Common Sense, Part XIII: Preaching to the Choir, contd.

In addition to making use of explicit invocations of the term “God,” alluding at length to the history of the ancient Israelites as recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible, and inserting occasional references to Satan, Lucifer, and the Pharaohs of the Book of Exodus, Paine also made rhetorical use in Common Sense of intermittent suggestions or citations of certain abstract concepts that were, and remain, fundamental to Protestant Christianity. Once again, these instances likely served the dual purpose of both demonstrating the piety of the author in the hope of engendering trust with his audience, as well as attempting to direct the at-times highly personal and emotional reverence the great majority of colonial Americans felt toward God and the Bible against the British Crown and any potential reconciliation therewith. They also seem, upon consideration, to show that Paine possessed a particular understanding of the aspects of Christian theology to which 18^th-century colonial Americans attached the greatest significance. More than a retelling of the stories of Gideon or Samuel, or even direct admissions to the primacy of the will of God, Paine’s attempts to speak to the specific religious perspective embraced by most of the post-Great Awakening population of the American colonies likely helped demonstrate that the author of Common Sense was a trustworthy co-religionist and not simply a self-interested interloper.

To that end, Paine first made overt reference in paragraph fourteen of section two of Common Sense to what he suggested was the obvious relationship between hereditary monarchy and original sin. Kingship, he asserted, could only have emerged in its earliest form in one of three ways: by lot (at random from a pre-selected group), by election (on an at-least semi-democratic basis), or by usurpation (as in some form of coup). The manner first exercised would naturally seem to set a precedent for subsequent instances; i.e. if at first a monarch is elected it would seem logical that a second election should follow in the event of their death or abdication. All hereditary monarchies, of which the 18^th century was cheek-to-jowl, must have started in one of these three ways and at some point deviated into the more familiar mode of inherited authority. This, Paine argued, constituted a grave misfortune, for it effectively served to rob the people to be ruled in subsequent generations of the fundamental freedom of choice enjoyed by their predecessors. To make use of what I hope is an apt example, a theoretical group of Anglo-Saxon warlords may have, in far-distant antiquity, selected from amongst themselves he who would serve as their sovereign overlord, thus giving rise to the Kingdom of England. Said warlords, Paine doubtless would have agreed, were perfectly within their rights to delegate a portion of their individual sovereignty in the name of centralizing the administration and security of their combined holdings. Trouble arose, however, when at some point between that distant origin and the 18^th-century the English Crown became the legal possession of a single family line. The descendants of those same venerable warlords, though potentially still blessed with wealth and privilege, would thus have lost the right to choose their liege as their forbearers had done through no particular action or transgression of their own.

To Paine’s view, or so he argued, the loss of the ability of the ruled to choose their ruler that hereditary monarchy entailed made it strikingly similar to the Biblical concept of original sin. “The right,” he wrote to that effect, “of all future generations is taken away, by the act of the first electors, in their choice of not only a king, but of a family of kings for ever, hath no parallel in or out of scripture but the doctrine of original sin, which supposes the free will of all men lost in Adam.” By a simple transgression, brought about by his own mortal weakness, the Biblical progenitor of man doomed his race in perpetuity to an existence of suffering, deprivation, and permanent exile from paradise. Just so, Paine argued, the progenitors of monarchy looked to their own personal priorities and anointed a family line that would continue to rule their own descendants, theoretically for all time, whether the monarch of the day be fit for the task or not. “As in Adam all sinned,” he wrote, “and as in the first electors all men obeyed; as in the one all mankind were subjected to Satan, and in the other to Sovereignty; as our innocence was lost in the first, and our authority in the last.” Striking here is Paine’s assertion that living under a hereditary monarchy was the worldly equivalent of continuously being subject to the influence of Satan, both a collective punishment for a singular error. Yet, though man would always bear the burden of original sin he need not forever suffer under the yoke of inherited kingship, and therein lay the strength of Paine’s rhetorical construction.

At the very heart of the idea of original sin is a sense of loss. Adam’s choice led humanity down a path other than what God originally intended. Had he chosen to reject temptation mankind might have remained in the Garden and enjoyed an endless existence of peace, prosperity and joy. Along with this sense of loss, however, there would seem to be an accompanying sense of resignation or finality. However much humanity may labour to attain salvation, they may only find paradise in death; the earthly garden is closed to them forever. Though as Paine described it hereditary monarchy was similar to original sin in its basic origins, it was unalike in its most fundamental implication. Where the penalty for original sin was absolutely irrevocable, the punishment to be suffered by subsequent generations for their progenitors’ crime of having embraced monarchy was not. History is awash with examples of civilizations, from ancient Rome to the 17^th-century Dutch to the Roundheads of the English Civil War, who cast off longstanding hereditary monarchies and embraced some form of republican government. Though inherited monarchy may have been, as Paine argued, inherently sinful in character, people clearly need not have suffered under it indefinitely. Indeed, the realization that acknowledging the authority of a hereditary ruler was tantamount to embracing the Biblical fall of man was likely intended as an exhortation to the contrary. Americans need only seized hold of their destinies with both hands and throw aside the “royal brute of Britain” in order to right an ancient wrong, the only equal of which was the paramount wrong the Bible records as forming the root of human weakness. As, once again, a generally pious, Bible-reading, church-going population the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies likely felt this to be a difficult proposition to ignore. Original sin may have been forever beyond their reach to undo, but as Paine explained in Common Sense banishing hereditary monarchy was the next best thing.

