Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason"

           Thomas Paine was a popular author during the American Revolution. He was born in England in 1737 to two religious parents (his father a Quaker and his mother an Anglican). Although Paine grew up in poverty, he was intelligent, curious, and rebellious through his early years which carried on throughout his life. Before Paine became a writer he worked many jobs in England, which included: a corset maker, tobacconist and grocer, schoolteacher, and an exciseman (639). Eventually, Paine moved to America in 1774 just before the American Revolution started. He was undoubtedly a strong supporter of independence from Britain, and this showed in his most successful works “Common sense” (1775) and “Rights of Man” (1791-92), as well as the first Crisis Paper (1776), all dealing with his support of independence from Britain and his “plea against hereditary monarchy” (640). Eventually, Paine ended up in New York in the last years of his life, writing “The Age of Reason” in 1794, which was written by Paine to give his personal beliefs on religion.

            Thomas Paine’s main idea in his writing “The Age of Reason” was to that man should find happiness in his faith in god within himself and not within any form of organized church. While Paine says that he does not mean to condemn those who believe otherwise in his beliefs, it is clear that he is very against any church institutions through his irreverent writing. Paine personally attacks the Christian church, saying that the church studies the opinions that humans created about god, rather than god himself and what he has made (656). Paine also questions the credibility of the bible among other forms of church, saying that each church’s book has their own form of revelation (or word from god to man) and this makes any evidence for the existence of god from the church weak. He explains this, saying “…It is a revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person…and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is a revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it” (655). Paine also strongly believed that any form of organized church was “no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit” (654), and saw the church and the state as a single corrupt institution.

            “The Age of Reason” caused Thomas Paine to get a lot of backlash from society, and was ridiculed by its readers and critics. This was because it ultimately argued that Christianity was human made and not the true source of god’s wisdom, which offended the majority of Britain, America, and France, as Christianity and the bible was the most accepted and believed in faith in those countries during this time period. “The Age of Reason”, however, later paved the way to the Age of Enlightenment which was a very important intellectual movement that shed light on scientific thinking.

Works Cited

Paine, Thomas. “The Age of Reason.” Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine, W.W. Norton & Co., 2012, pp. 653-659