally refers to God in his writings, especially in Common Sense, published in 1776. Paine’s beliefs about God as Creator were firmly entrenched in Deism, and a large part of his argument in Common Sense—that the American colonies should separate from the British crown—begins with natural law. If human nature originates in a world created by God, then liberty is a predetermined condition; revolution is necessary when corrupt individuals assume power. Providence, then, is on the side of America for Thomas Paine. In this essay, I will examine the interconnectedness of God and America as an overarching paradigm. Paine, as a Deist, differs from the Puritans and Protestant dissent—Deists are not attached to the idea of scripture as the infallible word of God, nor to any denomination. Still, through the modern day, God, morality, and faith are integral parts of defining America and Americans, and Paine’s ideas stand as a sort of trailhead for writers, thinkers, and statesmen who come later.

Thomas Paine begins the call for American independence with a simple premise in the early pages of Common Sense. He writes that “Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated” (690). There is no question for Paine, at least from a rhetorical perspective: if what God creates is good and natural, then “corrupt, inhuman men construct evil governments” (Fruchtman 423). Paine acknowledges Heaven (or God) as the pivotal argument for eliminating slavery, as well, where “so unlimited a power can only belong to God” (690). Freedom as a celestial article—Paine’s assertion—becomes an integral part of American identity, a singular thread that runs through that identity. And Paine, even in arguing against slavery, is ahead of his time.

In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson makes it clear that Paine was an outlier, especially in 1775, when “a separation from Great Britain and the establishment of a republican government had never entered into any person’s head” (qtd. in Hoffman 373). Scholars estimate that as many as 500,000 copies of Common Sense were in circulation by 1776 (Hoffman), and when one considers sheer numbers, it is not difficult to see how Paine’s ideas resonated throughout the colonies; it is easy to assume that nearly every American citizen was aware of his work. At a time when a successful newspaper might have a circulation of 2,000, Paine’s great fortune was a result of timing and place. The pamphlet was published in Philadelphia, the most populous city on the continent, the seat of the Continental Congress, and the home of a postal service created by Benjamin Franklin; Paine’s name would quickly become a household word. More important for this analysis, from a rhetorical standpoint, Paine uniquely understood his purpose and his audience; his language would be simple but bold, his aims abundantly clear. He was able to appeal to “the most progressive elements of Protestantism…to both evangelicals and scientifically minded mechanics” (Hoffman 384).

It is arguable, then, that Common Sense is the most important document of the American Revolution, and its place as a catalyst in the quest for independence from British rule can hardly be underestimated. We note Jefferson’s assertion that no one had planned a republican government or separation from the British, and quotes from George Washington and Benjamin Franklin confirm the mood prior to 1776. In 1775, Washington, for example, did not wish for “the government (of Massachusetts), or any other upon this continent, separately or collectively, to set up for independence” (qtd. in Ingersoll). But Common Sense calls attention to the “political abuses and absurdities that had been fostered by altars and thrones for many centuries” (Ingersoll 182). In 1892, Ingersoll wrote about Paine as a British subject—a British subject committing treason with his pamphlet—with a great purpose: to “battle for the rights of men” (182). Treasonous as they were, Paine’s ideas would light the fire of liberty.

In Norton’s Anthology of American Literature, Levine says that Paine left Britain because of the “discrepancy between his (Paine’s) high intelligence and the limitations…in England’s hierarchical society” (681). In England, the young Paine worked at various jobs while he taught himself about philosophy and science. Upon arrival in Philadelphia, he was well equipped to write pamphlets against slavery, and to challenge the idea of British rule in America. He came to Philadelphia with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin and quickly found himself in the company of other revolutionaries. Paine was profoundly ready to point out the limitations he and others faced in England, and he goes to great lengths in characterizing monarchies and hereditary governments as monstrous in Common Sense; this seems to be his first task as a rhetorician. As a Deist, he also makes a case for providential protection for those who defy the British, an assumption based, again, on natural law—God on the side of the American colonies, God as nothing less than the “government of the world” (690). Paine claims that God would not support or help the King of Britain, just as he would not help “a common murderer, a highwayman, or a housebreaker.” The King—any king—can be no better than a common criminal, and Paine’s aim is to make George III look ridiculous.

