Tom Paine’s Age Of Reason And Modern Unbelief -- By: Irving Hexham

Journal: Global Journal of Classical Theology
Volume: GJCT 04:2 (Jun 2004)
Article: Tom Paine’s Age Of Reason And Modern Unbelief
Author: Irving Hexham


Tom Paine’s Age Of Reason
And Modern Unbelief

Irving Hexham

Karla Poewe

© 1998 -2004

As I went out in the morning

To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s

I spied the fairest damsel

That ever did walk in chains.

I offer’d her my hand,

She took me by the arm.

I knew that very instant,

She meant to do me harm.

Bob Dylan

Introduction

Two hundred years ago Tom Paine (1737-1809) nuked the advance of Evangelical Christianity with his Age of Reason (1794-1796).1 Like a Cruise Missile his book struck home with deadly effect. Everywhere it was read believers lost their faith and skeptics were convinced they held the truth. Biblical Criticism, moral dilemmas, the challenge of other Faiths, literary theories and issues of science were all marshaled by Paine to destroy the confidence of believers. Anyone wishing to understand the intellectual issues facing Christianity today needs to face the fury of Paine’s wrath because in embryo the criticisms we face today are found in Paine.

The arguments Paine advanced devastated Christian people throughout the nineteenth century. Wherever Anglo-Saxon Methodism or Continental Pietism thrived The Age of Reason targeted Christians whose lively faith it destroyed. Even today we are contaminated by the fallout from Paine’s work. Yet now few people recognize his name except as a haunting image in Bob Dylan’s “As I Went Out One Morning” on his John Wesley Harding album.

Avoiding Paine

Today there is a tendency to avoid dealing with Tom Paine and his criticisms of religion. Nevertheless, the religious writings of Tom Paine, American Revolutionary leader and master of propaganda, are perhaps the most important and neglected texts in the development of modern attitudes to religion. His role in the development of Religious Studies as a field of academic interest is both immense and almost completely ignored by modern scholarship. Nevertheless, British sociologist Susan Budd, in her article “The Loss of Faith: Reasons for Unbelief among Members of the Secular Movement in England, 1850-1950,”2 that Paine “remained a dominant influence” on unbelief because of “the enormous circulation” of The Age of Reason.3

Why Paine’s work and immensely valuable insights should be ignored by scholars writing about religion is an interesting question in itself. Secular historians certainly recognize his importance both as a...

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