Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., was revving up a crowd of tens of thousands gathered in Philadelphia for the first major No Kings protest last June. His speech, like the demonstration itself, was focused primarily on pushback against President Donald Trump, whom critics such as Raskin likened to a would-be monarch.
But after railing against the president, Raskin paused to focus on one of his favorite Founding Fathers: Thomas Paine, an English-born political writer who supercharged the American Revolution with his wildly popular pamphlet “Common Sense” 250 years ago.
Noting that he named his own late son after Paine, Raskin recalled the corset-maker-turned-revolutionary’s dream of an America that would operate as “an asylum to humanity.” Paine, he told the crowd, envisioned “a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from religious and political and intellectual and economic repression from around the world” — and then helped spur a revolution to make it a reality.
Less than a month later, at the inaugural service of Christ Church DC — a congregation organized by self-described Christian nationalist Doug Wilson and attended by influential conservatives, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — Pastor Jared Longshore delivered a sermon that held up Paine not as a hero, but a cautionary tale. Longshore dismissed Paine as someone who “exalted human reason to the place of a golden calf,” an apparent reference to Paine’s deism and his criticism of organized religion’s entanglements with political power.
“Thomas Paine actually lost all of his old friends,” Longshore said, standing at a pulpit underneath an American flag. He then implied Paine’s fall from grace could be the ultimate fate of modern progressives, saying: “Only a few mourners came to his funeral, and even the Quakers wouldn’t let him be buried in their cemetery. That’s tough. Shows you how people used to think and how people are thinking now.”
The contrast captures not only Paine’s contested place in American memory, but the larger political and religious debate in the US over whose founding vision should govern.