Carine Lounissi writes about Thomas Paine’s “linguistic radicalism” in a chapter from an anthology published in 2016, Radical Voices, Radical Ways. Lounissi’s chief claim focuses on dichotomies within Paine’s work and tries to show that “radical” is too simplistic. She says Paine blends “several patterns of thought…because his positions evolved from his first American writings in 1775 to his last ones in 1807” (60). And she points out contradictions in Paine’s writing; he is both “republican and democratic” (60) for Lounissi. Paine argues against monarchial forms of government and “promotes a representative regime.” He is democratic, insofar as the desire to make ideas plain to the common man is always present.

Lounissi says, “Paine brought to light the subtext” (71) of speeches by the King. Words spoken by kings are “invented” and need to be torn down. In her conclusion, Lounissi asserts that Paine’s central point is awareness, so that the lower class might become “vigilant, nay suspicious” (73) of the language of the governing class. Paine wants his words to be understood by everyone, especially the uneducated, and he takes aim at the voice of the King, in an effort to deconstruct the language “used by those who held power in monarchical regimes” (Lounissi 61). Put simply enough, Paine clarifies complex subject matter as he argues for independence.

How, then, can a monarchy be torn down with language? Paine begins with a new common language, dedicated to a very clear common purpose—common language and purpose, both aimed at common men—a perfect rhetorical storm. He reaches the farmers and merchants of America as a co-conspirator, where individuals become an integral part of the mechanism that will govern itself; the pamphlet is a harbinger of the country that will grow out of the Revolution, and it seems that Common Sense, in moving against the grain of prevailing opinion—and Paine’s skillful rhetoric—positions the author as the most important figure in early American literature. He eliminates “ceremonious expressions” (Levine 682) that might hold up hereditary governments; class and anything related to birthright would mean much less in America than in Europe, and this, for Paine, is by design. The common language—perhaps we can call it a new American colloquialism—might also be viewed as egalitarianism on the page, what Lipset calls “equality of opportunity and respect” (19). This new country would belong to the common man, one who would absorb Paine’s argument and, at the same time, have his own voice.

Without Paine’s radical views, the America we speak of today might be very different. He writes about the King and his “parasites” (685) and disparages the idea of Great Britain as the Mother country or parent; he cites those Americans who have fled the social structures of Europe—the entire European continent—as a living assertion of freedom. All of Europe is a parent country for Paine, and monstrous, too: “Hither they have fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster” (685). England, in trying to wrestle the Colonies into submission, pursues the descendants of those who left Europe.

Paine’s rhetoric is powerful in several different contexts, but what of his use of God as an American ally? That premise might be the very foundation for his work, a framework of support that is stronger and more effective than any treatise against monarchies. It has long been noted that Paine’s Deism holds him in strict defiance against Christianity and its organized denominations, especially those religions which might take the Bible literally. But Bush says that seeing only Paine’s skepticism limits our view and underestimates “his impact on the patriotic culture of nineteenth-century America” (Bush 79). Certainly, Paine must have understood the need to appeal to those who saw Scripture as infallible. To be a patriot would be religious in “tone and sensibility” (Bush), and Paine would have to reach churchgoers, not just fellow Deists. Common Sense creates a world where social and cultural history are intertwined with religion, what Bush calls a civil religion (79). The average American will not see a conflict with God and religion as integral parts of America’s identity. Bush contends that the “anti-religion” of Paine is, depending on how you define religion, “profoundly religious.”

Lipset, in his book American Exceptionalism, calls this civil religion the “American Creed” (19). Taken in context, an American creed has an obvious religious connotation. But what is America’s civil religion, or creed? For Lipset, it is, first and foremost, connected to individualism, both social and political, and this focus on the individual begins with Protestant sectarianism—a moral code, a personal relationship with God, and some interpretation of biblical truth. The key characterization is some interpretation, because a single religion will not hold sway in America; there will be no singular view of the Bible, no state-run religion. Rather, “Citizens have been expected to demand and protect their rights on a personal basis” (Lipset 20). Those rights, of course, live in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, rights against the state, rights that explicitly outline what the state cannot do to an individual; liberty is abundantly personal, and natural rights are endowed by the Creator. This is the foundation of a religious pattern, according the Lipset—religion, in any denomination, is a voluntary choice when it exists beyond the clutches of the state.

