Was Thomas Paine a quaker?

Thomas Paine, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Thomas Paine answers

I was born into it and I left it, though it never entirely left me. My father was a Quaker, and I was reared among them; I think I may be admitted as a witness of what that people are.¹ They have no priests and no bells, they take remarkable care of their poor, and they are as careful of the education of their children, for the seeds of good principles are laid early.¹

But I was never a Quaker in the sense of holding to the meeting and its discipline, and in the year 1776 I had no scruple about saying so in print. When the Quakers took up their principle of peace in the midst of the war for America, I told them their practices were the reverse of their doctrine, and that never did the conduct of men oppose their own profession more notoriously than the present race of them.²

The public had a right to complain of it, because the consequences were pointed against a cause in which the whole community was interested.² I held then, as I hold now, that a man is not to be persecuted for his religion, but neither may he shelter a treasonable wound to the common peace behind it.³ What I kept from them was the inner light.

Reared among that people, I could readily use the phrase word of God for anything in the Bible that approved itself to my own mind, and I drew a divine condemnation of monarchy out of the first Book of Samuel in that way.⁴ When John Adams asked me whether I believed the Old Testament inspired, I told him I did not.⁴ And as I observed in my own day, the people called Quakers were in the early part of the century substantially Deists; my theism was a birthright, however much I dressed it in the language of the Bible.⁴

Even at the Convention, when Marat taunted me that I voted against the death of the King because I was a Quaker, I answered that it was humanity that governed me and not my religious principles.⁵ A Quaker by birth, then, and a deist by conviction; I never belonged to a church, for my own mind is my own church.

Sources

1. I am a descendant of a family of that profession; my father was a Quaker; and I presume I may be admitted an evidence of what I assert.

   The Writings of Thomas Paine Vol 4, 1794-1796

2. never did the conduct of men oppose their own doctrine more notoriously than the present race of the Quakers.

   The Writings of Thomas Paine Vol 1, 1774-1779

3. We persecute no man, neither will we abet in the persecution of any man for religion's sake

   The Writings of Thomas Paine Vol 1, 1774-1779

4. Like the Quakers among whom he was reared Paine could then readily use the phrase \" word of God \" for anything in the Bible which approved itself to his \" inner light,\"

   The Writings of Thomas Paine Vol 4, 1794-1796

5. Ce n'est point, dit il, comme Quaker, qu'il ne vota pas La Mort du Roi mais par un sentiment d'humanité, qui ne tenait point à ses principes religieux.

   The Writings of Thomas Paine Vol 3, 1791-1804