Tocqueville On Religion’s Role In Democracy

Freedom doesn’t last on parchment alone. We sit down with Dr. Daniel Mahoney to trace why Tocqueville believed that religion—understood broadly and charitably—quietly underwrites the habits that make a republic work. Laws matter, but mores matter more, and the moral culture of a people determines whether constitutions breathe or break. Moving from Puritan townships to the American founding, we explore how early communities paired local self-rule with moral seriousness, teaching citizens to deliberate about justice while tethered to a shared code. That ethic softened over time, yet the deeper pattern remained: religion formed citizens; citizens sustained liberty under law.

We contrast this with France’s revolutionary rupture, where a state-imposed “religion of reason” failed to replace the church it toppled. Tocqueville’s lesson is not to fuse altar and throne, but to keep a public friendship with faith—a separation of institutions without a hostility to belief. We unpack why he saw the Ten Commandments as natural law echoes rather than sectarian impositions, and why he’d likely resist a public square so sterile that biblical literacy is taboo even as other civilizational texts are welcomed. Along the way, we revisit Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s biblical cadence, and the idea that self-government begins with governing the self.

Pluralism doesn’t erase the need for shared moral ground; it makes it more urgent. We talk about religious literacy as a civic skill, empathy for serious belief across traditions, and the common grammar of the good that allows neighbors to cooperate without uniformity. The takeaway is a demanding middle path: neither theocracy nor militant secularism, but a civic order that protects freedom by cultivating virtue. If you value thoughtful conversations about how culture shapes politics, hit follow, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review to help others find the show.

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Transcript

Why Tocqueville Still Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Welcome back to Civics in a year. We are kind of going more with our series on Alexis Satokeville because it's he's been mentioned so many times in previous podcasts. And I am really excited today to welcome Dr. Daniel Mahoney, who is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Assumption University, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and Senior Visiting Fellow at Hillsdale College Graduate Program in Washington, D.C. He has written a lot on Tocqueville. And to be very honest, any scholar that I've talked to is like, you need to talk to Dr. Daniel Mahoney. So, Dr. Mahoney, thank you so much for being here today. We're going to be talking about Alexis to Tocqueville and religion. So, my question is what are Tocqueville's claims about religion sustaining democracy?

