ABSTRACT
The popularity of Common Sense and its role in America’s quest for independence have been well documented by historians and scholars alike, thus such a study is not warranted here. What is missing from the historical record, however, is a study of the impact the famous work had upon its author. Of the many holes in Paine scholarship, this is perhaps the most ponderous because Common Sense not only marked the beginning of Paine’s career as a revolutionary pamphleteer, but it fostered the ideological motive for his political activism for the next thirty years. This new direction in Paine’s political career following Common Sense was largely the result of Paine uniting his religious convictions and his political aspirations in one global mission to spread the gospel of deism to the world. The goal of this chapter will be to explore how Paine developed this mission by obtaining a better understanding of how Paine’s political ideology was shaped almost exclusively by his belief in deism.
