Thomas Paine, a deist, argued for independence from the Book of Samuel

Here is a paradox worth a minute of your attention. The most influential pamphlet of the American Revolution was written by a man who would later publish a book attacking organized Christianity and the Bible, and he built his central argument out of the Bible.

That is not a trick. It is a fact about the audience. When Thomas Paine sat down in Philadelphia in the winter of 1775 and 1776 to persuade the colonists to give up on the King, he reached for the book he knew they all knew. That choice tells us more about colonial America than many a thick history of the period.

Let me lay out the case in order: what Paine argued, which passages he used, why he could count on his readers to follow, what happened to his reputation later, and what the episode shows. I will state the skeptic's view fairly as I go. I will give you the claim at the start, so you can check me against the evidence. The claim is this: the American argument for independence spoke in a biblical vocabulary, and even a man who rejected Christian doctrine could not make a case for liberty to Americans without it.

Who Paine was, and what he wrote

Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England, in 1737. He worked as a corset maker, a tax collector and a schoolmaster, with little success. In 1774 he emigrated to Philadelphia, carrying a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, and he found work as a magazine editor. By late 1775 he was writing a long pamphlet on the quarrel with Britain. It was published anonymously in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776, under the title Common Sense.

The timing matters. The fighting at Lexington and Concord had happened in April 1775. The Second Continental Congress had issued the Olive Branch Petition to the King in July. Most colonists still described themselves as loyal subjects seeking redress, and the great majority of colonial leaders had not yet publicly called for independence. The King's own response, a proclamation declaring the colonies in rebellion, had arrived in the fall, and many Americans were beginning to ask what they were loyal to.

Common Sense answered that question with a bluntness no other writer had dared. It said that monarchy itself, not just the policies of one king, was a mistake. It said that America's separation from Britain was both necessary and right. It sold at a pace the colonies had never seen for any publication. Estimates of the total vary, and I will not give a number I cannot source, but it was widely read and widely discussed in taverns, at army camps and in legislatures. Six months later, the Declaration of Independence would draw the same conclusion in the language of a state paper.

The first argument: Gideon and the refusal of a crown

Paine's attack on monarchy ran through a section of the pamphlet that dealt with the origins of kingship, and he drew on the Hebrew Bible to do it. He pointed first to the Book of Judges.

In Judges 8, the people of Israel, delivered from the Midianites by Gideon, offer him a crown. They say: rule over us, you and your son and your grandson. Gideon answers in verse 23: "I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you." That is the King James text, which the colonists knew by heart.

Paine's use of the passage was direct. Here was a man, the hero of the nation, offered the throne by popular demand, and he refused on the ground that rule belonged to God alone. The suggestion was plain: if the best of the judges thought that kingship was a usurpation of divine authority, how could a hereditary monarch in London claim to rule by right?

Paine added a point about the pagan origins of kings. He argued that government by kings was first introduced into the world by the heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. The claim, in his telling, was that the monarchical form came out of idolatry and not out of the plan of the Almighty.

The second argument: Samuel's warning

The stronger passage comes from the First Book of Samuel, chapter 8. The elders of Israel come to the prophet Samuel and ask him to give them a king, "like all the nations." Samuel is displeased. He prays, and God tells him to listen to the people, for they have not rejected Samuel; they have rejected God from ruling over them. Then God tells Samuel to warn the people solemnly, and to show them "the manner of the king that shall reign over them."

The warning that follows is one of the most powerful passages in the Bible on the nature of government. A king, Samuel says, will take your sons for his chariots and horsemen and plows. He will take your daughters to be cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your grain and your flocks. And "ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day." The people refuse to listen. They say: "Nay; but we will have a king over us."

Paine used this passage with real force. He wrote that the Almighty had here entered his protest against monarchical government, and that this was true, or else the scripture was false. That is a formulation designed to catch a believing audience in a logical bind: if the Bible is God's word, then this is God's testimony against kings, and anyone who wants to defend a king has to explain away the text.

A modern reader may look at the argument and think it is a stretch. Samuel's warning is addressed to Israel, which was a unique case, and the story ends with God telling Samuel to give the people what they asked. Paine's reading is selective, and, as we will see, he was answered by readers who said so. But as rhetoric, it was devastating. It put the burden on the defenders of the Crown.

Why Paine could count on his readers

Paine did not pick these passages at random. He picked them because he was sure the audience would recognize them.

Think about the reading world of 1776. The Bible was by far the most widely read book in the colonies. Many families owned little else. Children learned to read from it. Sermons were the main form of public speech, and ministers preached at length on political subjects, including liberty, resistance and the duties of rulers. When a political pamphleteer wanted to make an argument, the common coin was Scripture.

A well-known study by the political scientist Donald Lutz, published in the American Political Science Review in 1984, counted the sources cited in American political writing between 1760 and 1805. The Bible was the single most cited source, accounting for roughly a third of the citations. I am giving that from secondary accounts of the study, and you can check the exact percentage there. In fairness, those accounts note that much of the Bible's share came from sermons printed as pamphlets, and that without the sermons the Bible was cited about as often as classical or common-law sources. The numbers matter less than the direction: in the generation of the Revolution, Scripture was one of the main sources that American political writers drew on.

That is why Paine's choice is revealing. He was not a churchman. He did not need to be told what would persuade. He knew that a case against kings would travel farther if it was clothed in a text the reader already respected.

