Reconstructing Religion-contra-Democracy in Tocqueville's Democracy in America

To Tocqueville, the ideal relationship between religion and democracy is one of tension, not partnership. Although Tocqueville is often taken as a staunch admirer of America's religion, this article shows how Tocqueville, through his delicate handling of both the positive and negative tendencies of Jacksonian Protestantism, not only anticipates common criticisms of American religious culture today but also offers theorists the conceptual tools to sympathetically (though substantively) critique that culture. Through a close textual reading of Democracy in America, this article reconstructs Tocqueville's idealized view of the role religion should serve in a commercialist democracy, while attending equally to the failures of American religion to serve those goals. Having built up this conceptual framework, it then takes a Tocquevillian lens to examine contemporary religious culture. Although Tocqueville proves to be no apologist of American religion, he does offer one source of hope for democratic soul crafting: philosophy and public moralism.