Early American Literature

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Americans embraced a "freethinking secularism" that sought to be "productive" and "not simply destructive" of religious impulses (ix–x). That claim is at the heart of Leigh Eric Schmidt's compelling exploration of the thought and practice of generations of freethinkers who drew inspiration from Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason (1794, 1795, 1807) and "found religion in and through their own irreligion" (xiii). Invoking Paine's ideals, proponents of this new religious vision sought to "deemphasize the supernatural" and instead "accentuate moral responsibility, intellectual freedom, cosmopolitan universality, and this-worldly progress," all while cultivating practices and building institutions that resembled those of Protestant Christianity (4). Schmidt's rich study offers a nuanced depiction of the competing religious impulses of American secularism, and it chronicles the manifold ways in which Paine and his book remained touchstones of secular freethought.

Schmidt explores three distinct manifestations of the American quest for a secular religion. The first centered on the author of The Age of Reason himself. Paine's bones—lost through a series of attempts to reclaim and move his body after burial—became relics. The desire to recover them inspired a century-long quest among his followers, which reflected, as Schmidt aptly describes it, an "act of secularist faith" (46). Likewise, Paine's followers developed a set of rituals to celebrate his birthday, and they commissioned monuments to serve as sites of pilgrimage. All these efforts revealed how Paine was imagined by nineteenth-century freethinkers. He was not merely the "slashing iconoclast" who assailed Christianity but rather represented the "religious draftsman" of a new system of practice that his followers worked to develop further (29).

Second, many freethinkers likewise sought to develop an array of secular practices, especially related to burial, that countered Christianity's rituals with "humanistic ceremonies that were equally solemn and affective" (72). As Schmidt notes, this goal proved vexing. While the French [End Page 773] positivist Auguste Comte had developed his own set of rituals, the parallels between these and Roman Catholicism rendered them "largely untenable to Protestant-descended unbelievers" in the United States (93). Paine's "philanthropic cosmopolitanism," Schmidt concludes, offered a more palatable religious substitute for American freethinkers than a ritualistic system that struck them as troublingly similar to Catholic practice (112).

And third, also important to many of Schmidt's subjects was the preservation of institutions and the cultivation of community. Many freethinkers followed the example of Octavius Frothingham, who believed that "nontheists were right to move beyond Christianity" but thought "they should retain the comprehensive notions of 'religion' and 'church' as moorings for their own secularity" (124). As Schmidt notes, however, "American freethinkers often mimicked Protestant churches and Sunday schools" when they put this desire into practice (11). Organizations like the Free Religious Association and the Society for Ethical Culture, along with numerous local institutions, reflected this impulse to create "a secular church, a humanistic church, or an ethical church," however much such things might seem "anomalous and ill-fitting," even to freethinkers themselves (160). Indeed, as Schmidt repeatedly notes, many freethinkers had no desire to adopt the trappings of religion.

Considered together, these expressions of the quest for a secular religion confirm Schmidt's assertion that "no founding figure occupied a more canonized role in the nineteenth-century secularist imagination than Paine" (25). The Church of Saint Thomas Paine would tell an important story even if it merely amplified the stories of those freethinkers whose commitment to Paine inspired their continued embrace of the practices, symbols, and institutions of Protestant Christianity.

This book does far more than that, however. As Schmidt persuasively suggests, Paine's argument in The Age of Reason created legacies that lasted long after the height of the book's popularity. Subsequent generations faced the task of negotiating the tensions of Paine's own thought. Echoing Paine's critiques of traditional religion, some freethinkers sought to "be defined by...