Even before 1776, American liberty and equality were expressed in church and civil covenants and compacts, like the 1620 Mayflower Compact. Alexis de Tocqueville makes much of such covenants and compacts in Democracy in America, arguing that religion lies at the core of American character and sustains the American experiment in democracy. Christianity, in his view, is especially well-suited to supporting liberty, equality, and self-government, as it naturally rules over hearts and minds without relying on state support. Uncontested in the intellectual and moral realm, Christianity lifts the democratic soul upward, beyond the petty material concerns that tend to consume men’s minds in democratic ages. At the same time, Tocqueville argues that Christianity must accommodate itself to democratic equality, especially the love of material wellbeing and distaste for forms it engenders.

　　Tocquevilles argument raises important questions about whether Christianity is a prerequisite for liberty and equality. This in turn presents interesting challenges for thinkers who stress the value and vitality of religious pluralism within the American experiment, but also for those who assert the need for greater state support of Christianity. The symbiosis between democratic self-government and religion Tocqueville envisions is attractive, with religion taking liberty by the hand to “sanctify its efforts.” But the balance he envisions may be elusive. Christianity ultimately aims not at what will support democratic pluralism but what will build the Kingdom of God.

　　Christianity, Equality, and Democratic Self-Government

　　Tocqueville’s main subject, what most impressed him during his trip to America in 1831–32, is equality, which he takes to be the essence of democracy. He describes the march of equality as a providentially guided force he is powerless to halt, a force he regards with a “religious terror.”He traces the roots of equality not to self-evident principles or natural rights championed by Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke, but to the church’s inclusion of clergy from all classes in its ranks, and to Christianity’s teaching that all are equal before God. Christianity has equalized moral duties and sanctified suffering.

　　Tocqueville is less than thrilled at the prospect of ever-increasing equality. While he concedes it may be more just than the hierarchical societies of aristocratic ages, he stresses that it will also, in the best case, produce societies that are less grand. There will be less illiteracy, but fewer geniuses, less poverty, but also less opulence. There will be more trustworthiness, but less pure virtue and greatness of soul. Much of Democracy in America also describes a new path toward despotism that is opened, and a new form of tyranny that might emerge amidst the democratic revolution. Religion, which he piquantly dubs “the first” of the American “political institutions,” serves as one of the principal ballasts against democratic despotism.

　　Tocqueville also notes a particular connection between equality and Christianity in America. Society, he claims, tends to merge religious and political ideas: “Allow the human spirit to follow its tendency, and it will regulate in a uniform way political society and the holy city; it will seek, if I dare say so, toharmonizeearth with heaven.” In New England, the Christianity planted by Puritans and Separatists is democratic and republican in form. American Christianity is shaped and delimited by equality, even as it was equality’s primary progenitor.

　　The feature of Christianity that Tocqueville most values, thinking mainly about the role of religion in democracy, is its general moral and spiritual framework as a basis for lifting the soul toward eternity.

　　Tocqueville argues that in Puritan New England, we see the roots of American liberty: willing submission to divine law. The Americans, he believed, had successfully merged the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. Religion provides salutary limits to the field of legislation. In proportion as the field of self-government becomes free and open, religion’s influence and the constraints it imposes must grow; religion is more necessary in the republic than in an authoritarian regime. Political liberty, if it is not to unravel into tyranny, relies on a salutary tyranny of the majority supplied by religion.

　　Tocqueville considers Christianity especially suited to reign in ages of equality and liberty. He writes:

　　Christianity, even when it demands passive obedience in matters of dogma, is still of all religious doctrines the one most favorable to liberty, because it appeals only to the mind and heart of those it wants to bring into subjection. No religion has so disdained the use of physical force as the religion of [Jesus Christ].

　　What keeps religion’s influence strong in America is precisely that it is not imposed or established by government authority. In France and Europe, where the church became intertwined with governmental power, its influence collapsed with the old regime. Since religion imposes its influence indirectly through the mores in America, it stands apart from and above the fray of the shifting political scene. Religion stays “free and powerful in its sphere, satisfied with the place reserved for it.”

