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

Turning to paragraph nineteen of section three, Paine therein seemed to hint in the direction of the providential or predestined nature of American independence. A continued connection between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain, he argued, would inevitably and to no good effect drag the American colonists into one conflict after another in whose successful conclusion they had little to gain and much to lose. American trade in particular, the cornerstone of an economy dependent on the importation of manufactured goods in the absence of native industry, was most likely to suffer in the event of war between the British and one of their various Great Power rivals whether said conflict had anything to do with Britain’s American territories or not. This, Paine asserted, was best understood as a signifier of how ill-suited the two regions were, Europe and North America, to exist in a relationship of mutual dependence. Indeed, he wrote, “The distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America, is a strong and natural proof, that the authority of the one, over the other, was never the design of Heaven.” Thusly, Paine was able to transition from an argument seemingly against the logic of two distant territories possessing such an intimate relationship to one that speculated whether the continuation of said relationship wasn't a violation of God’s manifest will. This was, to his credit, smoothly done, and tapped expertly into the aforementioned millenarian strain of thought present in 18^th-century American Protestantism.

What Paine claimed to have an interest in, and no doubt believed his audience would as well, was “the design of Heaven.” This ineffable master plan, the details of which were generally understood to be beyond human comprehension, nonetheless exerted a strong influence on Christian, and in particular Protestant, thought. If it was the manifest design of the Almighty that America be a world unto itself, untethered from allegiance to any other region of the globe, then it would have followed that the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from British hegemony constituted a furtherance of the selfsame hallowed manifesto. Paine’s audience was likely well-primed to recognize and respond to arguments such as this. Rhetoric had often been deployed by members of the American colonies’ various religion communities over the centuries between the beginning of the colonial era and the 1770s that contained numerous allusions to the New World as a kind of “promised land,” religious refuge, or the site of a general social and/or historical regeneration. Even among the members of the colonies’ educated classes, who had generally moved away from adherence to orthodox religion and embraced some form of the European Enlightenment’s spiritual rationalism, there were those who found it difficult to resist characterizing the burgeoning American civilization as one ideally suited, if not destined, for a degree of social and philosophical perfection not possible in arch-traditionalist Europe.

Paine was very wise to recognize this tendency in American religious and philosophical thought, and appears to have buttressed many of his arguments with allusions to the inevitability of American independence, the importance of recognizing and following one’s destiny, and the special place that America supposedly occupied in the history of Western civilization. Events, he time and again declared, had appeared to conspire to place the American continent in a unique position. At the bottom of the abovementioned paragraph nineteen, Paine made the particularly weighty observation that, “the Reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship not safety.” There are, I think, two things about this claim of Paine’s that are particularly worthy of consideration. One is the way it reinforces an understanding of history as being a function of the Christian God’s ordering of events in a specific sequence. In the predestination/millennialism-tinged Protestant view of human existence, one thing happens after the other for a reason, and all things are leading towards a predetermined end. When Paine speculated that the Reformation (beginning in 1517) was preceded by the discovery of the Americas (beginning in 1492) in order so that the latter region could serve as a refuge for the soon-to-be persecuted Protestant faithful he effectively endorsed this perception of history. It perhaps follows, given the numerous instances over the course of Common Sense in which Paine made note of the inevitable nature of American independence, that he regarded a separation between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain to be the next major event in God’s immutable design. This interpretation of Paine’s intention is, I think, reinforced by the second element worth noting about his aforementioned paragraph nineteen millennial allusions.

Paine’s mention of the Reformation, America as a religious sanctuary, and the persecuted being forced to flee their homes in Europe was not, I think, incidental to his overall purpose. As previously discussed, by the 1770s many of the Thirteen Colonies were populated by the descendants of exactly those religious refugees that Paine described in, and was now addressing with the publication of, Common Sense. The Puritans of New England, the Baptists of Rhode Island, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the Catholics of Maryland were all members of religious denominations that had been effectively barred from holding significant political authority under the British Anglican Establishment. Indeed, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Maryland were all originally envisioned as religious refuges by their founding patrons. The offspring of the original populations of said colonies continued to be acutely conscious of their origins in religious persecution well into the 1770s, and this accordingly shaped their perceptions of what their purpose (some might even say destiny) in America was. A common manifestation thereof was a belief in eventual validation; that exile in the New World would eventually lead to the creation of a purer, more glorious, and more godly society than would have been possible in orthodox European climes. Paine seemed to have recognized the existence of such sentiments in his audience, and structured his arguments in favor of independence so as to tap into their variously manifested sense of persecution, vindication, and destiny.

Paine referred to the providential nature of America’s perceived status as a religious refuge again in paragraph twenty-one of section four of Common Sense. Among the roles he envisioned a proper government ought to possess he asserted that the only religious duty a republican regime should undertake was the paramount protection of freedom of conscience. This state of affairs, he continued, would have been easier to achieve in America than in other regions of the globe thanks to the abiding religious diversity of the colonies and their distinctly heterogeneous populations. Indeed, he wrote, “I fully and conscientiously believe, that it is the will of the Almighty, that there should be a diversity of religious opinions among us.” Such diversity, he claimed, “affords a larger field for out Christian kindness,” and would have provided, unlike in a society united by single faith, greater opportunity for continued questioning, debate, and spiritual regeneration. In this instance, as in other already noted, Paine seemed to quite effectively tap into several strains of religious thought present among his 18^th-century American Protestant audience. The most obvious is evidenced by his willingness to attribute a manifest circumstance of life in the colonies – their religious diversity – to the guiding hand of the Almighty. This, he effectively declared, was not a mere quirk of history but the direct consequence of God’s ultimate design. His fellow colonists, it followed, would have done well to embrace their diversity, and thus embrace the dictates of providence.

