Christian Fundamentalism vs. the Real American Values

Most of us remember Thomas Paine as the author of the revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, which appeared in January, 1776. Paine was one of the chief ideologues –today he would be called a theoretician – of the Revolution. His close friendship with Thomas Jefferson, whom he influenced, is well known. Following the American Revolution, Paine traveled to France to participate in the revolutionary movement there. He fell into disfavor with Robespierre and was imprisoned by the Directory, where he wrote the first part of one of his greatest treatises, The Age of Reason.

Although Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and other so-called “founding fathers” were not atheists, they were militantly opposed to the doctrines of Christianity, and, realizing the dangers inherent in any institutional liaison between government and organized religion, they favored a clear separation of Church and State. After all, the outrages of the Inquisition were fairly recent history for these men. As long as they were to have any voice in the matter, there would be no theocracy in the newly independent colonies.

Paine lived at the moment in history when the possibilities offered by science and its methodology – which is the methodology of reason – excited the imaginations of all progressive thinkers. Nothing could be denied to man if he chose the path of reason and renounced the path of superstition. Paine saw democratic revolution as the vehicle whereby the Church stranglehold on the human mind could be broken, and enlightenment promoted.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, man stands at the precipice of an even more profound revolution in technology and information, and yet he has progressed not at all in divesting himself of the baggage of superstition. Twenty-first century man will emerge still clinging to his moldering Bronze Age religions, and who can tell what horrors his divided loyalties will engender? How can he remain committed to science, technology and reason if he will not forsake religion, ignorance and superstition?

Today, pompous jackasses like Pat Buchanan make their living by telling the public that America needs to “return” to Christian values. The truth is, those selfsame “values” were denounced in no uncertain terms by many “founding fathers,” and even if they hadn’t been, their clear intention was to prevent groups like the so-called “Moral Majority” from seizing secular power and using it to further their parochial aims.

Paine’s views on religion in general – and Christianity in particular – fairly mirror those of his contemporaries, the followers of John Locke who instigated and led the American Revolution. Writing in The Age of Reason, Paine said:

The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it has taken place, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, has so effectively prohibited by pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.

For Paine, the “revolution in government” was merely a means to an end. As much as his name is equated with the political transition from monarchies to Republics, both here and in Europe, Paine saw the entrenched governments of his time as mere impediments to a much broader and more significant enlightenment – a “social revolution,” if you will.

Nor was he simply favoring the privatization of religious belief; he was for subjecting the claims of religion to full, open, unbridled scrutiny, regardless of any embarrassment this might have caused the devout. What he wanted to usher in was truly an Age of Reason, and “the adulterous connection between church and state” prevented it. Nevertheless, he saw the intellectual climate of his time as favorable for a trenchant criticism of Christianity:

The suspicion that the theory of what is called the Christian Church is fabulous is becoming very extensive in all countries; and it will be a consolation to men staggering under that suspicion, and doubting what to believe and what to disbelieve, to see the object freely investigated.

Now, over two hundred years later, we still have school boards kowtowing to the demands of ignorant Bible-thumpers, who insist that “creationism” be taught in science classes. Their silly Bible is held to be “the revealed word of God,” but Paine made a convincing argument against the doctrine of Bible-as-revelation:

Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man. . . . It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. . . . When I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this – for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so – it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

That paragraph alone could have qualified The Age of Reason for the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books.

Paine demonstrated that there is no internal evidence for the Bible being a true account; the document itself is fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. Much of Part Two of the Age of Reason, written after Paine’s release from prison when he had access to a Bible from which to quote, details the sometimes ludicrous internal inconsistencies of the work. He passed final judgement on the Bible by saying,

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.

Paine said,

It is not the antiquity of a tale that is an evidence of its truth; on the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous; for the more ancient any history pretends to be the more it has the resemblance of a fable.

Paine demonstrated that some of the very words and terms used in the Bible have come to mean things quite different from what they originally meant, so that it becomes absurd to insist that the book is “the revelation of God’s word.” A true revelation must be unambiguous and beyond misinterpretation throughout time.

As a specific example, Paine cites the frequent usage of the verb “to prophesy” in the Old Testament. From the context in which the word invariably appears, it had nothing to do with divining the future. Instead, it was synonymous with “making poetry.”

