In a move supporters consider common sense, Thomas Paine is one step closer to getting his own memorial in Washington, D.C.
On Wednesday, Sept. 16, the House Natural Resources Committee unanimously approved a bill to erect a memorial to Paine near the Capitol and the National Mall in an area reserved for memorials to figures of preeminent and lasting significance to the country.
HR-9600, the “Common Sense 250 Act of 2026,” is sponsored by Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Victoria Spartz, R-Ind. With committee approval, the bill now moves to the full House for a vote. If approved there, the bill would have to pass the Senate and be signed by the president.
Although Thomas Paine is a well-known Founder of the nation, his particular views are not popular with modern-day evangelicals.
Although Thomas Paine is a well-known Founder of the nation, his particular views are not popular with modern-day evangelicals.
He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), two of the most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution. He also helped inspire Colonial-era patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain.
But as an advocate for Enlightenment-era ideals of human rights, Paine sometimes ran afoul of the most religiously pious of his peers. He ridiculed Christianity and made fun of George Washington, whom he called an incompetent general and hypocrite.
The bill currently before the House calls Paine “America’s indispensable and unsung Founding Father.”
At his death on June 8, 1809, only six mourners attended his funeral.
Thomas Paine (Wikipedia)
“Today the Natural Resources Committee said Thomas Paine deserves a memorial in the company of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln,” said Margaret Downey, president of the Thomas Paine Memorial Association. “Paine gave this country its argument for independence and then shouldered a musket to help win it. We are grateful to every member of the committee who voted to move this bill forward.”
In earlier testimony before the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands, Freedom from Religion Foundation Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor said Paine deserves to be memorialized.
She traced Paine’s role in the nation’s founding to soon after his arrival from England at Benjamin Franklin’s invitation in 1774. “Common Sense,” published 250 years ago this January, sold an estimated 500,000 copies when the 13 colonies held 2.5 million people. Paine relinquished the copyright and gave the proceeds to the Continental Army, then enlisted as a private in 1776 and marched with George Washington through that first winter campaign. The experience produced the first of the “Crisis Papers” (“These are the times that try men’s souls”) in 1776, which Washington ordered read aloud to soldiers to keep up morale.
Of his own religious beliefs, Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
Despite some of his peculiarities, Paine is an essential Founding Father.
Colonial historian Jack P. Greene has said: “In a fundamental sense, we are today all Paine’s children. It was not the British defeat at Yorktown, but Paine and the new American conception of political society he did so much to popularize in Europe that turned the world upside down.”