RELIGION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC: A SECOND TOM PAINE EFFECT

Abstract

Tom Paine, it turns out, may have done almost as much to shape public discourse in the early national period of the United States as he did in moving aggrieved colonists to take up arms against King George III in the Revolutionary period. As historians have documented time and again, the arguments in Paine's Common Sense (1776), especially “On Monarchy and Hereditary Succession,” worked as an elixir to transform mixed opinions about dealing with Parliamentary overreach into an unalloyed determination to throw off the king. The four books reviewed here point to the same sort of conclusion about the importance of Paine's The Age of Reason, published in two parts in 1794 and 1795 and then reprinted almost as often over the next few years as Common Sense had been at the outset of the War of Independence. With the latter work, however, Paine accomplished more through the opposition he generated than by the readers he convinced. Although a few doughty Loyalists had ventured to take on Common Sense, that opposition was as nothing compared to the groundswell of denunciation that arose in the 1790s to defuse what Americans of many stripes considered Paine's incendiary provocations. Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued monographs from Eric Schlereth, Jonathan Den Hartog, and Sam Haselby provide, in effect, an account of why The Age of Reason caused such a stir, how those who regarded its arguments as threatening damnation for individuals and poison for the republic mobilized for their own counterpurposes, and then what resulted from the ambiguous success that this mobilization achieved.