TOCQUEVILLE AND RELIGION - part 1

The Problematic Relationship Between Religion And Democracy


“Their mutual centrality is not surprising. Politics, after all, deals at the most general level with the organizing principles and symbols of the entire society. Religion, in turn, provides values which give meaning to human life, placing any given set of social or political events in a broader framework of significance.” – Daniel Levine

Alexis de Tocqueville astutely observed that the “spirit of religion” was an essential factor in the success of American democracy. Unlike other social observers of his time and since, Tocqueville did not trace American political culture and institutions solely back to the rational traditions of John Locke, John Stuart Mill and other Enlightenment philosophers. Tocqueville believed that it was essential to go back to the starting point of a civilization in order to best understand the normative framework or national character of a people. In most cases, these early beginnings of European nations are lost in the mists of time, but the United States, according to Tocqueville, offered a unique case in which the beginnings were relatively recent and well documented. Rather than only looking to the Scottish Enlightenment to explain the apparent success of democracy in the United States of the 1830s, Tocqueville carefully examines beliefs, mores, institutions and motivations of the early Puritans of New England to discover the normative framework that makes the U.S. a unique example of democracy and civil society.

Tocqueville believed that Puritan political culture provided a normative basis for American constitutional democracy. A key element of the Puritan influence on the American political system was the belief in popular sovereignty, which Tocqueville calls a “generative principle,” which spread from New England to the rest of the colonies. Early examples include the Mayflower Compact and other covenants which established the right the people under God to form a "civil body politic." Democracy at the level of the local township was predominant in New England by the mid-seventeenth century. Puritan political processes were very democratic and encouraged citizen participation. Despite Great Britain's overall jurisdiction, democracy prevailed in the local townships with the making of their own laws, raising taxes, and judicial accountability (Kessler:784). Due to the separation of church and state, along with the Puritan tradition, the spirit of freedom and the spirit of religion, in Tocqueville’s view, successfully co-existed in the United States and provided a religious fabric to social mores unlike France, where the spirit of freedom led to a strong current of anti-clericalism and even an attack on religion.