Essay 53: “How Religion In The United States Makes Full Use Of Democratic Tendencies”, “The Progress Of Catholicism In The United States” & “What Causes The Minds Of Democratic Nations To Include Toward Pantheism” (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Chs. 5-7)

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 417 – 426 of this edition of Democracy in America.

On The Benefits of Religion to Democracy

Upon visiting the United States, De Tocqueville was enamored of the fact that lovers of liberty and democracy were not enemies of religion, but rather its sincere friends. This was not the case in France, where religion was so bound up with the aristocracy and the monarchy that the French revolutionaries sought to topple the church along with disfavored hereditary institutions. In America, religion and liberty—faith and democracy—found themselves on the same team.

This is important because De Tocqueville believes that religious beliefs are profoundly determinative of human action. Such beliefs influence nearly everything about a person’s conduct: “There is almost no human action … that does not arise from a very general idea that men have conceived of God, of his relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and of their duties toward those like them.” For De Tocqueville, politics is downstream from theology.

Americans’ religiosity is boon to their political life, according to De Tocqueville, because religion counterbalances some of the innate problems of democracies. For example, De Tocqueville says that Americans are Cartesian skeptics, prone to doubt all that is not the product of their individual reason. Yet, one cannot be a thoroughgoing skeptic because one cannot consistently doubt everything without achieving large-scale “disorder and impotence,” so there must be a bedrock of ideas resistant to the corrosive acid of skepticism.

By providing individuals with good, ready-made answers to primordial and perennial questions, religion can neutralize doubt’s corrosive effects and provide this bedrock. Absent these fundamental convictions, one would find a society composed of “enervated souls”—individuals paralyzed by “doubt,” “limitless independence,” and “perpetual agitation.” For, if all is thought to be in flux, then nothing is stable and individuals lose their sense of human agency; however, in a world of fixed first principles, individuals have the stability necessary to be responsible moral agents capable of citizenship and self-government.

Not only does democracy precipitate doubt, it can also generate in individuals a tendency to isolate themselves from their fellow citizens (“individualism”) and promote a love of material well-being (“materialism”). Here too religion has a role to play: “There is no religion that does not place man’s desire beyond and above earthly goods and that does not naturally raise his soul toward regions much superior to those of the senses…. Religious peoples are therefore naturally strong in precisely the spot where democratic people are weak.” In other words, religion turns one’s eyes upward and outward—towards eternal verities and the well-being of the community.

But, De Tocqueville warns, religion should be careful to content itself with furnishing metaphysical beliefs and moral principles and not venture into “political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and scientific theories.” For this reason, De Tocqueville approves of the American institutional separation between church and state (even if he thinks it impossible to separate religion and politics). In this situation, religion can preserve its moral authority without engaging in partisanship.

Because De Tocqueville approves of American religion, he has some tips for preserving its influence in America:

First, religion should be careful not to needlessly multiply the “external forms” of religion—i.e. the rituals, ceremonies, and aesthetic elements of faith. For a democracy, the moral and dogmatic core of religion is more important than its particular presentation or its secondary doctrines. Catholicism, Tocqueville thinks, might take hold in democracies if it focuses on the central moral aspects of religion and downplays the formal elements. Second, while religion must rein in “materialism,” it should not seek to destroy it. The love of well-being is an “indelible feature” of democracies; one can temper it, but never “subdue it entirely.” If religion should ever seek to eradicate acquisitiveness, one should not be surprised to find individuals ridding themselves of religion rather than their material goods. Third, because democracy so depends upon common opinion, religion should only infrequently inveigh against it. Of course, religion must be able to call people to account; however, if religion presents itself as the enemy of public opinion or the exclusive province of the few, it will forfeit its broad public authority.

In all these things, one sees a fine line: religion must combat the defects of democratic society, but not too intensely. Religion must preserve the best of democracy, subtly rebuke its excesses, and somehow maintain public approval. Such is the delicate balance in which every church, pastor, and congregation in America still find themselves.

De Tocqueville famously predicted that American Protestants would inevitably gravitate towards opposite poles: Catholicism or Unitarianism. Here, De Tocqueville was wrong. However, his error in prediction actually proved his deeper analysis to be true, for Protestantism—especially Evangelical Protestantism—exploded in the years after De Tocqueville’s visit to the United States precisely because it could affirm democracy and yet combat its excesses.

In the final analysis, a religion is good for democracy if it can elevate the human spirit, incline individuals to fulfill their moral and civic duty, and forestall materialism. De Tocqueville is fairly confident that most Christian denominations fulfill these goals; however, one “religion” conspicuously does not: pantheism. Because pantheism conflates creator and creation, it can offer no transcendence, only immanence. There is nothing in pantheism to elevate the human spirit to a higher level, and therefore De Tocqueville urges all good people “to unite and do combat against it.”

Jacob Wolf is Assistant Professor of Politics and a Founding Faculty member of the University of Austin (UATX). He was previously the 2020-2021 Barry Fellow of the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Political Science from Boston College. His scholarly and popular writings have appeared in The Political Science Reviewer, Perspectives on Political Science, Interpretation, Public Discourse, VoegelinView, and Modern Age Online.

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