Dec 10, 2006 - 04:06:57 CST
Error is the stuff of life. In a recent column I characterized Thomas Paine as an atheist. I had good reasons for doing so, and I was writing the truth as I knew it at the time. Several readers wrote to me to protest the characterization and to urge me to set things right.So I did the only reasonable thing. I bought a couple of new biographies of Paine and luxuriated in reading about his long extraordinary life. Paine (1737-1809) was an amazing man: political radical, Enlightenment busybody and reformer, bestselling pamphleteer, inventor of an experimental iron bridge, citizen first of Britain, then the United States, and later France, where he served in the National Convention (parliament), and argued against the execution of Louis XVI. And deist, not atheist. He wrote, "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life."
I was simply wrong about Paine. I'm sorry I was wrong, of course, because I hate to be wrong, but I don't at all mind admitting it, and setting the record straight.
Paine wrote three books that rocked the world. How many authors can make that claim? "Common Sense" (1776) helped to galvanize support for the American Revolution. It sold more than 120,000 copies. Washington had parts of it read to the troops at Valley Forge. "The Rights of Man" (1791) defended the French Revolution and laid out, as clearly as any document of the era, the principles of self-government and popular sovereignty. "The Age of Reason" (1793) is a severe critique of the Bible, organized Christianity and other received religions.
Paine was emphatically a deist. He believed in one eternal and benevolent God, a clockmaker deity who created the universe and set it into motion. He scoffed at the idea of the Trinity. He believed in an afterlife, though he did not like to think of it as a reward for good behavior. He believed that Jesus was a remarkable man, but he scoffed at the idea that Jesus was the son of God. He ridiculed the idea that Jesus accomplished miracles contrary to Newtonian mechanics. He dismissed the idea that Jesus rose bodily to heaven after his death. He regarded the Bible as a tissue of absurdities, and he refused to believe that it was in any sense written by or inspired by God.
Paine wrote, "The opinions I have advanced ... are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the almighty; that the only true religion is Deism."
This is strong and, for many, offensive stuff, even now. Publication of "The Age of Reason" cost Paine most of his American friendships. People crossed the street to avoid him. Pubs refused to serve him. He was denounced from pulpits and in broadsides, and physically assaulted on the street.
Even his old revolutionary compatriot Samuel Adams would have nothing to do with him following publication of the book. Thomas Jefferson remained a loyal friend - but carefully distanced himself from Paine's open assault on Christianity. Jefferson's detractors expressed their profound displeasure that the president of the United States would not break with a man John Adams called "a disastrous meteor," and whom Theodore Roosevelt later called a "dirty little atheist."
Paine was unrelentingly anti-clerical. He found nothing to admire in organized Christianity. "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
Most Americans, then and now, do not share Jefferson's and Paine's distaste for the Bible or their antagonism to institutional religion. A solid majority of the Founding Fathers were Christians in some sense of the term. Some of them, like Patrick Henry, wanted an official established religion in each state. Most believed that religion was an important restraining mechanism in human affairs. Many of them, if we could lift them out of their context and into ours, would probably be distressed by the degree to which we have chosen to prohibit religious activity in the public square.
It is easy for religious conservatives to compile anthologies of pro-Christian sentiment from the founders' writings, including - with a bit of disingenuous manipulation - from the works of Jefferson. There is room for an honest debate about what the founders intended, but any honest participant acknowledges that there is plenty of "evidence" on both sides of the argument. In other words, there is no definitive "intent of the Founding Fathers" on religious questions.
It is certain that the United States is a more religious country in 2006 than it was in 1806. For Jefferson, who declared in 1822 that "there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian," this would come as a surprise and something of a disappointment. Jefferson, like Paine, believed that science and reason would emancipate mankind from faith systems, and that at some future, but near, date, all people would admire, though not worship, the one universal deity.
And yet. ... Thomas Jefferson attended Anglican services on occasion and saw to it that his children were baptized. As president, he permitted ecumenical Christian religious services to be held in the U.S. Capitol during his administration. Though he would not permit religious observances within the precincts of his brainchild the University of Virginia, he saw nothing wrong with the idea that private chapels would be built adjacent to the university campus.
If there were an unambiguous intent of the founders, there would be no special reason for us to follow their lead 219 years later. Their intent was to perpetuate slavery. Their intent was to count every five slaves as three for the purposes of apportionment and representation. Their intent was that senators would be elected by state legislatures. Their intent was that the Electoral College would sit in independent judgment about who was fittest to be president. Their intent was to exclude all women, almost all African-Americans, all Indians and white males without property from voting or holding public office.
We have discarded all these 18th century notions because they do not serve us well in the 21st century. Nor, in a nation with as much religious diversity as the United States, does it make any sense to force the 5.8 million Muslims, the 5.2 million Jews, the 1.5 million Buddhists, the 1 million Hindus, and the 433,267 Wiccans, pagans and Druids under one Christian tent. About this the First Amendment is very clear.
The government of the United States is overwhelmingly tolerant of the widest possible variety of religions and religious sensibilities. Nobody is legally punished for being a Mormon, a Christian Scientist, a British Israelist, a Mennonite, a Deuteronomist, a Scientologist or a member of a Native American peyote tradition. Members of each of these groups have held public office in the United States. We have no test oaths that prevent Catholics or Anabaptists from holding public office. A Catholic has been president. A Mormon (Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts) plans to run for the presidency. Joe Lieberman, who is Jewish, nearly became vice president of the United States in 2000.
In this our happy and tolerant republic, tax exemption is afforded to individuals and groups whose religious views would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers, and deeply abhorrent.
The "wall of separation" between church and state works. We have the freethinking Founding Fathers, among them Tom Paine, to thank for that great gift to human freedom and diversity.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
james1v wrote on Dec 17, 2006 6:32 PM:
Bob Johnson wrote on Dec 10, 2006 7:51 PM:
Karen P. wrote on Dec 10, 2006 8:25 AM:
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