Mores Over Laws In Democracies

Puritan Roots Of American Self-Government

Separation Without Hostility To Faith

Liberty Requires Self-Government Of Soul

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Well, that's a wonderful question. And I think it's also a very good entry into Tocqueville's political thought. And I should mention the book of greatest relevance to Americans, Democracy in America, which was published in two volumes, first in French in 1835 and 1840, and remarkably remains an enduring and relevant guide to the discussion of democracy simply, but also the American manifestations of democracy. That book was more than a travelogue. He and his friend Gustave de Beaumont came to America. They saw a successful version of democracy at work, and they compared it very favorably to the more chaotic and revolutionary and haphazard manifestations of democracy and democratic revolution in France and Europe. But Tocqueville is also a political philosopher who gave much thought to the habits and mores that underlie democracy at its best. Tocqueville famously writes in Volume One of Democracy in America that while laws are important, the mores, the manners, the morals, the, we might say the moral and political culture of a free people are even more important than the laws. Because he says, you know, Mexico had almost the same constitution of the one they adopted in the 1820s, and it didn't quite work because the mores of a free people weren't there to sustain it. So Tocqueville thinks religion is, and by religion he primarily means the Christian religion, although not exclusively, I think, but he thinks religion is absolutely essential to shaping the character, the habits, and the thinking of democratic peoples. I mean, he traces the coexistence, the interaction of the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion in America back to our pre-founding with the Puritans. There is a wonderful, a wonderfully engaging chapter in the first volume of Democracy in America, where Tocqueville talks about the point of departure of the Americans. And he doesn't uh trace our initial point of departure to 1776 or 1787. I mentioned those because of the Declaration of Independence and the constitutional founding. He traces it to the Puritans. But he, of course, has much to say about our constitutional order. But what the Puritans brought was self-government in small communities, kind of morally and civically serious communities. And they combined what we would call Republican self-government with a strong emphasis on religious observance, on moral rectitude. And Tocqueville thinks that coming together of moral seriousness rooted in religious affirmation and free politics, of citizens deliberating about the advantageous and the just. I just quoted Aristotle, who's another helpful guide to civic things. That remains utterly relevant to post-1776, post-1787 America. But but Tocqueville knew that some of the laws in Puritan America, Puritan New England were too strict. Some were bizarre and tyrannical, holding hands, couples holding hands in public, you know, locking people up for signs of drunkenness, long hair, and all this. So America after 1776 is a much more liberal republic. But while Tocqueville favored an institutional separation of church and state, particularly at the national level. Because, you know, states had established churches as late as 1840 and they were not prohibited by the Bill of Rights. But Tocqueville did not favor what some people call following one reference in one letter from Jefferson, an absolute wall of separation between religion and politics. So Tocqueville did not believe that a free people or a free government should be religiously neutral, neutral between atheism and religion, for example. And that meant we ought to encourage religion. Statesmen ought to take religion seriously. We, we, we, Tocqueville thought it would be a terrible mistake to think that people can be, you know, morally uplifting without at least some religious horizon. Doesn't mean you have to, everyone's going to be a believer, but with least some sense that we live in a purpose of universe. That the, you know, something like the Ten Commandments, that these are not just, you know, developments of evolutionary psychology as some social scientists would today, but they're rooted in the very structure of reality, natural law or divine command. Tokother was absolutely essential because he says otherwise we relax the political tie. We give people more and more freedom. And it is exceedingly unlikely that people will exercise that freedom in an elevated, uplifting, and civically serious way. So Toqville says in the middle of volume one of Democracy in America, maybe people in a despotism can live without faith, but not in a democracy. Because we have we have Togville understood what self-government meant. Self-government did not just mean, in some important respects, we govern ourselves, through our representatives, through laws we ascend to, through the art of association and local liberty, all very vital things discussed by Tocqueville in Democracy in America. But we also govern ourselves. We govern our passions. We are not ruled. When a man or woman is a slave to his or her passions, you are hardly free. So liberty under law. Tocqueville has a wonderful phrase in his sister volume, The Old Regime and the Revolution, the French Revolution, published 20 years after Democracy in America, that he supports government under God and the law. In other words, liberty is not license, it's not anarchy, it's not absolute autonomy, it's the self-government of free and responsible individuals. Institutionally, Tocqueville thought the church, in this case the Catholic Church, had been too tied to the French old regime. And so when the old aristocratic monarchical order was dispensed with in 1789, the revolutionaries dispensed with the Christian religion. They had a religion of reason, and it was year zero, and they threw out the Christian calendar ten days in a week. You read French history, you know, uh Robespierre was finally overthrown after his terror, you know, on the ninth of Thermidor in the year two. Well, that was all rooted in anti-Christianity. You get rid of the calendar, get rid of everything that preceded the revolution, year zero with tabula rasa. Americans did not do that. Our constitutional order presupposed a moral order that owed much to the Christian centuries.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

So you talk about, excuse me, you know, mores and things like that. So it's not that Tocqueville thought religion should have, you know, this immediate place in government, but it was more about religion needs to have a place in society. Is that correct?