But one might assume that a church—any church—can serve the nation and still be a partner in a religious mission. The American Revolution was soaked in the words of the Deists, and yet, the Calvinist or Protestant ethic—the organized religions Paine would deride in 1794’s The Age of Reason—would not be lost in the mix; it was necessary to Paine that Protestants should not be lost, or miss his message. Presbyterians in North America were especially keen on the idea of serving the nation, and, like Paine, they viewed the War of Independence as “a conflict between the forces of spiritual light and wicked darkness” (Hart 248). At a practical level, Protestant societies made sincere efforts in maintaining order in the new nation through the “Benevolent Empire” and “such initiatives as primary education, temperance, and wholesome literature” (249). For these societies, the social and moral imperatives of their faith were directly connected to their lives as citizens, so that, in all things secular, there could be no separation from Protestant values.

Independence takes on two meanings outside the shackles of Europe’s feudal society. In the early days of the Reformation, Protestant pastors throughout Europe needed protection from city councils and princes; pastors at that time might have been reliant on this protection for their very lives, having set themselves apart from a state and king identified as Roman Catholic. But in North America, immigrants developed their own churches without fear of punishment. And, Hart notes, Reformed churches in America developed “notions of denominationalism” and upended “Christendom’s model of ecclesiastical establishment” (136); yes, freedom from the British, but freedom from any organizational religious hierarchy, too. The Presbyterians and German Reformed churches in the colonies had fashioned their own revolutions in creating “voluntary churches” (Hart 136) that gave the Calvinist world an important lesson in independence. A preacher could preach without ties to some larger denomination, without guidance or directives from civil authorities. And, from a more practical standpoint, a church on the Western frontier, a church dropped outside of (or far away from) urban centers would be very much on its own, protected, to some extent, by geography.

Indeed, the Puritans had come to American shores with the specific goal of escaping religious persecution in England, with the King an ocean away. As Levine notes, the Mayflower Compact was “a civil covenant designed to allow the temporal state to serve the devout citizen” (130). Protestants had been burned at the stake under the rule of Mary Stuart in the mid-1500s. The Plymouth colonists went to the Netherlands first, and then came to America. William Bradford, in “Of Plymouth Plantation,” foreshadows Paine’s characterization of God as government of the world. Where the body politic is concerned, Bradford uses a letter from John Robinson, who upholds “God’s ordinance for your good” (141). The civil life was necessarily colored by religion because, as Levine writes, “The success or failure of the Plymouth colony was more than a worldly venture—it was a measure of their ability to interpret God’s will…and to remake the world in its image” (131).

Kries, in his book on Alexis De Tocqueville, says that the Puritans were the only point of focus for Tocqueville as he addressed the ideas and attitudes behind American democracy. The Mayflower is the point of departure because the Massachusetts Bay colony was chartered by King Charles I; the Puritans were, by contrast, the voluntary church we spoke of earlier, with no edict or charter from across the sea. Most important for Tocqueville is the idea of laws—in a Puritan colony in Connecticut, and in the Mayflower Compact—laws that begin with reference to God. Tocqueville calls this “the password to the great social enigma that the United States presents to the world in our day” (qtd. in Kries 172). The civil laws set forth by the Puritans echo their dedication to a religious idea, and they are “above all preoccupied with the care of maintaining moral order and good mores in society, so they constantly penetrate into the domain of conscience” (171). Tocqueville is intent on showing that the Puritans’ influence would be felt throughout the colonies. Moreover, where other societies had used laws based on scripture and the Old Testament, Kries sees Tocqueville’s Puritans as “a little schizophrenic,” since they have two spirits to look after—religion and freedom. That is, despite religious beliefs and laws based in morality, the Puritans see a clear distinction between church and state—a distinction that could not have arisen in Europe, a distinction that would be uniquely American.

