Chapter Two - Paine - The American Heretic

CHAPTER TWO

Paine - The American Heretic

THOMAS PAINE HELPED spark a revolution.
Not just against kings, but eventually, against scripture.

Most Americans remember him for Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that rallied the colonies toward independence. But in his final years, Paine turned his attention to something even bigger than monarchy.

He turned to the Bible.

In 1794, he published The Age of Reason, a clear and forceful critique of organized religion. It wasn’t anonymous. It wasn’t subtle. It began with a statement of belief in one God and then proceeded to dismantle almost everything built in that God’s name.

Paine wasn’t an atheist.
He believed in a Creator and moral reason.
But he rejected revelation, priesthood, miracles, and scripture, arguing that they were human inventions rather than divine truth.

He described the Bible not as holy, but as inconsistent, violent, and contradictory.
He said he couldn’t accept a book as divine when it depicted a God who ordered genocide, endorsed slavery, and punished generations for the crimes of their ancestors.

“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions… it would be more consistent to call it the word of a demon than the word of God.”

That wasn’t satire. That was his conclusion.

Paine believed that the Bible was not just flawed, but often morally indefensible. He challenged the idea of the virgin birth, the resurrection, and the miracles of the New Testament. Not because he hated religion, but because, as he said, “I do not believe in anything that is inconsistent with reason.”

He saw religion as something that had drifted far from truth and even farther from justice.
And he believed that giving people a book and calling it unquestionable truth was a form of mental slavery.

The backlash was immediate.

In America, where he had once been celebrated as a founding thinker, Paine was now labeled a blasphemer. Clergy denounced him. Former allies abandoned him. His name was scrubbed from classrooms and sermons for nearly a century.

He died in 1809 with almost no one at his funeral.

But The Age of Reason never vanished. It circulated quietly, especially among freethinkers, skeptics, and those on the edges of public belief. And it laid the groundwork for a deeper and more critical look at scripture in the decades to come.

Paine didn’t claim to have all the answers.
But he did believe people had the right, and maybe even the obligation, to ask the questions.

Not just about what the Bible says.
But about what kind of God it describes.
And whether that God deserves worship, or simply understanding.