France’s Break With Church And Aftermath

The Indirect Public Role Of Religion

Beyond Radical Secularism And Fundamentalism

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yes. He speaks about the indirect role of religion in shaping democracy and shaping the character of citizens. But we want to make clear Toqhville thought there had to be some political inscription for religion. And that meant Toqhville would have found it incomprehensible that some people would think posting the Ten Commandments in state capitals or state legislators violated the separation of church and state. The non-establishment of religion did not mean that the Ten Commandments, as C.S. Lewis points out in the Abolition of Man, something like the Ten Commandments are upheld by almost everyone of different religions. You know, uh maybe not some of the specific references to Yahweh or Jehovah, but there's no society on earth where murder is considered good, where lying is considered better than a falsehood, where lack of fidelity in marriage is considered a virtue, or stealing your neighbor's property is considered to be okay, illicit. So the idea that political leaders and citizens have to privatize religion in such a way that they kind of stick it in the bathroom. You know, it's a private activity, a private thing. We don't use any of the language of religion in the public square. I think Tocqueville would have been appalled by that. But on the other hand, Tocqueville never said and would never say explicitly, America is a Christian nation. It's a nation whose character and institutions are unthinkable without her biblical heritage. But that is different than saying our institutions are explicitly grounded or founded in revealed religion. So, in other words, he doesn't adopt the kind of ACLU position that any entanglement, quote unquote, of religion and politics is a violation of the First Amendment and a terrible threat to freedom. On the other hand, he doesn't think the, you know, the interaction or interpenetration of religion and politics can be so direct as it was in France before 1789 or in Puritan New England in the 1700s. So I think Tubville provides a really good foundation for thinking about a public and civic role for religion that honors both religious freedom and the institutional separation of church and state without making, and this is what so many people who impose, who misread the First Amendment as radically secularist, they end up imposing radical secularism as our state religion. You know, and that's that's something very different. You know, the idea, I mean, we can teach the Quran, we can teach the Bhadavagita in public schools, because that's you know other civilizations, but we can't teach the Bible. Well, I'll obviously, if you're teaching the Bible in an explicitly theological way, that would raise some problems. But reading it as a great work of wisdom, as central to our civilization, and taking some of its claims seriously, if not in a sectarian way. I mean, it's crazy that we would somehow see that as we we went from being a nation where, you know, when Abraham Lincoln spoke to the American people, his Republican rhetoric was also a biblical rhetoric. He was the crisis of the house divided, you know, and all that. He's constantly alluding to or citing or reiterating the King James Bible. And we're increasingly a biblically illiterate people. And part of that is we've banned the Bible as a book that can be studied publicly, civically. That's a mistake. And again, there's a middle path between fundamentalism, sectarianism, and radical secularism. And I think Tocqueville provides that. I think many of the founders provide it. Most of the founders, I think, understood that religion was something that aided Republican citizenship. The most famous example is probably, I bet you Professor Caris or someone else has talked about George Washington's farewell address. Oh, yes. The farewell address makes very clear that if we want, we need a moral people, people who obey the roaths, people who obey the law, people who honor each other, who have a sense of civic concord. And Washington says, well, we could imagine an individual here and there of a peculiar character who can do all those things without religion, but not many. And so Washington certainly says in his farewell address that he thought free institutions presuppose a belief in a supreme being and the encouragement of that belief. But again, he did so in a way that was not specific to any denomination or sectarian tradition. And it's it's interesting, the courts in the 20th century sort of lost sight of this rich American tradition, and they started resorting to a much more absolutist and doctrinaire approach to church-state separation that ignored our founding principles, ignored the wisdom of Tocqueville, ignored 150 years of American experience. And so I think we need to rethink these things in a serious way. And I think this rebirth of uh of civic reflection is a real guide to doing so, because you know you just can't take your bearings from the latest Supreme Court decision. You have to say, you have to say, what is what does the American tradition say about these goods? What does it say about these things? And and Toqueville certainly remains the the most thoughtful interpreter of the American tradition who did not, was not a leader or statesman within that tradition.

Lincoln, Biblical Rhetoric, And Literacy

SPEAKER_01 16:56

It sounds like you're talking about religious literacy too, right? Like understanding other religions and understanding. You know, I just did a podcast interview with Dr. Tim Hall, and he talks a lot about religious literacy and having an understanding because it does make you more empathetic. It makes you kind of a better citizen of the world. So Tocqueville's talking about, you know, religion.

