Awakening, usually dated as covering the period from 1800 to 1830, see
McLoughlin 1978, pp. 98–140). But perhaps more than anywhere else, his
aim here was less to describe than to instruct—and it is easy to understand
why his readers, still smarting from the trauma of the French Revolution, would
have been especially concerned about the role of religion in the‘new world’
Tocqueville had explored.
After the Constituent Assembly’s law of 12 July 1790, enacting the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy (which required the clergy to be elected, and forced
clergymen to swear an oath of allegiance to the revolutionary regime), few
issues were more divisive in France than the relationship between the Catholic
Church and the French state (Perreau-Saussine 2012, pp. 69–80). The growth
of ultramontanism—associated with the writings of Joseph de Maistre—
ensured this remained so despite Napoleon’s concordat with the Vatican
and the Restoration.
Little wonder, then, that Tocqueville considered‘the organisation and
establishment of democracy in Christian lands’as the‘great problem of our
time’(Heclo et al. 2007, p. 6). And although he had lost his faith in his youth,
his‘highest aim in entering political life’, he declared in a letter to his brother,
‘was to play some part in reconciling the spirit of freedom with the spirit
of religion, and the clergy with the new social order’(Perreau-Saussine
2012, p. 74).
Set against that background, Tocqueville advanced three crucial conten-
tions inDemocracy in America. First, far from being weakened, the separation
of Church and State strengthened the churches, as it distanced them from the
vicissitudes and always dubious fortunes of politics, giving them the aura of
permanence. Second, in a democracy, individuals, instead of turning away
from religion, had an even greater thirst for it, as itfilled the vacuum left by
the disappearance of other forms of legitimate authority and assuaged the
materialism andanomiedemocracy engendered, while meeting those needs in
a manner consistent with democracy’s promotion of abstract, impersonal
reasoning. Third and last, religion, without ever intending to do so, made
democracy sustainable, by imposing structure and constraints on the chaos of
choice individuals faced in democratic societies and transforming mere self-
interest into‘self-interest properly understood’, a complex phrase by which
Tocqueville meant self-interest viewed in the light of reason.
In short,‘religion keeps the Americans within certain limits and moderates
their passion for innovation’, so providing ballast to democratic society; for
‘how could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral
ties are not tightened?’(Kaledin 2011, p. 307).
It would be easy to view Tocqueville’s argument as crudely functionalist—as
the claim that since‘the main business of religions is to purify, control, and
restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History