Leigh Eric Schmidt, "The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism" (Princeton UP, 2021)

New Books in American Studies · Dec 8, 2021 · 1h 13m

In his new book, The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2021), Dr. Leigh Eric Schmidt tells the surprising story of how freethinking liberals in 19th-century America promoted a secular religion of humanity centered on the deistic revolutionary Thomas Paine and how their descendants eventually became embroiled in the culture wars of the late 20th century. After Paine’s remains were stolen from his grave in New York, and shipped to England in 1819, the reverence of his American disciples took a material turn in a long search for…