Paine, Religion, and Politics

Chapter 6 surveys Paine’s openly Deist writings. It considers his early anti-Trinitarianism, and argues that he probably adopted this position before his political engagement with the American Revolution. It relates his Deism to his attempt to check the French Revolution’s campaign of de-Christianization, and attributes the lack of success of that effort to the Englishness of Paine’s Deism: it was not an international language. Rather, this chapter suggests a possible association with the biblical criticism of the London-based Alexander Geddes. After the mid-1790s, Paine continued to be preoccupied not with revolution but with revelation: it was his central theme until his death in 1809, and his Deism, not any supposed plans for a social security system in Rights of Man. Part the Second, created the intellectual context for his Agrarian Justice (1797).