These churches become intertwined with Paine when we consider Deism embracing what Bush calls the “cardinal virtues” (81) held dear by Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington: a universal First Cause, an afterlife, and “a commitment to living virtuously” (81). Paine, too, thought that morality was necessary to uphold this new republic. And all of these believed in American exceptionalism inspired by the Enlightenment; the reasons behind this exceptionalism become self-evident: exceptionalism in this case is not connected to being greater, which is a subjective idea; rather, The United States was, or is, exceptional because of its guiding principles, which were profoundly different from anything the world had seen. Paine can be credited for the civil religion we speak of in America, then. The Revolution itself would be a religious experience, one with its own sacraments: The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and freedom to worship as one pleased, enshrined in The Bill of Rights. In the same way that Presbyterians viewed the Revolution as a battle between light and darkness, Bush says that Paine’s rhetoric would “shine the new light of democracy out into the ancestral darkness of Europe” (82). Thus, in Common Sense, Paine writes of that light being found in a land where the word of God is a guide and, “so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king” (Paine).

If there is a defining thread between Paine and the modern era, it might be Robert Ingersoll, who wrote at great length about Paine over the course of a lifetime. Ingersoll’s book, The Life and Deeds of Thomas Paine, lauds Paine as someone all Americans should be indebted to, an intellectual hero. Ingersoll writes, “As long as free government exists, he will be remembered, admired, and honored” (qtd. in Bush 84). Ingersoll, by the time of the Civil War, was well-known as an agnostic and free thinker, a nineteenth century intellectual. Bush points out that Ingersoll, even as an avowed agnostic, saw America as a religious idea. A speech Ingersoll gave in 1879, Bush says, might be “a sermon on the gospel of America” (85). Ingersoll, reflecting on the Civil War, sees Union soldiers as preserving liberty and defending nothing less than humanity: “They finished what the soldiers of the revolution commenced…and rendered tyranny in every other land as insecure as snow upon volcanoes’ lips” (qtd. in Bush 86).

It is no accident that Ingersoll’s words echo Paine and his intense belief in America as a beacon for the world. Conversely, the act of halting tyranny might be viewed as a necessary extension of natural law. In reviewing a biography of Paine in 1892, Ingersoll writes about Common Sense: “To read it now, after the lapse of more than a hundred years, hastens the blood” (183). Ingersoll’s adoration of Paine is visceral, almost religious, nearly fanatical. Looking back at Paine’s work, he refers to the entire body as a “creed” (190). But he also makes clear that Paine had a troubled relationship with America after writing The Age of Reason.

One might imagine that Paine anticipated trouble as he wrote The Age of Reason, though the specter of trouble would not be enough to keep him quiet. Page after page, he attacks the Bible—first the Old Testament, and then the New. Paine’s overarching message is that organized religions, and Christianity as a whole, have everything wrong: “a sort of religious denial of God…the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God.” (Paine) God is simply the first cause for Paine, and, “Every man is an evidence to himself, that he did not make himself…from this evidence, that carries us on, as it were, by necessity, to the belief of a first cause eternally existing, and this first cause, man calls God.”

Still, Ingersoll passionately remembers and honors Paine’s contributions to the American creed and credits Paine as working only “for the benefit of mankind” (181). Just as religious freedom became a reality for Reformation churches in America, Ingersoll hearkens back to Europe and hails Paine for calling out the Church as “the enemy of liberty…altar and throne always in partnership” (189). Certainly, this had been true in Europe. In Ingersoll’s estimation, Paine had taken up his duty in attacking organized religion, even as “Franklin, Jefferson, Sumner, and Lincoln, the four greatest statesmen America has produced, were believers in the creed of Thomas Paine” (Ingersoll 190). This creed, though, would hold America to a higher standard, with, perhaps, what Tocqueville called a conscience. And while Paine’s reputation suffered with organized Christianity in the early nineteenth century, his relationship with Americans becoming more and more tenuous, today, his ideas are central to conservative thought in the United States. Ingersoll would spend most of his adult life defending Paine as “the first great patriotic exemplar of America’s new civil religion” (Bush 84). For Ingersoll, faith was something directed at America itself, “a devout and enlightened belief in the human rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (93). Redemption comes not from God, but from freedom.