The loyalist reply

A fair account has to include the other side, and the other side was not stupid.

Loyalists answered Paine, and a number of them used Scripture too. Charles Inglis, an Anglican clergyman in New York, wrote a reply in 1776 titled The True Interest of America Impartially Stated. The loyalist argument, put in its strongest form, was that Paine had misread the Bible. Samuel's warning was addressed to a particular people at a particular moment, and the Scriptures elsewhere say, in the Epistles of Paul and Peter, that believers should be subject to the governing authorities and honor the king. If the New Testament commands obedience to rulers, he argued, then it was bad exegesis to use the Old Testament to justify rebellion.

That was a strong argument, and the patriot clergy had to answer it. Many did, and they did it by appealing to a long tradition of the right of resistance to tyranny: the idea that rulers who violate the rights of the governed lose their claim to obedience. That tradition ran from the English Civil War through Locke and was familiar to American ministers. It is the argument that sits behind the Declaration's list of grievances.

My own view is that Inglis scored points on the text and Paine won the larger argument. The question the colonists were asking was not a point of Hebrew exegesis. It was a question about whether a king who levied taxes without consent and sent soldiers into their towns still had a claim on their loyalty. Paine's use of Samuel gave them a way to say, in the language they trusted, that he did not.

The later Paine: The Age of Reason

Paine's story took a turn that his early readers could hardly have imagined. In 1793 he was in France, where he had gone to support the Revolution, and he was arrested in December during the Terror and imprisoned in the Luxembourg prison. He had finished the first part of a book called The Age of Reason just before his arrest, and it was published in 1794; a second part followed in 1795.

In that book, Paine professed belief in one God and in the duty of doing justice and loving mercy, and he attacked what he called the corruptions of organized churches. But he also criticized the Bible directly, rejected the divine inspiration of Scripture, and mocked parts of it. Many Americans, who had once read him with gratitude, were appalled. His reputation, which had been enormous, collapsed. He returned to the United States in 1802 and lived his last years in relative obscurity. He died in New York in 1809, and by most accounts very few people attended his funeral.

The irony is complete. The man who used Gideon and Samuel to move a Christian people toward independence lived to write a book they considered an assault on their faith. One reasonable reading is that Paine used Scripture in 1776 as an instrument. Another reasonable reading is that he, like many deists, respected parts of the moral tradition of the Bible while rejecting its claims to revelation. I do not need to settle that. Either way, he did not use the Bible by accident. He used it because it was the language of the people he needed to persuade.

What the episode shows

Here is the conclusion, as plainly as I can state it, with a few premises.

1. The Revolution's rhetoric was biblical, even in the mouth of a skeptic. If a man who later wrote a book against the Bible still found Samuel and Gideon the best weapons available, then the Bible was woven into the political thought of the people.
2. The idea that rulers answer to a higher law is a biblical idea. The narratives of Gideon, Samuel, Nathan confronting David and the prophets rebuking kings all say that the ruler is under a judge. That is the root of the principle that the Declaration states when it says rights come from a Creator.
3. The Founding was not a secular project. It was not a theocracy either. It was a political movement that drew on Scripture, English law, classical history and Enlightenment philosophy at once. The honest account includes all four.
4. Liberty and the Bible were not strangers. The common claim that religion has always sided with kings does not survive the pamphlet that did more than any other to turn the colonists against one. The pulpits of New England had been preaching resistance to tyranny for a generation.

I would add a caution against overreading. The Bible does not mandate a form of government, and sincere Christians have argued for monarchy, for republic and for many things in between. Paine's use of Samuel was an argument from a text, not a proof. What the episode shows is not that Scripture dictates a constitution, but that a people steeped in it reached for it when they needed to say why they were free.

Where to read more

On this blog, the biblical vocabulary of the Founding recurs. The seal that Franklin and Jefferson wanted is told in Pharaoh, the Red Sea and the Great Seal design Franklin and Jefferson wanted. The earlier colonial case for resisting a bad ruler is in The Boston sermon of 1750 that taught colonists when to resist a king. The Declaration's claim that rights come from a Creator is examined in Why 'created equal' is a claim about God and not just about politics. The deeper question of how Jerusalem and Athens together shaped the West is in Jerusalem and Athens, the two cities every free society still lives in. And an earlier American protest against slavery, from believers who read the same Book, is in The 1688 Germantown protest and the believers who started abolition. The Declaration is at the site's Constitution page, and the Founders' own writings are on the founders page.

The case in brief

1. Common Sense, published in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776, argued against monarchy from the Hebrew Bible, citing Gideon's refusal of a crown in Judges 8 and Samuel's warning about kings in 1 Samuel 8.
2. Paine used Scripture because his readers knew it. By one scholarly count, the Bible was the most cited source in American political writing of the era, though much of that came from printed sermons.
3. Loyalists such as Charles Inglis answered him with Scripture of their own, and the debate shows that both sides were arguing from the same Book.
4. Paine's later Age of Reason (1794 and 1795) attacked the Bible and ruined his reputation, which makes his 1776 choice of sources more telling, not less.
5. The episode shows that the language of American liberty was biblical, and that a ruler answering to a higher law is an idea the colonists had learned from Scripture.

What you can do: read 1 Samuel 8 and Judges 8 for yourself, then read the first pages of Common Sense from a public-domain edition and see how Paine used them.