　　In Volume II, Tocqueville argues Christianity is more suited to liberty and adaptable to the democratic age than Islam, partly because it naturally resides at the intellectual and moral level. Whereas Islam includes detailed prescriptions for all of life, including society and politics, Christianity teaches very general moral principles, leaving a wide field for legislation and self-government:

　　Mohammed made not only religious doctrines, but also political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and scientific theories descend from heaven and placed them in the Koran. The Gospel, in contrast, speaks only of the general relationships of men with God and with each other. Beyond that, it teaches nothing and requires no belief in anything. That alone, among a thousand other reasons, is enough to show that the first of these two religions cannot long dominate during times of enlightenment and democracy, whereas the second is destined to reign during these centuries as in all others.

　　Christianity is most at home in the sphere where religion naturally rests, focused on winning hearts and minds, the sphere in which it must remain if it is to retain influence in a democratic age.

　　Caveats and Qualifications

　　There are important caveats and qualifications to Tocqueville’s claims. The first is what we might call the “tentativeness postulate”: religious leaders play an essential role in the functioning of a democratic republic, but to maintain authority they must not overplay their hands. For example, religious leaders cannot push too hard against the taste for material well-being characteristic of a democratic society. They must downplay their emphasis on forms and non-essential doctrines. There are limits to the sway religion can have, and it cannot push too hard against the materialism equality engenders.

　　A second, related caveat to Tocqueville’s case for the importance of religion, and Christianity in particular, is a degree of indifference about the ultimate truth of religious claims and manifest concern for their salutary effects in the here and now, notwithstanding his recommendation for religious leaders to bend only on nonessential teachings and not core dogmas. Whatever the traditional religion in a society, even if it is Islam, Tocqueville recommends effort to preserve it.I am reminded of the line from President Dwight Eisenhower, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” (Though there is a bit more context to the remark.)

　　Tocqueville expresses his seeming indifference to religion’s actual claims in the emphasis he places on certain doctrines like the immortality of the soul and general duties toward God and neighbor, not unlike political philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, who argue for a generic civil religion containing these sorts of doctrines. These teachings are, no doubt, salutary for society, but they are nested within or flow from more fundamental tenets of the faiths from which they derive. For example, in Christianity, the claim that the Bible is revelation from God, that Jesus is Lord and God, that His sacrificial death on the cross atones for our sins, that He gave the mission of spreading the gospel to the church, form the essence of Christianity, its reason for being. The veracity of those claims would seem a subject of public concern, even if they are not to be finally settled by the state. Tocqueville’s narrow stress on the salutary social effects of Christianity, like promoting civic duty and recognizing we will answer to God in the next life, might even be considered a betrayal of the essence of the faith, witnessing to the grace of God that has appeared for the salvation of all mankind (Titus 2:11).

　　Challenges for Equality, Liberty, and Christianity

　　The claim that Christianity is uniquely suited for liberty cuts across claims in contemporary discourse. On the one hand, the claim contradicts the notion that secularism or pluralism provides a robust basis for democratic self-government, positing instead that Christianity’s beliefs and teachings are best suited to channeling democracy’s excesses and securing liberty. On the other hand, Tocqueville also supplies reasons to doubt that the state should too actively support Christianity. The feature of Christianity that Tocqueville most values, thinking mainly about the role of religion in democracy, is its general moral and spiritual framework as a basis for lifting the soul toward eternity. Christianity’s comfort with remaining in the general moral and intellectual sphere, not dictating details of legislation and civil politics, is what makes it fit for democracy. As Carson Holloway writes, “Tocqueville’s call for modern democracies to preserve their shared religious beliefs is not a rejection of pluralism; it is an effort to preserve the moral and religious foundation on which a successful pluralism can exist.”

　　Is Tocqueville right that Christianity is especially suited to democratic self-government? Is Christianity a religion of liberty and equality? Or does Christianity’s adaptation to democratic self-rule really require major concessions to the spirit of the age? Though it is common to contrast Christianity and Islam with regard to the level of social regulation they prescribe, as Tocqueville did, we might question that judgment. Consider Dutch minister and politician Abraham Kuyper’s famous dictum, echoing the Apostle Paul’s description of the Christian confession that “Jesus is Lord” (Rom. 10:9): “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” Christianity presents claims of significant social and political import, as adherents and foes both understand. Tocqueville’s tentativeness postulate, that religious leaders must temper their demands on congregants and society lest they lose authority, seems in tension with his own point that human society tends to merge ideas about politics and religion.