How, though, do we connect Ingersoll to the modern era? His rhetorical skills are undeniable, and a speech he gave in 1876 serves as a model for Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which came nearly one-hundred years later. The construction of Ingersoll’s speech, his rhetorical stance, relies on the same sort of repetition that will work for King in August of 1963. Ingersoll says, “I see our country filled with happy homes…I see a world without a slave…I see a world without the beggar’s outstretched palm” (qtd. in Bush 88). There is a sort of American mysticism in the words, and nothing can stop a free people from their destiny, he says. The cadence is religious, uplifting, wrought with emotion, and Ingersoll provides a “romantic view of the American nation” (Bush 89).

What might be most remarkable about Ingersoll’s 1879 speech is that Mark Twain was in attendance. Twain would give America a new and different voice in the nineteenth century, and his admiration for Ingersoll (and Paine) added color to the American stories he told. Twain, too, would glorify individualism, progress, “American newness and regeneration, and biblical typology” (Bush 91). That is, even at his most cynical, Twain is a believer in the American creed and glorifies the American myth, even as he critiques it. In 1889’s “To Walt Whitman,” Twain praises America in a rhetorical style that is more Ingersoll than Huck Finn:

What great births you have witnessed! The steam-press, the steamship,

the steel-ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the

telephone…But tarry yet awhile, for the greatest is yet to come…Man at

almost his full stature at last…Wait till you see that great figure appear,

and catch the far glint of the sun upon his banner (qtd. in Bush).

Twain’s ideology is present in his fiction, too, as his characters declare independence from corrupt authorities. In their own way, the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are a part of an American civil religion that worships protest and liberty, a religion that celebrates the individual. Twain, in his later writings, would excoriate American mistakes, too, but Bush says it is this very quality—the urge to criticize—that aligns him with Paine and Ingersoll. That is, any true American conscience lives in the individual citizen, and that individual must necessarily speak up when something has gone awry in his society. All of Twain’s work might give voice to the common citizen Paine aimed for in Common Sense; the plainspoken man whose words are no less important than those of kings or princes—even as he speaks with a tongue steeped in colloquialisms. That voice is at the center of the American creed, and it has a sacred responsibility, since “the greatness to which their country aspired carried with it the necessary burdens of exceedingly difficult standards” (Bush 93). Sometimes, the nation must be challenged, and this challenging, questioning spirit draws a clear line through Paine, Ingersoll, Twain, Martin Luther King, and others too numerous to mention. This spirit is a tenet of the American faith.

This spirit of dissent is the real thread that moves through America when we view the nation as an ideology. Americans are moralistic and have a conscience, precisely because of the way the country grew, from the Puritans and onward. Lipset calls the dissenters the “original source” (63), as the Protestant tradition, again and again, serves as a catalyst for movements urging change or reform. This source, the one that might serve anti-war protests, is the same one that would urge boys to enlist and fight for their country. Even while the idea of what is good, or what is evil, can shift with time, most Americans have absolute guidelines for morality, according to Lipset. And one must remember that a part of the creed is embedded in the First Amendment; the same Constitution that guarantees religious freedom also allows for peaceful assembly, allows for common citizen to address the government with grievances when the moral compass tips too far.

Fruchtman posits that Paine sees true common sense as a connection between mind and heart; man, because of his nature, will assume that liberty is a vital part of his makeup. This idea does not require education, does not require “abstract reasoning or metaphysical concepts” (425). Rather, this realization—the desire for freedom—is spontaneous and visceral, and all men possess this type of common sense. Conversely, anyone who fails to see liberty as a natural condition is somehow flawed: “Their habit and desire for dominance and violence stopped them from ever living a life of reason and moral affection in society” (426). These words are written by Fruchtman, but Paine might have uttered them about King George III; he might have uttered them about slavery. A mind, afflicted in this way and set on domination, relies on base, animalistic tendencies, not common sense. And, in the case of the British in 1776, it would be impossible for Americans to maintain the status quo after one sees the lack of common sense, this most human tendency, in England’s leaders and, especially, in King George; this approach adds depth to Paine’s case for American independence. To quote Fruchtman again, “Corrupt, inhuman men construct evil governments” (423).

