The saga of Paine’s missing bones began when William Cobbett, the cantankerous agrarian radical, hatched a plan to repatriate Paine’s remains from America to England. The never-resolved quest to find the exhumed contents of Paine’s casket marked the secular cause’s first major movement toward something like cultic observance.
It all starts, fittingly enough, with the legacy of Paine himself-and more precisely, his mortal remains.
The doomed labors of its prophets furnish Schmidt’s narrative. With its Sunday School lesson plan so short on specifics, the religion of humanity was wide open to entrepreneurial innovators. “Even in the hands of its most illustrious proponents,” he writes, “the religion of humanity was often little more than pleasant bromides, refined in tone and short on detail.” Take, for example, the secular movement’s most widely quoted (and misquoted) maxim, Thomas Paine’s signature aphorism that “the world is my country, and my religion is to do good.” Global citizenship and universal goodwill are far easier to proclaim in the abstract than to pin down in the world there’s a reason, after all, that the freethinking Paine himself died far from his English homeland, a thinker widely (and unfairly) dismissed as a naïve-at-best adherent of the most rigid and Olympian brand of Enlightenment rationalism. And more pressingly, as Schmidt observes, the brave new rationalists didn’t produce very much in the way of coherent doctrine or ritual observance.
The initial cohort of secularists overestimated their own world-transforming powers, while also dismissing the endurance of believers. Princeton University Press, 272 pp., $27.95īut as historian Leigh Eric Schmidt shows in his lively tour through the expansionist heyday of the secular creed, the longed-for golden age never really got off the ground.
0 kommentar(er)