　　If Tocqueville is right that religion is the first of America’s political institutions, and the democratic republic depends on its salutary tyranny over mores, where does that leave the American experiment in a time of declining religious participation and belief? Is the seventeenth century Puritan experience merely a quaint historical episode, or a formative experience for American character and institutions? How can the paradoxical relationship between democratic self-government and submission to divine law be maintained or revived if it is formative?

　　These questions are salient in the context of general religious decline balanced by growth of segments of Christianity like nondenominational and charismatic congregations, and some signs of religious revival. Republican and democratic Christianity has not managed to maintain the unchallenged dominion over mores Tocqueville observed in the early 1800s; liberty and equality, instead became less and less tethered to their Christian roots. The decline of mainline Protestantism since the 1950s and relative attraction of evangelical Christianity might suggest the centrality of core dogmas and the message of salvation to the resilience of Christian faith, somewhat contrary to Tocqueville’s focus on general moral teachings—though perhaps in continuity with the congregational polity model of the colonial Puritans. 

　　There are a variety of interesting responses to these sorts of questions. Some, like political theorist Francis Fukuyama, argue that Christianity gave birth to equality and human rights, but liberal democracy has transcended its roots. Defenders of Western civilization and liberal democracy need not and perhaps should not cultivate those roots, for fear of rekindling religious wars and conflict over the ultimate ends of human life.

　　But liberal democracy may rely on moral and spiritual resources it cannot itself generate. Brookings Institution analyst Jonathan Rauch’s response to the conundrum in Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy takes this issue seriously, offering a Tocquevillian analysis. His argument that Christianity is a crucial pillar for American democracy is intriguing, not least since it comes from a self-identified “atheist” and “scientific humanist.” He critiques mainline, liberal Christianity for being too “thin,” for failing to provide the moral and spiritual resources on which American democracy depends for “meaning and moral grounding.” He charges conservative, evangelical Christianity with fearfully fostering the pursuit of social position and political power. The bargain he envisions between liberal democracy and Christianity requires Christians to interpret the Bible “in a way which is consistent with the well-being of democratic pluralism,” focusing on three principles he describes as core to both Christianity and liberal democracy: don’t be afraid but trust in God’s judgment, treat everyone with equal dignity, and forgive.

　　Rauch is right to identify these three principles as part of the Christian message, and as compatible with and important for liberal democracy. But those teachings flow from a faith that teaches Jesus is Lord and the only way to God; that all persons, nations, and governments are accountable to Him to do justice and love mercy, even as they have particular duties and roles in society; a faith proclaiming the primacy of the spiritual over the temporal in the final analysis. As Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote, the salutary limits on the democratic state that Christianity suggests come not just from an embrace of certain values consonant with liberal democracy but from Christians higher allegiance to Christ: Communal allegiance to Christ and his Kingdom is the indispensable check upon pretensions of the modern state. Because Christ is Lord, Caesar is not Lord. By humbling all secular claims to sovereignty, the Church makes its most important political contribution by being, fully and unapologetically, the Church. Allegiance to that higher community and submission to that higher authority than the people is, ironically, Christianitys great service to democratic self-government.

　　Political and constitutional theorist Jenna Storey insightfully suggests the metaphor of a difficult but passionate “marriage of opposites” for the relationship between religion and democracy. Perhaps it would be as apt to picture an outright wrestling match, each contender seeking to dominate the other. Of course, a wrestling match may be more or less friendly. The spirit of democratic liberty and the spirit of religion, if they can be balanced, might produce a form of liberty and equality that is bounded; a form of religion respecting liberty, the limited role of the state, and due attention to material well-being. But any particular instantiation of that balance may require a sacrifice of much that partisans of each see as essential to their purposes, particularly if Tocqueville is right that these spirits are jealous, each seeking to shape society in their image.