The Age of Reason Thomas Paine

The Age of Reason provoked a hostile reaction from most readers and critics, although the intensity of that hostility varied by locality. There were four major factors for this animosity: Paine denied that the Bible was a sacred, inspired text; he argued that Christianity was a human invention; his ability to command a large readership frightened those in power; and his irreverent and satirical style of writing about Christianity and the Bible offended many believers.[45][83][84]

Britain

Paine's Age of Reason sparked enough anger in Britain to initiate not only a series of government prosecutions but also a pamphlet war. Around 50 unfavorable replies appeared between 1795 and 1799 alone, and refutations were still being published in 1812. Many of them responded specifically to Paine's attack on the Bible in Part II (when Thomas Williams was prosecuted for printing Part II, it became clear its circulation had far exceeded that of Part I).[85][86] Although critics responded to Paine's analysis of the Bible, they did not usually address his specific arguments. Instead, they advocated a literal reading of the Bible, citing the Bible's long history as evidence of its authority. They also issued ad hominem attacks against Paine, describing him "as an enemy of proper thought and of the morality of decent, enlightened people".[87] Dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, who had endorsed the arguments of the Rights of Man, turned away from those presented in The Age of Reason. Even the liberal Analytical Review was skeptical of Paine's claims and distanced itself from the book. Paine's deism was simply too radical for these more moderate reformers and they feared being tarred with the brush of extremism.[88]

Despite the outpouring of antagonistic replies to The Age of Reason, some scholars have argued that Constantin Volney's deistic The Ruins (translations of excerpts from the French original appeared in radical papers such as Thomas Spence's Pig's Meat and Daniel Isaac Eaton's Politics for the People) was actually more influential than The Age of Reason.[89] According to David Bindman, The Ruins "achieved a popularity in England comparable to Rights of Man itself."[90] One minister complained that "the mischief arising from the spreading of such a pernicious publication [as The Age of Reason] was infinitely greater than any that could spring from limited suffrage and septennial parliaments" (other popular reform causes).[91]

It was not until Richard Carlile's 1818 trial for publishing The Age of Reason that Paine's text became "the anti-Bible of all lower-class nineteenth-century infidel agitators".[92] Although the book had been selling well before the trial, once Carlile was arrested and charged, 4,000 copies were sold in just a few months.[93] At the trial itself, which created a media frenzy, Carlile read the entirety of The Age of Reason into the court record, ensuring it an even wider publication. Between 1818 and 1822, Carlile claimed to have "sent into circulation near 20,000 copies of the Age of Reason".[94] Just as in the 1790s, it was the language that most angered the authorities in 1818. As Joss Marsh, in her study of blasphemy in the 19th century, pointed out, "at these trials plain English was reconfigured as itself 'abusive' and 'outrageous.' The Age of Reason struggle almost tolled the hour when the words 'plain,' 'coarse,' 'common,' and 'vulgar' took on a pejorative meaning."[95] Carlile was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to one year in prison but spent six years instead because he refused any "legal conditions" on his release.[96]

Paine's new rhetoric came to dominate popular 19th-century radical journalism, particularly that of freethinkers, Chartists and Owenites. Its legacy can be seen in Thomas Jonathan Wooler's radical periodical The Black Dwarf, Carlile's numerous newspapers and journals, the radical works of William Cobbett, Henry Hetherington's periodicals the Penny Papers and the Poor Man's Guardian, Chartist William Lovett's works, George Holyoake"s newspapers and books on Owenism, and freethinker Charles Bradlaugh's New Reformer.[97] A century after the publication of The Age of Reason, Paine's rhetoric was still being used: George William Foote's "Bible Handbook (1888) ... systematically manhandles chapters and verses to bring out 'Contradictions,' 'Absurdities,' 'Atrocities,' and 'Obscenities,' exactly in the manner of Paine's Age of Reason."[98] The periodical The Freethinker (founded in 1881 by George Foote) argued, like Paine, that the "absurdities of faith" could be "slain with laughter."[99]

France

The Age of Reason, despite having been written for the French, made very little, if any, impact on revolutionary France. Paine wrote that "the people of France were running headlong into atheism and I had the work translated into their own language, to stop them in that career, and fix them to the first article ... of every man's creed who has any creed at all – I believe in God" (emphasis Paine's).[100] Paine's arguments were already common and accessible in France; they had, in a sense, already been rejected.[86][101]

