Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer whose “Common Sense” and “The American Crisis” fanned the fiery spirit of the American Revolution, celebrates his 285th birthday on January 29 with a new Princeton University Press book, “The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism.”
It obviously puts the once Bordentown resident into a fresh perspective.
Its author is Leigh Eric Schmidt, a professor of humanities at Washington University in St. Louis and past professor and department chair of religion for Princeton University.
His expertise is American religion and culture, including research in evangelical revivalism, religious liberalism, atheism, and secularism.
As Schmidt shows in the following excerpt, Paine’s call to end the European monarchy structure that also called for dismantling religious institutions made him an enemy to the church and a savior to nonbelievers:
No founding figure occupied a more canonized role in the 19th century secularist imagination than Paine, whose bold deistic critique of the Bible in “The Age of Reason” had made him the ogre of evangelicals and the hero of infidels. Denied burial in a Quaker cemetery — a religious fellowship with which he had a lingering familial affinity — he was interred in June 1809 on his farm in New Rochelle, New York, with little ceremony and few at all in attendance. Then, in 1819 the British radical William Cobbett, a one-time detractor turned ardent admirer of Paine, decided to dig up the remains and return them to England as a catalyst for a protest and reform back in the motherland. With that act of grave robbery, Cobbett set Paine’s bones in motion; sardonically dubbed a “resurrection man” by the British press, Cobbett had created an empty tomb of sorts for American freethinkers. That the stolen remains eventually went missing after Cobbett’s own death in 1835 made Paine’s bones the doubly lost relics of 19th century secularism. Dreams of reclamation, memorialization, and recompense would preoccupy Paine’s freethinking disciples for decades. As late as 1908, one frustrated pursuer of the vanished bones waxed biblical to explain his failed search. Paine’s “final resting place” would remain, he concluded, as shrouded in mystery “as that of Moses.”
Under the banner of the religion of humanity, the 19th century architects of organized secularism built their disenthralled identities out of multifaceted religious engagements — by turns, fanciful, ironical, and earnest; at once, cosmopolitan in ambition and parochial in practice. When the British freethinker John Sholto Douglass made his pleas in 1881 for secularists to be recognized as a “religious body,” he instinctively turned to Paine’s revered place in the movement for validation of his claim. Those who dismissed freethinkers as irreligious, as having “no religion at all,” he argued, were simply uninformed about the noble history of “the religion of secularism” — “a religion,” he insisted, that “was long ago clearly defined by Thomas Paine.” The very tangible veneration of Paine is a good conduit for reconsidering secularism, rather literally, as a religious body. While Paine’s bones stayed missing — or, more precisely, were reported found and then lost in what amounted to a repeated cycle of secularist hope and disappointment — a portion of his brain and some of his hair (so several prominent American freethinkers profess) were eventually recovered for memorializing in New Rochelle in the early 20th century. Even then, with the long quest at least partially fulfilled, Paine’s sepulchral relics continued to draw inquirers into the chase and into secularist mythology. The abiding reverence for Paine among his American devotees reveals a more complexly religious, densely material version of secularism — one concerned as much with a localized shrine of a saint as with a prescriptive regime of disenchantment. Whatever political program secularists dreamed of enacting to limit Christianity’s public power, they subsisted on minority allegiances and practices, seen quite clearly in this peculiar sect of American “Paineites,” with the commemorative rituals and long-sought relics.
Thomas Paine’s reputation as an American patriot would have been far more secure had he stuck to politics and left religion alone. Arriving in the colonies form England in 1774 with scant resources, he quickly established himself as an editor and propagandist. A singularly influential pamphleteer in defense of revolution and independence, he became the most widely read advocate of a new social and political order swept clean of aristocratic privilege and monarchic tyranny. His exhortations in “Common Sense” and “The Crisis” steeled patriot resistance, and later his “rights of Man” made the universalistic reach of his democratic politics all the more apparent. The hitch was that Paine came to believe that “a revolution in the system of government” needed to be paired with “a revolution in the system of religion” — that after throwing off the despotisms of monarchy and aristocracy, citizens of the new republic should now cast aside the superstitions of Christianity, the impostures of priests, and the fables of the Bible. Once his ferocious pen turned against the scriptures and the church in “The Age of Reason,” his contributions to the patriot cause were almost totally beclouded by charges of infidelity, blasphemy, licentiousness, and moral monstrosity. “All his services were instantly forgotten, disparaged or denied,” Ingersoll lamented in a lecture eulogizing Paine. “He was shunned as though he had been a pestilence . . . He was regarded as a moral plague, and the bare mention of his name the bloody hands of the church were raised in horror.”
