rgued against the execution of the French royal family, which led to his being denounced and imprisoned early on in the Terror; his American citizenship appears to have saved his life. During his nine-month stay in Luxembourg prison, he began work on Age of Reason, with Part I published in 1794 and Part II, written in Paris, published in 1795.
It is clear that in the background of Age of Reason were the vicissitudes of Paine's biography and his revolutionary turn of mind. Yet unlike the tracts that preceded it, Age of Reason was not particularly political. It was much more a critique of religious orthodoxy, in particular the tradition of orthodox exegesis of Holy Scripture, which was, as far as the popular and in significant part educated imagination was concerned, thoroughly an artifact of commentators of faith. The thesis of The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and of Fabulous Theology is an elaborated objection to that condition.
To be sure, the Enlightenment had prepared the way for interrogation of institutional religion as well as other institutions, in particular absolute monarchy and moral authoritarianism backed up by the rigidity of Church doctrine. Accordingly, political reform envisioned by Enlightenment thought involved some form of anticlericalism and some form of rejection of the moral authority of institutional religion. Paine's work is fully consistent with that line of thought. Rights of Man, written very much in anticipation of the fall of the French monarchy, closes with a critique of the conflation of politics and religion. Paine says that religion "is very improperly made a political machine" and refers to "what are called national religions" as "national Gods. It is either political craft or the remains of the Pagan system, when every nation has its separate and particular deity" (RM 148, 149).
In Age of Reason, Paine takes on religion itself, specifically the religion...