Similarly fundamental in its likely appeal was Paine’s apparent attempts in Common Sense to subtly invoke the concepts of predestination and millenarianism. These are both somewhat heady notions, it must be said, and the average 21^st-century American Protestant likely doesn’t encounter them as often in the course of their religious life as their 18^th-century counterparts did. For the citizens of 1770s colonial America, heirs to the legacy of the First Great Awakening, these concepts were absolutely fundamental to how they understood their faith, their place in the world, the role of salvation, and the purpose of life on earth. Predestination is perhaps most strongly expressed and embraced by the Calvinist churches, and holds that every person is predestined, based on God’s knowledge alone, for either salvation or damnation. Human action has no impact on the fate of an individual soul; salvation comes by the grace of God alone, rather than as a reward for the good works accomplished in life. It follows, in the orthodox conception, that a person who attempts to live well, aides their fellow man, is charitable, compassionate, etc… does so not in an attempt to earn salvation, but because they were clearly destined for it all along. Among the Congregationalist churches of  colonial New England and New York, members of the larger Calvinist doctrinal community, the primacy of predestination exerted a profound spiritual, social and psychological effect on generations of colonists, and subsequently helped shape the cultural, philosophical and political outlooks of countless American statesmen, soldiers, merchants, and artists.

Millenarianism, or in the Christian context millennialism, is generally understood as a belief in the inevitable transformation of society in preparation for or in consequence of the second coming of Jesus Christ. Within the realm of American Protestantism, particularly as expressed in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, millennialism took two basic forms with differing social implications. Post-millennialism holds that the second coming will herald the beginning of a thousand year kingdom of Christ on earth, at the conclusion of which will follow the final judgement and the literal apocalypse. This form of Christian millenarianism generally emphasized the imperfectability of man, who requires Christ to usher in the thousand year kingdom of peace and prosperity, and the need for believers to take an active role in preparing their souls for salvation. Pre-millennialism, by contrast, proclaims that the thousand year kingdom of heaven on earth will occur before the second coming and the final judgement, and in fact will be brought about by the efforts of mankind to reform and perfect human civilization. Consequently, adherents of pre-millennialism inherently believe in the ability of humans to achieve perfection via their own efforts, without the intervention of Christ’s prior arrival on earth. Indeed, in the decades following the American Revolution the rise of pre-millennial thought in American Protestantism in turn gave rise to a legion of grassroots reform movements closely associated with the Evangelical faiths, including but not limited to campaigns in favor of temperance, women’s suffrage, and the abolition of slavery.

Though pre-millennialism and post-millennialism looked differently on the ability of mankind to usher in the millennium on its own, and thus placed differing emphases on the need for spiritual and earthly reform, both seemed to agree on the basic premise that human history possessed a predetermined end. Predestination was bound to this same idea as well, going so far as to proclaim that the history of each individual human soul had been decided far in advance of life’s emergence on earth. Because these concepts were, again, highly influential within 18^th and 19^th-century American Protestantism, it follows that the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies to whom Thomas Paine addressed himself with Common Sense where particularly attuned to ideas or arguments that seemed to conform to their theological conceptions of history, inevitability, and destiny. While it is true that significant portions of the colonial American population were adherents of religious faiths in which predestination specifically played little or no part – the Catholics of Maryland, Quakers of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and the Anglicans of the Southern colonies – a sizeable number, perhaps even the majority, attached theological significance to some form or other of millennial thought.   

The Puritans of New England in particular were a population whose social fabric was strongly shaped by millennial thinking and the interplay between the perception of free will and the doctrine of predestination. The spiritual leaders of the first Puritan settlements at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay conceived of their enterprise as both a religious refuge from the Anglican Establishment in 17^th-century England as well as an attempt at social perfection by self-imposed exile. Puritan settlement in America, they prophesied, would serve as a “city on a hill,” a beacon of true religion in a world beset by idolatry and moral corruption. Even after the First Great Awakening, which helped move a large portion of the 18^th-century American Protestant community away from as rigid an understanding of predestination as held by prior generations, the notion that America and its people were somehow destined to lead the world toward an era of peace and prosperity still exerted a powerful emotional and psychological hold on the American mindset. Tapping into that vein of American socio-religious thought, which endorsed social and spiritual reform and the power of destiny, would thus have been an extremely useful tactic for those wishing to sway the American public at large towards this or that point of view. This, I do believe, is precisely what Paine attempted.