While still in France, Paine formed the Church of Theophilanthropy with five other families, a civil religion that held as its central dogma that man should worship God's wisdom and benevolence and imitate those divine attributes as much as possible. The church had no priest or minister, and the traditional Biblical sermon was replaced by scientific lectures or homilies on the teachings of philosophers. It celebrated four festivals honoring St. Vincent de Paul, George Washington, Socrates, and Rousseau.[102][103] Samuel Adams articulated the goals of this church when he wrote that Paine aimed "to renovate the age by inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity and universal philanthropy."[104] The church closed in 1801, when Napoleon concluded a concordat with the Vatican.[105]

United States

In the United States, The Age of Reason initially caused a deistic "revival". Paine became so reviled that he could still be maligned as a "filthy little atheist" by Theodore Roosevelt over one hundred years later.[106]

At the end of the 18th century, America was ripe for Paine's arguments. Ethan Allen published the first American defense of deism, Reason, The Only Oracle of Man (1784), but deism remained primarily a philosophy of the educated elite. Men such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson espoused its tenets but at the same time argued that religion served the useful purpose of "social control."[107] It was not until the publication of Paine's more entertaining and popular work that deism reached into the middling and lower classes in America. The public was receptive, in part, because they approved of the secular ideals of the French Revolution.[108] The Age of Reason went through 17 editions and sold thousands of copies in the United States.[109][110] Elihu Palmer, "a blind renegade minister" and Paine's most loyal follower in America, promoted deism throughout the country. Palmer published what became "the bible of American deism", The Principles of Nature,[111] established deistic societies from Maine to Georgia, built Temples of Reason throughout the nation, and founded two deistic newspapers for which Paine eventually wrote seventeen essays.[112] Foner wrote, "The Age of Reason became the most popular deist work ever written ... Before Paine it had been possible to be both a Christian and a deist; now such a religious outlook became virtually untenable."[61] Paine presented deism to the masses, and, as in Britain, educated elites feared the consequences of such material in the hands of so many. Their fear helped to drive the backlash which soon followed.[113]

Almost immediately after this deistic upsurge, the Second Great Awakening began. George Spater explains that "the revulsion felt for Paine's Age of Reason and for other anti-religious thought was so great that a major counter-revolution had been set underway in America before the end of the eighteenth century." By 1796, every student at Harvard was given a copy of Watson's rebuttal of The Age of Reason.[114][115] In 1815, Parson Weems, an early American novelist and moralist, published God's Revenge Against Adultery, in which one of the major characters "owed his early downfall to reading 'PAINE'S AGE OF REASON'".[116] Paine's "libertine" text leads the young man to "bold slanders of the bible" even to the point that he "threw aside his father's good old family bible, and for a surer guide to pleasure took up the AGE OF REASON!"[116]

Paine could not publish Part III of The Age of Reason in America until 1807 because of the deep antipathy against him. Hailed only a few years earlier as a hero of the American Revolution, Paine was now lambasted in the press and called "the scavenger of faction," a "lilly-livered sinical [sic] rogue," a "loathsome reptile," a "demi-human archbeast," "an object of disgust, of abhorrence, of absolute loathing to every decent man except the President of the United States [Thomas Jefferson]."[117][118] In October 1805 John Adams wrote to his friend Benjamin Waterhouse, an American physician and scientist:

I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte [sic], Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr [sic] on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.[119]

Adams viewed Paine's Age of Reason not as the embodiment of the Enlightenment but as a "betrayal" of it.[120] Despite all of these attacks, Paine never wavered in his beliefs; when he was dying, a woman came to visit him, claiming that God had instructed her to save his soul. Paine dismissed her in the same tones that he had used in The Age of Reason: "pooh, pooh, it is not true. You were not sent with any such impertinent message ... Pshaw, He would not send such a foolish ugly old woman as you about with His message."[121]

The Age of Reason was largely ignored after 1820, except by radical groups in Britain and freethinkers in America, such as Robert G. Ingersoll[122] and the American abolitionist Moncure Daniel Conway, who edited his works and wrote the first biography of Paine, favorably reviewed by The New York Times.[123] Not until the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, and the large-scale abandonment of the literal reading of the Bible that it caused in Britain did many of Paine's ideas take hold.[124] As writer Mark Twain said, "It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read the Age of Reason ... I read it first when I was a cub pilot, read it with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power." Paine's criticisms of the church, the monarchy, and the aristocracy appear most clearly in Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).[125]

Paine's text is still published today, one of the few 18th-century religious texts to be widely available.[126] Its message still resonates, evidenced by Christopher Hitchens, who stated that "if the rights of man are to be upheld in a dark time, we shall require an age of reason". His 2006 book on the Rights of Man ends with the claim that "in a time ... when both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend."[127]