Letter to the editor: Applying Thomas Paine's 'Reason' to Trump

In this age of Donald Trump claiming to be Christian, Project 2025, white Christian nationalism aligned with Trump to teach their version of Christianity, and the Bible in schools, schoolchildren and the public should be reading Thomas Paine’s “The Age of Reason” as applied to Trumpism:

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society.

“When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and, in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this?

“Soon after I had published the pamphlet Common Sense in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited, by pains and penalties, every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world.”

Bruce Braden

Carmel, Ind.

The writer is a Mt. Pleasant native.