We read of prophesying with pipes, tabrets and horns – of prophesying with psalteries, with cymbals and with every other instrument of music then in fashion. Were we now to speak of prophesying with a fiddle, or with a pipe and tabor, the expression would have no meaning or would appear ridiculous, and to some people contemptuous, because we have changed the meaning of the word.

But that’s not all.

We are told of the greater and the lesser prophets. They might as well tell us of the greater and the lesser God; for there cannot be degrees in prophesying consistently with its modern sense. But there are degrees in poetry, and therefore the phrase is reconcilable to the case, when we understand it by the greater and the lesser poets.

For Paine, the doctrine of redemption was little more than a thinly veiled scheme for the priests to raise revenue by means of a scam.

…the Church has set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. It has set up a religion of pomp and of revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty. . . . For the internal evidence is that the theory or doctrine of redemption has for its basis an idea of pecuniary justice and not that of moral justice.

Quite clearly and undeniably, the idea of a Redeemer, one who stands in for another by bearing full punishment for the latter’s sins, negates every civilized concept of justice.

If I owe a person money and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself and pay it for me; but if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed; moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty, even if the innocent would offer itself.

What of the Christian himself? Here’s what Paine had to say,

…it is by being taught to contemplate himself as an outlaw, as an outcast, a beggar, as a mumper, as one thrown, as it were, on a dunghill at an immense distance from his Creator, and who must make his approaches by creeping and cringing to intermediate beings, that he conceives either a contemptuous disregard for everything under the name of religion, or becomes indifferent, or turns what he calls devout.

   In the latter case, he consumes his life in grief, or the affectation of it; his prayers are reproaches; his humility is ingratitude; he calls himself a worm, and the fertile earth a dunghill; and all the blessings of life by the thankless name of vanities; he despises the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON; and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason, as if man could give reason to himself. In his irrational conceit, through prayer, the Christian

   …takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the government of the universe; he prays dictatorially; when it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine; he follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change His mind, and act otherwise than He does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I. The fact of the matter is, religion is quite un-American when you take into consideration the views of the men who started this country up. Here are a few of their remarks on the subject of religion, and as you read them, you ought to keep in mind the agenda of today’s born-again Christian zealots and their misappropriation of the label “patriot” to define themselves: Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying, “In the affairs fo this world, men are saved, not by faith, but by want of it.” John Adams wrote, “This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.” Thomas Jefferson noted that “in every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty: he is always in allegience with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own.” James Madison said that

during almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. And even as late as the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln confessed, My earlier views at the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them. Can there be any doubt that if they were alive today, none of these quoted gentlemen would be electable to any public office? So corrupted, so perverted, has their Republic finally become, so estranged from its original values, that none of the simpering sheep posturing as “patriots” today would dare to endorse their views. Orwell’s predictions have been borne out in fact – today, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, and if the views of the fundamentalist Christian movement were translated into law, four hundred years of philosophical enlightenment would be cancelled out, negated, revoked. A theocracy of American Christian Ayatollahs would rule, and Jefferson would turn over in his grave. I know that in public schools they ignore or gloss over the ideas that launched America, just as they never tell you that Shelley was an atheist, or that Mark Twain hated Christianity and used to ridicule it. Instead, they give us “Ode to a Skylark” and “Huckleberry Finn,” innocuous works that won’t offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities, or provoke anyone to think. They don’t tell you about Sand Creek or Ludlow in Colorado history classes. They show us only the brightest facade of history, so that we won’t be disturbed by the sordid things our leaders have done. And even if they do tell you about Little Big Horn, they make Custer out to be some kind of hero. They’ve even erected a “memorial” to the swaggering braggart on the battlefield, so that we won’t develop any sympathy for the “savage pagans” he and his ignorant rustics came to slaughter in their tents while they slept. One thing’s for certain: they never give you the unvarnished truth, and I’ll wager they’ll never make The Age of Reason required reading in any of their educational factories. Big Brother would be proud of them. But if we are to “return” to any values, I must insist: why not just return to the values of Tom Paine, the values upon which this country was really established? Or has everyone forgotten?