Tip-Off #216 - Democracy's Religion
"Faith, left free, disciplines liberty. Compelled, it corrupts both." - Alexis de Tocqueville.
July 4th
Asked why the Constitution's Preamble omitted a customary invocation to God, Alexander Hamilton reportedly quipped, "We forgot it."
At the time of the American Founding, most Christians believed that all truth came from God. Any sound idea—whether from Scripture, antiquity, or Enlightenment philosophy—was recognized as compatible with divine truth. Religion's task was to foster civic morality and prepare citizens for republican self-government.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman and perceptive outsider, saw in American democracy both a warning and a model. Writing not as an academic but as a curious traveler, he saw in the American government a glimpse of Europe's future.
After two years in the United States, he published the first volume of Democracy in America (1835), a work still cited for its enduring insight into the fragile balance between liberty and equality. For years, historians regarded Tocqueville as one of democracy's keenest observers. His name is heard less today; those who once invoked his localism defend the very centralization he warned against—executive power swollen beyond anything a republic should tolerate, now controlling the other branches of government,
Tocqueville believed that American self-government could thrive because of, not despite, religion. Faith, kept separate from the state, helped cultivate habits of restraint and the common good. "Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith," he wrote. Without that foundation, liberty unravels.
However, when morality moves from persuasion to force, it does more harm than good. Tocqueville would have no patience for today's godly pretenders—America-firsters or anxious moralists invoking Christian nationalism or "illiberal democracy"—seeing in these efforts a form of insecurity posing as conviction. "I would prefer to chain priests within the sanctuary," he remarked, rather than let them direct public life. The more faith seeks to govern, the less it governs itself.
Tocqueville wrote as a social observer, not a theologian. His concern wasn’t doctrine but democracy. He foresaw a Protestant drift toward Unitarian rationalism and, on the other hand, a Catholic revival among the more spiritually inclined. But he also anticipated something more diffuse and, to him, more troubling: pantheism—not as a formal creed, but as a cultural mood that exalts the holiness of all things while blurring the boundaries between them.
In his view, once God dissolves into the landscape, equality may feel secure, but at a cost. Conviction yields to feeling, autonomy to comfort, awe masks submission. Worship slips into self-regard, and citizens risk ceding freedom to paternal power—becoming what one critic calls “altar egos.” Personal choice disappears, and society grows content with a god who asks for nothing in particular.
This roomy spirituality makes space for Emersonian transcendentalism, séance parlors, incense-heavy ritual, evangelical highs, and a zeal for purity. What links these disparate movements is not a common vision, but a sensibility that romanticizes personal experience, with the self as both seer and source. Without a shared compass, religion drifts from public duty to private atmosphere—something felt rather than followed, to the convenience of ruling authorities.
When religion dissolves into sentiment, civic life grows hollow. A public that drifts from concrete duty becomes easier to manage by corporate overseers or illiberal forces—each offering the same goods religion once supplied: fulfillment, identity, and transcendence.
Tocqueville warned that the pursuit of equality and individualism in democracy could lead to social atomization, weakening communal bonds and making individuals more vulnerable to manipulation. This, in turn, fosters restlessness and political apathy, leaving citizens susceptible to charismatic leaders and, in today's terms, to conspiracy theories.
Religion, when rightly placed, anchors liberty without coercion. But when it conforms to politics or dissolves into sentiment, it loses both authority and utility. Its public role depends not on official status but on inner discipline and common recognition. Without this, civic life devolves into spectacle or resentment. What religion provides is not control but restraint—an inner boundary that prevents outer freedom from turning on itself.
Tocqueville offered not policy but principle—no program, only a question: what sustains freedom when its rituals grow hollow and its foundations fade? His answer lay in attentiveness and habits that integrate inner conviction with public action.
The world has changed beyond Tocqueville's imagining, yet the forces he observed still shape our choices. His hope lay not in restoring a lost order, but in recognizing what still exists beneath the surface—an invitation, not an instruction.
Democracy is no country for sanctimony of any stripe. Tocqueville, a Catholic by tradition and conviction, would have echoed Scripture: "Judgment begins with the household of God."
In America, chastened faith fortifies liberty, defies tyranny—and never wraps itself in the flag. Tocqueville would say it steadies the democratic soul when the world feels unhinged—never more so than now.
Notes and reading
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America - Volume I and II (1835 and 1840). - “Faith left free. . .” Part One, Chapter 17, “Principal Causes Which Tend to Maintain the Democratic Republic in the United States.” Adapted.
Joseph J. Ellis - Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2002). See discussion of the Constitution’s drafting and Hamilton’s role. Ellis, a leading interpreter of the American Founding, was a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.
“Making America Gothic Again: Reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America Today,” Paul Keen, New American Studies Journal, Issue 75 (2024). Democracy harbors the potential for new forms of despotism—today, the rise of Donald Trump. Keen is a professor and associate dean at Carleton University, specializing in 18th- and 19th-century literature, especially its political dimensions.
"The Omnipresent Threat of Democratic Pantheism: Redeeming Liberty” - Aurelian Craiutu, Law and Liberty (August 15, 2012). Craiutu is a professor of political science at Indiana University, where he also directs the Tocqueville Program.
Regime Change - Patrick Deneen (2023). Deneen is a leading voice in a new conservatism that sees liberalism as a failure and calls for a political order rooted in the common good—one that cultivates virtue through the exercise of state power. For Tocqueville, the exercise of political authority to enforce virtue subordinates freedom to managed security and moral conformity. See Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Part 4, Chapter 6. - Deneen is a professor of government at Notre Dame and founder of Postliberal Order, a journal advocating politics grounded in the common good and tradition over liberal individualism. (Personal: I disagree with Patrick, but he is a respected colleague.)
"Judgment begins with the household of God." - 1 Peter 4:17.
Tip-Off #215 - A Charged Field
Tip-Off #214 - Divine Comedy, Gloomy Prophet
"True religion," to borrow from James, is a stiff drink to the hypothermic democratic soul. Your post offers to warm us until we can feel the pain in our extremities--a first step in recovery.
My favorite sentence here: “Without a shared compass, religion drifts from public duty to private atmosphere—something felt rather than followed, to the convenience of ruling authorities.”
And here's one of the sharpest, clearest, and most condensed statements on the subject of religious practice and civic life that I've come across: “Religion, when rightly placed, anchors liberty without coercion. But when it conforms to politics or dissolves into sentiment, it loses both authority and utility. Its public role depends not on official status but on inner discipline and common recognition. Without this, civic life devolves into spectacle or resentment. What religion provides is not control but restraint—an inner boundary that prevents outer freedom from turning on itself.”