It is in The Age of Reason that Thomas Paine lays out the foundation for the establishment of America as a Deist country in much the same way that The Crisis established America as the model for democratic ideals. In prose that very often engages a particularly biting and satiric mode of humor, Paine pushes forward the concept of Deist though as the underpinning of religious freedom in such a way that it would eventually come back to haunt. If it can be stated unequivocally that it is sometimes unwise to be too truthful, then The Age of Reason offers proof. Nothing that Paine asserts was ever officially challenged by any major figure involved in the foundation of American representative constitutional democracy, yet by the time he finally managed to be release from a French prison—through no help at all from George Washington—and returned back to the country he did as much to found any other of its famous fathers, he was a pariah shunned by his formerly fervent supporters into a life of ostracism.
What exactly is contained in The Age of Reason that was viewed with such distaste by so many who shared its opinions? For one thing, the existence of a God as creator of the universe, but not an active participant in it. Paine utterly rejected religion and used The Age of Reason in part to outline how one could very definitely be deeply spiritual without buying into Moses, Jesus, Mohammed or any other avatar of redemptive activism from the beyond. Like so many of the more famous figures attending the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, Paine was a Deist: nature itself was the existence of a benevolent Supreme Being. This, of course, was in direct opposition to idealistic views of Puritan settles like John Winthrop who saw America as special precisely because it was formed in great part by the Hand of God. For Paine, America is not the City on the Hill, but something even greater: A City of Men.
Jeffersonian separation of church and state finds it greatest orator within the pages of The Age of Reason. Paine is in agreement with billions in accepting a monotheistic view of God, but there is where he draws the line that situates America as a government incapable of becoming a theocracy. Theocracy by definition implies religion as a political state whereas a Deistic state can only be political since there is no guiding dogmatic schematic. What really caused The Age of Reason to becoming the turning point at which Thomas Paine went from heroic pamphleteer of the Revolution to outcast among outcasts was the carefully delineated rejection of each and every and all tenuous connections between scripture and belief in God. For Paine, Jonah being swallowed by the whale is truly an extraordinary tale, but far less extraordinary than if things had been reversed. Paine reveals the lunacy of faith in that which can be easily disproved by turning the tables and the faithful: if God intervened it the affairs of men, wouldn’t it have made much more sense for Jonah to swallow the whale?
Ultimately Paine asks a question that seems to have a very obvious answer and yet the history of the succeeding two centuries proves just the opposite. What is a more impressive accomplishment: that America is the result of the intervention of God or that it exists only through the knowledge and work of man?