Religious Literacy And Civic Empathy

Pluralism, Shared Morality, And Meaning

SPEAKER_00 17:26

Religious literacy is part of it. Okay. I think religious literacy also demands some empathy toward a religious point of view. We don't want to just treat it as, you know, a coat of many colors and they do it this way. Yeah. We want to take seriously the spiritual, the moral, the human claims of the great religions. I much prefer an approach that sees dignity in all the great religions rather than one says, I'm spiritual, not religious. I do this, these are my values. All that's pretty superficial. But to say, you know, it's hard to adjudicate between the great religious traditions is a way of taking them seriously and not just defaulting to indifference. And and it's certainly quite possible for a Muslim or Hindu, I think, with their own religious views, to read themselves in a Tokvillian way, to see their faith affirmations as contributing to the cause of self-government. But I think Toqhvel thought Christianity offered something in particular, maybe Judaism. The biblical God created us free. The moral law, what some people call the natural law, is available to reason, not just revelation, like the Ten Commandments, but it has a link to religion that gives it, you might say, heft, you know. And yeah, I think overcoming ignorance of religion is a good first step. But I also think, you know, Tookville has a beautiful line in Democrats in the America. He says, well, he thinks atheism will never triumph. He says, religion is natural to the human heart, it's natural as hope. I think human beings naturally believe that, you know, the good is not arbitrary, that, you know, that there's some support in the structure of reality for our highest aspirations. I mean, some people are existentialists, you know, the famous remark of Lady Macbeth, you know, the life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, it's hardly really hard to sustain human happiness, well-being, civic well-being based on that kind of nihilism. And so I'll add one more thing. I think Americans today are too hung up on pluralism. Pluralism is a fact. We have people from many different ethnic groups, races, religions. And some people say, well, we have a pluralistic society, therefore, we can't have any shared understanding of how we live together. I think that's silly because I think people from diverse backgrounds, even diverse religions, diverse traditions, nonetheless are human beings who have a sense of fellow feeling, have a sense that the meaning of life isn't in just doing your own thing or in material gratification. And you know, uh and and Tok feels really good on this. He says something in these the the human soul cries out for more than mac material gratification. And so religion serves two important philosophical roles. It reminds us that we're more than brutes. We're not just animals. We are insoled. We have a higher destiny, however, one interprets that. And it also frees us from the joyless quest for joy, you know, just thinking the pursuit of happiness is, you know, more money or more this or more material goods. Not to belittle those things. You can't do very much without some material goods. But religion, you know, it orients the soul in a higher direction and reminds us to put our material self-gratification in perspective. And if Tocqueville primarily had in mind the Christian religion, the vast majority of Americans were Christian in 1830, and Christianity remains the most important religion in the American context. The sheer fact of pluralism doesn't mean that that religious impulse, those hopes, that that sense that materialism is enough. That still very much remains. I've never really understood the argument because we have diversity in society, we you know we just have to give up on talking about the civic good or the moral good. I think a free people, a pluralistic people, still has higher moral, religious, and civic aspirations.

unknown 22:17

Dr.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Money, thank you so much. I feel like I always joke that I'm getting an honorary PhD from all of the scholars I get to speak with because to be very honest, I didn't know a whole lot about Alexis de Tocqueville. And you know, Professor Careese had mentioned to Tocqueville a couple times, and then I had done a podcast with Eastern States, the historical site, and that came up, and I'm like, I just want to know more about this person. And he is so multidimensional, he has so many thoughts on so many different things. So I really appreciate you digging into religion with us and what Tocqueville thought. So thank you so much for your expertise.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

And I could add that the way we did it, sort of just trying to give a general overview of Tocqueville, taking one theme that's vitally important to him and that's connected to his political philosophy and civic reflection and letting, you know, pursuing that road. That's very helpful, you know. It's it's very concrete. And you see, yes, Tocqueville had so much to offer on this front that could guide us and guide us in a way that could bring people together. Because his position, as I said, it's not, you know, religious fundamentalism, but nor is it religious indifference or secular radical secularism. So, you know, it's a a it provides help for the great civic project that we're all trying to encourage.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

Yes. Thank you so much. You're welcome.