3 Lessons on Religion in Democracy
From Tocqueville's Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville was sent by the French government in 1831 to study the American penal system. But that was just the funding proposal. His real interest in America was democracy.
Tocqueville grew up in an Aristocratic and traditionally monarchical society that had undergone two major revolutions in recent decades. And what fascinated him about America was that, unlike in Europe, here was a nation FOUNDED as a democratic society. It didn’t have to revolt its way into it.
I returned to his classic account of his travels, Democracy in America, for Hildegard College’s recent Great Works Seminar. Actually, it’s tonight, and I excited to mix it up with the educators, professionals, parents, and students who tend to join these events. Each time I read Democracy in America I find it more relevant than the last time.
This time, though, I was struck by Tocqueville’s treatment of religion and specifically by the complex but powerful connections he draws between religion and democracy.
Here are a few of the lessons he gives:
1. In a democracy, LIBERTY and RELIGION reign in the same soil.
What Tocqueville does not mean by this is that religious people experience more political freedom.
He writes,
I have seen among us [in Aristocratic society] the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty almost always march in opposite directions. Here, [in America] I found them intimately united with each other: they reigned together on the same soil.
For Tocqueville, American democracy is an interruption in the so-called progress of Enlightenment philosophical thought. “The philosophers of the 18th century explained in a very simple way the gradual weakening of belief,” he writes. Essentially, the received narrative of Enlightenment philosophers says that the more free a society is, the less religious it will be. “It is annoying,” he observes, “that the facts are not in accord with this theory.
Tocqueville views America as an “enlightened” nation. He doesn’t mean intellectual enlightenment per se but instead a kind of widespread consciousness and ownership of the political structure. By law and as practiced in small local ways by most free American citizens in the 1830s, the people are responsible for self-governance.
But as predicted by Rousseau or Kant, this should mean that they are proportionally less religious because more of their lives are accounted through political and civic activity. For example, there is no king who has a “divine right” to rule. Additionally, there is not religious obligation to fall in line with the class that God’s providence has afforded you.
What interests Tocqueville about American democracy is that the country most thoroughly inundated with freedom to rule and individual rights nevertheless professes widespread religious fervor. The reason for this, he says, is the American insistence on the separation of church and state.
…which leads him to a second lesson he offers about religion and democracy:
2. Politics can increase religion’s reach but in-so-doing greatly limits religion’s power.
Tocqueville is led to this conclusion by observing that American democracy inspires religious practice and is indeed founded upon Christian values, but the ardently held separation of church and state creates a psychological scenario where matters of state are detached from religious morality.
He makes the fascinating comment that, unlike in Europe at the time, American religion (that is, democratic religion) provides a kind of license to think and act in the political and civic realms without any spiritual consequence. He writes:
I learned that, . . . when they are sincere . . . there is not more sin in erring in matters of government than there is in making a mistake about the way to build one’s house or plow one’s field.
It’s a fascinating analysis not only because does it reduce opinions about government to technical knowledge rather than moral knowledge but also because it attributes this apparent secularizing of politics to democratic religion. The upshot is that religion in America, he says, more comprehensively affects the conscience of the majority.
Again, he it’s a relationship of proportions.
By allying itself with a political power [as in Aristocratic and monarchical societies], religion increases its power over some and loses the hope of reigning over all.
We might assume that a government that refers to certain religious dogmas for its authority and in making laws would induce greater religious consciousness in its citizens, but the opposite is the case. That’s because the more religion is tied to worldly matters the more fragile it becomes. Suppose that a certain social group disagrees with the laws that a religious government makes. They’re bound to direct their political cynicism toward the religious dogma that informed in.
By the same logic, the more a public differentiates the political realm from the spiritual one, the more durable religious belief and political values will be. But this comes at a price — what Tocqueville describes as a kind of averaging out of political and religious opinion.
Still, he sees in America a certain utility to religion. Religion is useful. Just as political action is reduced to a sort of secular technology for freedom, so in some sense does religion become a technology for democracy.
