Row 16: "Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst." Row 17: "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." Row 18: "All national institutions of churches... appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." — all attributed to Thomas Paine.

These quotes are accurately drawn from *The Age of Reason* (1794-95) and represent a real, extensive, historically significant critique — Paine devoted an entire two-part treatise to attacking what he saw as the fraud and cruelty of institutional, revealed religion, and it should be presented accurately as such rather than downplayed. But the crucial fact the row omits is what Paine affirmed, which he stated as clearly and emphatically as what he denied. The very opening lines of *The Age of Reason* read: 'I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.' Paine was a committed theist and deist, not an atheist or naturalist — he argued that the created universe itself was the authentic 'word of God,' knowable through reason, and that revealed religion (scripture, church creeds, priesthood, miracles) had corrupted and obscured that natural knowledge of God with fraud and superstition. His target across all three quoted lines is specifically *revealed* religion and *institutional* churches — 'the creed professed by' each named church, 'national institutions of churches' — not theism or belief in God as such, which he explicitly affirms elsewhere in the same book. Reading these lines as evidence against Christianity's truth-claims in general, rather than against organized/revealed religion specifically, is an equivocation between two things Paine himself carefully distinguished.

Paine's critique, properly understood, is evidence from a fellow theist for a claim many serious Christian thinkers also take seriously — that institutional religious power can be, and historically often has been, corrupted and abused (a concern shared by the Hebrew prophets' denunciations of corrupt priesthoods, e.g. Jeremiah 23, and by the Reformers) — while his own natural theology (creation as evidence of a designing God) is itself an argument classical Christian apologetics has long employed, not a rival to it.