James Hrynshyn has a post in which he notes a passage in which Christopher Hitchens defends his rhetoric in God Is Not Great by appeal to Thomas Paine.
I think I see what Hitchens is getting at, but the passage seems written in a confusing way that might easily be misunderstood. The work of Paine's that was tremendously influential was not The Age of Reason, but Common Sense. CS was published in 1776, whereas (as a commenter notes) AR was not published until well after all the fundamentals of the U.S. system of government were worked out and in place. CS notably does not have any virulent criticism of religion; it spends a good deal of one chapter, for instance, arguing that the Bible does not support monarchy as a form of government, in order to persuade those who would appeal to the Bible as an authority in the case.
Tracing influences is tricky, but I'm inclined to think the truth of the matter is this: AR quickly became a classic for freethinkers, but it had relatively little influence outside the circle of people who already agreed with it; it was for a short while very widely read in America, and one of the causes of a small, and very temporary, deistic revival. And it was well-liked by enough freethinkers that they kept in publication. But for the most part its result, both immediate and long-term, was to force almost everyone sympathetic to Paine's overall views to distance themselves from him because of his rhetoric. And most of what influence it did have in the wider world may have had little to do with its rhetoric and a great deal to do with sympathy for Richard Carlile, the clever book publisher who was put on trial for publishing the work and used the trial as advertising. Common criticisms of the work from freethinkers and non-freethinkers alike included: (a)despite Paine's intelligence, he simply showed in the work that he didn't have sufficient knowledge of religion to present a criticism of it worth taking seriously; and (b) it showed more dogmatism than reasoning; and (c) it was lopsided and tendentious, ignoring contrary evidence and alternative interpretations. Hmmm, perhaps Hitchens is right to regard Paine as a predecessor, since those criticisms sound familiar....
Paine is certainly a deist; but I don't think it's quite correct to say his deism is 'nebulous', as Hrynshyn does. (There is a tendency to conjoin automatically 'deism' with the adjective 'nebulous', for some reason; I'm not sure why. But not all deists are fairly characterized as 'nebulous'.) He's actually very specific about a great many theological issues; he speaks at great length, in lyrical language of the design argument, of which he is one of the period's most passionate defenders. It is perhaps notable, incidentally, that Paine is very explicit as to the reasons he is attacking the Christian churches so fiercely in AR; and one of the reasons is that he thinks they are proposing a view of the world that is very close to being atheistic ("as near to atheism as twilight is to darkness" as he puts it in one place). There is a certain irony in Hitchens appealing to Paine as an ancestor given that Paine's rhetoric was inspired in part by an intense loathing of anything that he thought suggestive of atheism. Christianity was too much like atheism because it had too much man and not enough God, too much politics and not enough awed reverence before the Author and Designer of creation. AR, indeed, is not put forward primarily as an attack on organized religion, but as an expression of faith in God, a faith that would brook no hypocrisy or mental lying; he makes this clear in the book, and was clear again when discussing the book with others (e.g., in letters to Samuel Adams).