By exhorting his American readers to embrace their abiding religious diversity Paine also appeared to validate their status as refugees from oppression in Europe. If the American continent was indeed ordained by God to be a haven for the persecuted, as Paine claimed it was, it then followed that the communities, be they Quakers, Baptists, Puritans or Catholics, who had settled therein had not suffered in vain. Indeed, their loss of home, property, livelihood, and exile in a strange and at-times threatening wilderness were all a part of God’s age-old plan to create a more perfect human society and thus hasten the coming of the millennium. This was doubtless an appealing notion to American Protestants, be they Post-Millennial or Pre-Millennial adherents. The suffering they and their forbearers had endured was entirely purposeful, and its eventual reward would be the creation of a new, stronger, more pious social body that would lead the world into a new age of peace and prosperity. The method by which this would be accomplished is where Paine looped back to his overarching thesis.

Persecution and disenfranchisement under the Anglican Establishment in Britain is what drove countless people in the 17^th and 18^th centuries to depart their homes in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales and risk their all by settling in what we now recognize as the Thirteen Colonies. The religious conflict at the heart of this migration continued to color the relationships between the various colonies and the British Crown throughout the colonial era, and played a far-from-insignificant role in nurturing an abiding sense of antipathy between the colonists and their British cousins in the years leading up to the beginning of the Revolution. Though the First Great Awakening did a great deal to revitalize American Protestantism in its various manifestations on an individual level, many non-Anglican colonists still found themselves living under a political order that was dominated by the influence of the Anglian Church and its hierarchy. Thomas Paine, perceptive as he was, recognized this, remarked that America’s religious diversity was in fact God-ordained, and offered a potential solution for its inability to be fully and freely expressed. Independence of the colonies from Britain, for which he had argued from any number of angles, could as well help bring about an era of religious freedom in America more in keeping with the manifest will of the Almighty. This, again, could not have but appealed to American colonists who had been forced to reconcile their faith with that of the monarch whose sovereignty over them they nominally acknowledged. George III was, after all, the head of the Anglican Church, and the governors he regularly appointed to administer the colonies that fell directly under his authority were of the selfsame faith (lest they be disqualified from holding any office). Yet, Paine intimated, freedom to worship, to hold public office, or to structure their governments in a way that did not offend the dignity of their faith was within the grasp of all Americans. Independence was the thing, and thus the author of Common Sense strengthened his argument in its favor.

As I've nearly come to the end of this particular post I’d like to offer a minor caveat to the image I believe I've painted herein of Paine using religious diversity as a hook and a prize in his arguments in favor of independence. I recognize that, looking back, I often included Catholics in amongst those disenfranchised Christians to whom Paine was attempting to appeal. I did this because I believe the arguments he put forward did indeed apply to those few 18^th-century American followers of the Roman Catholic Rite as they did to the much larger number of Congregationalists, Quakers, Baptists, and various other of what were known in Anglican England as Protestant Dissenters then living in the American colonies. I would be remiss, however, in not pointing out that one of the ways Paine appealed to the sympathies of his mainly Protestant audience was by manifesting a casual disdain of Roman Catholicism.

The sentiment in question is not one which pervades Common Sense from top to bottom, but it is there. At the end of the ninth paragraph of section two, which if you recall contains a lengthy meditation on the origins of kingship among the Children of Israel, Paine concluded that the practice of monarchs withholding information as to the lack of scriptural basis for their rule made them akin to priests in “Popish countries.” This was a blatant criticism, as old as the Reformation itself, aimed at the custom of Catholic priests to act as intermediaries between their congregation and the text of the Bible. “Monarchy,” Paine thusly declared, “in every instance is the Popery of government.” Further on, in the lengthy third section of Common Sense, Paine argued in the eleventh paragraph that the concept of Britain as the parent or mother country of the colonies was a fundamentally false one, and had been “jesuitically adopted by the king and his parasites, with a low papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds.” This again demonstrates Paine’s willingness to harness the antipathy felt among Protestants of just about any stripe for the Roman Catholic Church and its reputation for power-brokering and cynical manipulation.

In addition to demonstrating how far Paine was willing to go to adopt a tone of pious Protestantism with Common Sense, to the point of appearing to prey upon the faith’s accustomed theological adversary, his use of anti-Catholic slurs helped to set his rhetoric apart from that of his more self-consciously academic contemporaries. By and large, as I hope I've managed to get across, the Founding Fathers were a religiously diverse and generally quite tolerant group. Freedom of conscience is what they advocated, evidenced by their words as well as the fact that they included a prominent Maryland Catholic, Charles Carrol of Carrolton, among their number. Paine, as his later work indicates, was of this opinion as well, or at the very least was not one to celebrate or denigrate any one particular religious faith. The majority of the citizens of the American colonies, however, were somewhat less diffident. However much they and their forefathers had suffered under the overbearing hegemony of the Anglican Establishment, it had been hammered into them by generations of Protestant preachers, educators, and political leaders that Catholicism was the unequivocal enemy. It was the religion of France and Spain, their ancestral enemies; a faith outwardly defined by a meddlesome Pope, grasping Cardinals, rigid hierarchy, unquestioning deference, and dogmatic narrow-mindedness. In many ways Roman Catholicism was to the average 18^th-century Protestant what Islam is to the modern citizen of the Western world; a mysterious, vaguely threatening, and rigidly traditionalist faith whose adherents cannot be reasoned with. Though the 18^th-century Protestant perception of Catholics was often as shallow and misguided as modern misconceptions surrounding Muslims in the West, such emotional biases lent themselves to skilled rhetorical manipulation. This, Thomas Paine knew and this, Thomas Paine attempted; to what degree of success is a matter of speculation.