Precisely because Protestant resentment drove so much of the enduring animus against Paine, those who would defend his reputation felt doubly compelled to vindicate him on religious terms. Against the chorus of his Christian critics, Paine’s admirers routinely pointed to the positive thrust of his deism with its vision of benevolent reform, cosmopolitan fellowship, and purified monotheism. “I believe in one god, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life,” Paine had explained at the outset of “The Age of Reason.” I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.” His disciples dwelled on that passage, but they also pointed out that Paine had embraced the label of Theophilanthropists for his communion of organized deists (it was a group with French Enlightenment roots that had small offshoots in the United States by 1800). Surely, that name indicated the mere conscientiousness of Paine’s humanitarian faith; in that altruistic light, Paine could be seen as a religious draftsman more than a slashing iconoclast — as an opponent of an unprincipled atheism, not its filthy abettor. Paine’s Society of Theophilanthropists, subsequent freethinkers suggested, provided the practical groundwork for the religion of humanity. Seen as “a cross between a church and a society formed for the advancement of morals,” it was counted a harbinger of the Ethical Culture associations and the archly liberal Unitarian congregations of their own day. As one dedicated Paineite declared, “On this rock the Church of Man was to be build.”
The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism by Leigh Eric Schmidt, 272 Pages, $27.95, Princeton University Press.
Thomas Paine and Bordentown
Thomas Paine was born in 1737 in Norfolk, England. His father was a Quaker, his mother, an Anglican. Paine originally followed his father’s profession as a stay or corset maker, but soon tried other professions, including an excise tax collector. Despite the low wages, he frequently used his pay to purchase books to enhance his meager education. Low pay also cost him his position when he complained to his supervisors and showed how low paid individuals were susceptible to being corrupted.
It was during that time in London when he met the Colony of Pennsylvania representative Benjamin Franklin, who encouraged Paine to move to America and provided him with letters of introduction for work.
Paine arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 and became an editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine, where his political columns would eventually become the core for his January, 1776, publication “Common Sense,” an anti-monarch argument that founding father John Adams compared to “a ray of revelation (that) has come in seasonably to clear our doubts, and to fix our choice.”
George Washington also recognized Paine’s contributions and later pressed Congress to award a grant to help the pamphleteer for his Revolutionary War services.
Paine used the money to purchase a house in Bordentown to be near his close friend Joseph Kirkbride, a Quaker who had moved to Quaker-centric Bordentown after the British burned his Bucks County home.
Additionally, New York State awarded Paine a 227-acre farm that had been confiscated by a New Rochelle, New York, loyalist.
According to the Thomas Paine National Historical Society, “Bordentown is the only place in the world where Paine bought property. He was given a farm in (New York) but never chose a place to buy outside of Bordentown. The house he actually bought, along with a piece of land across Crosswicks Creek, was on Church Street. It was moved sometime in the late 19th century from the corner of Farnsworth down the block of Church Street a couple of lots, and is still there. The plaque on Farnsworth is incorrect as it names the present structure at the northwest corner of Farnsworth and Church was the house. However, Paine never lived in the house he bought! He ‘gave’ it to a widow of the war to live rent free, and then rented it to a ship captain and his wife. He eventually sold it in 1803 along with the land across the creek. Paine actually lived in Bordentown between 1778 and 1787 (one of the longest residences in his life) with his close friend Joseph Kirkbride at the foot of Farnsworth overlooking the river (the property is at 2 Farnsworth). He had a room on the second floor of a large house. A statue of Paine was erected in 1996 near this property where his horse Button grazed at the end of Prince Street. This house became a hotel and then the first female college in the country. It burned to the ground around 1900, and the current house there was built soon after.”
