Religious Society of Friends

The Religious Society of Friends is presented in Common Sense as a religious community whose political testimony becomes a test of the boundary between religious conviction and public authority. Thomas Paine does not attack Quaker belief as such; he challenges representatives who oppose political action while publishing a political intervention, arguing that their own doctrine of divine government makes their position inconsistent and that they cannot represent the whole community.

The political testimony and its claimed authority

Paine addresses the representatives of the Religious Society of Friends, or those involved in publishing a recent testimony on the king, government, and the disturbances in America. He frames his reply as a political rather than theological dispute. Religious accountability, he says, belongs to God, not to other people; his objection is that the writers have entered political affairs despite principles of professed quietude that, in his view, instruct them not to do so.

The dispute also concerns who may speak for the community. Paine accuses the publishers of placing themselves, without proper authority, in the position of the whole body of Quakers. He answers by adopting, pointedly, the same kind of representative posture on behalf of those who approve the writings and principles attacked by the testimony. The maneuver exposes what he sees as a shared lack of title: neither the publishers nor Paine can claim political representation merely by asserting it. His criticism is therefore directed not only at the testimony’s argument but at the authority under which it was issued.

Paine concedes that the testimony’s opening appeal to peace deserves credit. The desire for peace, he insists, is not exclusive to Quakerism but a natural as well as religious wish. He then contrasts the community’s professed quietude with its decision to publish a document that intervenes in a heated political controversy. In his assessment, the testimony combines sound and unsound arguments and draws an unjust conclusion; the very act of publishing it makes the tension between principle and practice visible.

Quietism tested against political change

The testimony declares that setting up or deposing kings and governments is God’s prerogative, that people should not contrive such changes, and that they should pray for the king and for the nation’s safety. Paine tests this rule against the act of issuing a political testimony. If the writers truly believe that government changes belong to God, he argues, they should wait patiently for the outcome of public measures and receive that outcome as divine will. Their publication instead attempts to influence a political question, which leads him to conclude that they either do not believe their stated principles or lack the virtue to practise them.

He presses the argument by tracing what passive acceptance would imply. If every government that comes to power is to be regarded as God’s work, the doctrine would require approval of every change in rulers, including changes achieved through ordinary human means. Paine invokes Oliver Cromwell and the execution of Charles as examples of the difficulty: if government changes are exclusively God’s business, the testimony’s adherents cannot coherently condemn such outcomes as human actions while claiming that no human should participate in political change. His point is not that the Quakers must endorse each event, but that the doctrine they publish appears to entail a passivity their political intervention already contradicts.

Paine also challenges their attempt to combine non-interference with a call to pray for the king and the safety of the nation. He reads the testimony’s conclusion as a return to the very political business its preceding principle had surrendered to God. The tension, in his account, is not an incidental flaw in phrasing: it makes the conclusion fail to follow from the doctrine and reveals the writers’ selective participation in political affairs.

Biblical argument against kingship

The pamphlet’s wider scriptural argument supplies the background to this confrontation. Paine presents the biblical account of Gideon as a rejection of hereditary kingship: after victory over the Midianites, the people offer to make Gideon and his descendants rulers, but Gideon refuses to rule over them and declares that the Lord will rule. Paine treats the refusal as an explicit denial of the people’s right to establish a king, not merely a personal rejection of office. The episode provides a biblical precedent for questioning whether human political arrangements can claim divine sanction simply because a people has chosen them.

He then recounts the Israelites’ later demand to Samuel for a king like those of other nations. In Paine’s reading, the demand arises from a desire to imitate the heathen nations, and the divine answer identifies it as a rejection of God’s rule. Samuel warns what monarchy will entail: the king will take sons for military service and labor, appoint officers, take daughters for household work, appropriate the best fields and produce, and claim servants, young men, animals, and a tenth of the people’s resources. The warning culminates in the people becoming servants and crying out because of the king they chose. Paine uses this catalogue to make monarchy’s costs concrete, presenting extraction, military compulsion, favoritism, and luxury as features of the institution rather than isolated abuses.

The narrative ends, in Paine’s account, with the people refusing Samuel’s warning. Thunder and rain during the wheat harvest frighten them into acknowledging their sin in asking for a king. Paine treats the episode as an unequivocal scriptural protest against monarchy, not as an ambiguous story that can be set aside by a monarchical reading. That interpretation directly bears on the Friends’ appeal to pray for the king: the pamphlet argues that biblical authority cannot simply be invoked in support of kingship when its cited narratives condemn the people’s demand for a king and describe the consequences of submitting to one.

Religious liberty and the political order

Paine’s criticism of political quietism sits alongside an insistence that government should protect religious conscience. He argues that government’s duty is to protect conscientious practitioners of every faith, and that he knows no other business it has with religion. He regards religious diversity as compatible with shared civic life, even beneficial to the exercise of Christian kindness; different denominations, in his image, are members of one family with different religious names. The argument distinguishes protection of belief from the use of religious authority to settle political disputes.

That distinction also informs his proposed constitutional order. A Continental Charter, he argues, should secure freedom and property and, above all, the free exercise of religion according to conscience. A charter would bind the whole community to uphold the rights of each part, including religious liberty, rather than leave those rights to the discretion of rulers or factions. He further insists that the constitution must be established before individuals are delegated to administer it, so that authority rests on a publicly agreed framework rather than on the power of a fortunate conqueror.

Paine connects these institutional proposals to representative government and civic accountability. In his account of an emerging colony, people first gather beneath a convenient tree to deliberate, with each person having a natural right to a seat. As population and distance make universal assemblies impractical, they may entrust legislation to elected representatives, but frequent elections are needed to prevent the elected from forming an interest separate from the electors. The same concern shapes his proposed continental arrangements: assemblies would be annual, representation more equal, and the Congress subject to a charter defining its authority. These proposals illuminate why he objects to the Friends’ political testimony: public authority should be conferred through accountable representation, not assumed by a religious faction speaking for a larger body.

Paine’s verdict and the dispute’s consequences

Paine concludes that involving religion in partisan political disputes risks discrediting religion and harming society. He objects that the testimony implicates people who disavow its publication, and warns that it could weaken continental harmony and friendship. This last charge gives the controversy a practical consequence: a body’s intervention under a collective religious name may divide the community and damage the cooperation needed to establish a new political order.

The disagreement is therefore not simply between political engagement and peace. Paine accepts peace as a shared religious and human aspiration, and describes separation from Britain as the route to lasting peace between the two countries. His objection is that a claim of religious quietude cannot coherently be used to condemn political change while simultaneously intervening in the struggle over government. The Religious Society of Friends becomes the focal point for a larger argument about who may speak in public, how political authority should be constituted, and how religious freedom can be protected without making religion a party instrument.