…which leads to the third lesson:
3. In democracies, religion must be ultimately free from the authority of reason.
In other words, Tocqueville thinks that the strength of American democracy derives partly from the fact that religion is confined to the realm of belief, not of deduction and rational deliberation.
His reasons for thinking this are circumstantial but compelling.
First, he says, humans have an inherent interest in forming beliefs about God and the soul. They desire that their actions are accountable to a higher cause, that their decisions be based in duty, and that the authority that obligates them be eternal and absolute. In other words, we want (even need) deep religious values.
But, Tocqueville observes, American democracy is unsuited to people forming these deep beliefs. For one, Americans are busy. The conditions of equality and their sense of self-governance pattern their lives according to the laws of efficiency and practicality. There was more onus on the Americans of the early 19th century to own personal opinions about government, civic order, economics, and general ethics than was experienced in the Aristocratic societies of Europe. But as a result, Americans lacked the bandwidth and leisure to subject religious opinions to the same rational scrutiny. In fact, if they were to, that effort would impede the progress of democracy, since, as Tocqueville thinks, democracy thrives on the separation of church and state.
Therefore, the political consciousness of Americans requires religion to be separate and durable, protected in a sense from the bustling scrutiny of civic discourse and rational deliberation. And so he writes:
General ideas relative to God and human nature are therefore, among all ideas, those which it is most suitable to remove from the habitual action of individual reason and regarding which there is most to gain and least to lose in acknowledging and authority.
So that’s what democratic Americans do: they confine religion to the authority of the heart, as informed by the general revelation of scripture and by the dogma of the church — insofar as such revelation and dogma stays out of their political opinions.
In essence, Tocqueville offers an early secularization thesis.
He tells the story of democracy in America as one of secularization, where the world becomes less and less explainable with reference to God.
So many accounts of the secularization of western societies have been written. Some point to the Enlightenment. Some to medieval nominalism. Some to the individualism of the Protestant Reformation. Some to the Romantic movement. Some to material factors like industrialization.
But Tocqueville’s secularization story is unique because, in his observation, Americans were astoundingly religious, even as they kept religion out of the political realms over which it generally reigned in Europe.
I have more questions than I have answers about the implications of Tocqueville’s secularization story. One of them is whether his observations have proven to be true 200 years later.
But I’ll conclude with one final observation. And it’s that the secularizing of politics (the removal of church from the state) in American democracy and the confining of religion to the realm of personal faith does not imply that religion actually had less influence over American politics. Another way of saying this is that demonstrating the utility of a certain form religious consciousness for politics doesn’t suggest that such religious faith is therefore less durable. Just because religion is used, like a technology, to serve political ends, doesn’t mean religious is false.
Instead, Tocqueville thinks that the usefulness of religion for democracy is a testament to the universality of religion in general. Moreover, he thinks that the symbiotic relation between religion and liberty (if we think that humans have innate rights) speaks to religion’s inborn authority over the individual mind and the political association alike.
Religion sees in civil liberty a noble exercise of the faculties of man; it sees in the political world a field freed up by the Creator for the efforts of the intellect. Free and powerful in its sphere, satisfied with the place that is reserved for it, it knows that its empire is established all the better because it reigns only by its own strength and dominates the hearts of men without help.
Liberty sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the safeguard of mores, and mores as the guarantee of the laws and of its own durability.
Year 2 at Hildegard College is done!
We finished the term with student pitches before a panel of entrepreneurs and business leaders. Here they are:
Dave Cieminis – Co-Founder of Able Grid & Ramp Energy, Entrepreneur, and Business Development Expert
Ashley Honoré Smith – Senior VP of Brand Strategy & Communications at Finance of America.
Ariel Corrales – Communication Coach & Operations Manager at Decker
Lucas Baerg – CFO of PriceSpider
They heard student pitches on businesses in industries including agriculture, theater, and health, to name a few.