Paine's Views on God

Paine's texts were not documents of governance but rather in the nature of public-relations support for the Revolution. As a native-born Englishman (1736), he was completely aware of the class and economic cleavages between England's aristocracy and virtually everyone else. Even though he was an inventor and craftsman of sorts--most famously a staymaker--he appears to have managed to abandon the military and civil service and several trades in succession, making an actual success of none and becoming involved in litigation and pamphleteering. When he and his second wife separated in 1774, he left England and traveled to America. He was 39. Based in Philadelphia, he became an enthusiastic revolutionary partisan and pamphleteer--hence Common Sense and American Crisis.

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o tell him he has done or seen it" (168). As for the moral content of the Bible, Paine sharply deplores the warfare waged in the name of religion and blames sectarian belief for much of the sad and squalid historical record. He would have humankind "imitat[e] the moral goodness and beneficence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures" (63). Paine has been characterized as a Deist and Age of Reason as an articulation of Deism, which the dictionary defines as a "movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe." Deism was a response to--and departure from--traditional Christianity, and Age of Reason is consistent with that. Yet the invective hostility of the book to Christianity tends to position it more as an atheist screed than as a "mere" critique of Biblical text. According to the 1898 unsigned preface to the edition of The Age of Reason used for this research, Paine's text prefigures what in the 19th century would become known as Higher Criticism, the name given to the examination of Biblical narrative sources, not from the standpoint of faith but from the standpoint
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