Thinking beyond boundaries: Thomas Paine today

By Chris Highland

What can a revolutionary thinker from the 18th century offer us today? Reflecting on the enduring power of Thomas Paine’s ideas, Chris Highland explores the importance of independent thought, expansive perspective and critical inquiry in responding to the political and religious tensions of our time.

Chris is a teacher, writer and humanist celebrant living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was an English-born journalist and pamphleteer from Thetford, Norfolk, a key figure in both the American and French Revolutions. Author of Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, he was a deist whose radical advocacy of reason, liberty and independent thought has led many to see him as a forerunner of modern secularism and humanism.

Teaching another course on Thomas Paine at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, I’m struck once again by his revolutionary ideas — still as ‘sharp as Washington’s sword'.

After reading selections from Common Sense, the pamphlet that helped ignite the American Revolution, and Rights of Man, which sought to spread the fires of revolution across the globe, our class turns to Paine’s explosive work, The Age of Reason.

The Age of Reason remains as challenging today as it was in the 1790s, prompting both theists and non-theists to rethink established beliefs. In our time of rapid change, Paine’s mindset may be exactly what we need to inspire us. As he wrote in Common Sense, ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again’. He was not only referring to political change, but also to the questioning of religious authority and inherited belief.

Paine was no atheist, yet neither was he a traditional religious believer. Could we call him a humanist? I think the argument could be made, though I’m not sure it’s necessary. Let him be the revolutionary thinker he was without additional labels, though he was a loud and proud defender of deism – the view that a creator exists but is known through nature and reason rather than through sacred texts or organised religion.

For Paine, the true ‘Word of God’ was to be found in nature itself, not in sacred texts. This left human-made religions and their scriptures out in the cold, while his conception of a deity was vastly greater than the gods people imagine and call 'great'. His writing took particular aim at established Christianity, which he described as a ‘species of Atheism.’  This stunning criticism reflects Paine’s view that Christianity misrepresents the ‘virtuous reformer’ Jesus by elevating him above humanity and surrounding him with what he saw as an implausible legend. For Paine, ‘true theology’ was to be found in nature itself — in the use of reason to understand the world — rather than in religious doctrine, which he saw as having become entangled in superstition.

How can Paine’s challenge to established religious beliefs help us respond to the extremes of our own time? To my mind, his genius lies in expanding our perspective – urging us to think beyond the boundaries we construct for ourselves, whether religious, political, social, or personal. Among the many passages in The Age of Reason that encourage this broader outlook, one particularly striking example is Paine’s reflection on the ‘immensity of space’. In that vastness, the Earth appears ‘like the smallest grain of sand’ or ‘the finest particle of dew’. When our thinking becomes too narrow, his answer is to widen our view — to enlarge our sense of the world we inhabit. He introduces this idea with a simple but powerful analogy (emphases added):

‘It is not difficult to gain some faint idea of the immensity of space in which this and all the other worlds are suspended, if we follow a progression of ideas. When we think of the size or dimensions of a room, our ideas limit themselves to the walls, and there they stop. But when our eye, or our imagination, darts into space, that is, when it looks upward into what we call the open air, we cannot conceive any walls or boundaries it can have; and if for the sake of resting our ideas we suppose a boundary, the question immediately renews itself, and asks, what is beyond that boundary?’

He then imagines taking up both a microscope and telescope:

‘If we take a survey of our own world … of which the Creator has given us the use as our portion in the immense system of creation, we find every part of it, the earth, the waters, and the air that surround it, filled, and as it were crowded with life, down from the largest animals that we know of to the smallest insects the naked eye can behold, and from thence to others still smaller, and totally invisible without the assistance of the microscope. Every tree, every plant, every leaf, serves not only as an habitation, but as a world to some numerous race …

'[Our solar system contains many] moons, of which our Earth has one that attends her in her annual revolution round the Sun, in like manner as the other satellites or moons, attend the planets or worlds to which they severally belong, as may be seen by the assistance of the telescope.’

Paine invites us to use the tools of science and reason, alongside our own observation, to see the world more clearly. In doing so, he offers a measured response to the anxieties of our age: to look beyond our immediate concerns and towards the wider natural world – near and far – remembering both how small we are in its immensity and how deeply connected we remain within a network ‘crowded with life’.

Over 200 years ago, this radically independent thinker posed questions that still echo like 18th century musket blasts: What is our place within the ‘crowd of life’? Can we practise humility as but one member of that crowd, without arrogantly assuming a superior role? How might Paine’s expansive vision encourage us as humanist freethinkers to act with reason and conscience – and a greater awareness of our own egos and limitations? And will we be seduced into narrow forms of nationalism, or aspire instead to be world citizens, as Paine suggested: ‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good’ (Rights of Man, Part Two).

If we respond to Paine’s call for revolutionary change, how can we ensure that our pursuit of freedom does not limit the freedoms of others? Are we willing to turn our critical thinking back on ourselves, and make space for a diversity of views and beliefs? If we fail to do so, we risk forgetting an important lesson: it is what comes after a revolution that matters most. A republic, like a religion, must learn to balance freedom with responsibility, both in the present and for the future. History offers many warnings of how one generation’s reformers can become another’s enforcers of orthodoxy.

Paine was among the first to expose the dangers of an ‘adulterous’ relationship between church and state. He warned that when religious and political authority become intertwined, they can restrict open inquiry and suppress dissent. That warning feels especially relevant today, as many humanists in the United States are increasingly alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism and its influence on the current administration. Paine’s response was uncompromising: such developments must be resisted, and both religion and politics must remain subject to reason and open scrutiny.

Paine saw the work and wonder of a Creator in the cosmos, yet he also believed that ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again’. With or without God, it is reason that must guide us. We are, in that sense, creators too, with the capacity to shape our governments, our beliefs and our world.

It would do us well, as humanists, to take up the pen, the principles and the perspective of a true revolutionary – Thomas Paine.