Lipset takes the American character, this individualistic, moral behavior, and connects it to capitalism and entrepreneurial success, where Americans are “more disposed to be workaholics” (60). The sociologist Max Weber credited the Puritans for the American work ethic, too; their values are conducive to capitalism, so that “the spirit of capitalism…was present before the capitalistic order” (60). In this regard, one might imagine the American creed as strong-willed and geared toward success. Lipset references a speech by Edmund Burke, where Burke called the sectarian Americans “the Protestants of Protestantism, the Dissenters of Dissent, which predisposed them to moralism and individualism” (60). The religious ethic inherent to America is functional for the economy and for a “liberal polity” (60).

If one questions the idea that capitalism can be extrapolated from the same, Roper calls Paine a mystic, in the same vein as Emerson: thought and motion are behind the power of human creativity. Therefore, man might “will into existence that which he wished to create” (108), which seems to be the very idea behind American entrepreneurship. Mark Twain’s “To Walt Whitman” emphasizes this same concept; all of these marvelous inventions—the steamship, the cotton-gin, the telephone, the telegraph—products of the Industrial Revolution, products of inquisitive American minds; the world is better because of them, he says, “Man at almost his full stature at last.” The key word here is almost, because Twain surely knows that American ingenuity and progress will only continue to grow at a dazzling rate. Bush calls Twain an “inheritor” of Paine’s voice, and, in 1908, Twain listed Thomas Paine as the writer who had most influenced his life.

Paine’s gift was to have what Wood calls an “extraordinary faith in the moral capacity of ordinary people” (14). Along with Thomas Jefferson, Paine saw power in this idea, a power that was unavailable to monarchies, and he was able to articulate the same to his colonial brethren. The strength of the new nation would be its people and their will to do good. If Common Sense has a tone that lacks pretense, that is intentional, as we have seen; Paine understood his audience and the assumption that he was not only speaking to the American people: he was speaking for them. Authenticity was important for Paine and Jefferson, and it was bravery that allowed them to speak honestly about the human condition in America, bravery that allowed them to put fault with the British monarchy, bravery that allowed them to argue for independence in the New World. The message was clear: We, the people, can do this on our own. Jefferson wrote, “Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art” (qtd. in Wood). By 1776, there was no need to flatter King George III, no need for pretense. And both men must have assumed that the American people were up to the task of governing themselves; the King was no longer needed.

The hierarchies of old would be gone from the American continent, then, and the great experiment in freedom would be underway. As Wood points out, there is something beyond the idea of men being created equal. Paine and Jefferson went further and believed that all men “remained equal,” having been created by God; equality and liberty are simply an outgrowth of being born, and no man can change that. This idea, Paine’s idea, his argument that men remained equal, was truly radical: man, at almost his full stature at last, with the full glint of the sun on his banner. Most Americans sense this, even if they are unable to articulate it as beautifully as Mark Twain.

If America finds redemption in freedom, religion in liberty, then Thomas Paine was the first great apostle for this new creed. His gospel still resonates today, and the American ethos is firmly settled within it, a stable and necessary part of the rhetoric used by presidents and ordinary citizens for nearly two-hundred fifty years. In 1984, Ronald Reagan echoed Paine when he spoke of virtue and conscience. His language was not dissimilar to Paine’s when he said, “Without God, there is a coarsening of the society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.” It is easy to assume that Reagan was speaking of the God who belongs to denominations, the God of the Bible, and perhaps he was. Still, when one considers the civil religion that is discussed here, where a broader and more complex idea of God is embedded within American patriotism and citizenship—something that lies between William Bradford and Thomas Paine, somewhere between Paine and Robert Ingersoll—well, then the American ideal becomes larger and more important, somehow, since the God Reagan speaks of belongs to the individual, where each citizen is free to have his own sense about the First Cause of liberty.

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