Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson had more in common than Paine and George Washington, post war. Washington was able to use Paine, though, especially in the winter at Valley Forge. It was Jefferson who invited Paine back from France, to re-settle in the United States, in 1802. Jefferson constructed his own bible: Jefferson Bible - Wikipedia Paine's Age Of Reason may have had some influence on Jefferson, who was more careful than Paine not to cross the prevalent Christian culture of the time. In the Age Of Reason, Paine says: "It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one 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 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." [The Age of Reason] Imo, Paine had blind spots in his reasoning. "Professing to believe what he does not believe" does not make much sense to me. What he could have said, and should have said, is that man's major problem is professing to know what he does not know. Ok, maybe there are people who profess to believe one thing publicly, and privately believe another. Today they are called Democrats. But the bigger mischief, leading to bigger crimes, imo, is that people think they know what they do not know.