Separate but Complementary: Tocqueville’s Counsels for Church–State Relations
Studies suggest that most Americans still support the separation of church and state. Significant segments of the population, however, disagree. Catholic neo-integralism sprang up not so long ago, proposing that churches direct government in ways not seen for generations. Other Christians have moved in a similar direction. No doubt such movements are emboldened by the retreat of church–state separation abroad in powerful countries like Russia and China. From the other direction, progressives increasingly suggest the state can require religious people to act against their beliefs, whether by participating in same-sex weddings, having their children instructed in radical gender ideology, or breaking the seal of confession.
The most ardent opponents of church–state separation are a minority. But many are young, devoted, and not going away, and older generations could do a better job of answering them. We all need to remember why, from its beginning, America has tried to keep religion and politics disentangled, and what great benefits that separation has produced for both religion and politics. An excellent place to start is Alexis de Tocqueville’s exploration of the question in Democracy in America.
The First of Political Institutions Never Mixes Directly in Government
In that work, Tocqueville (a Frenchman) presented the observations from his nine-month tour of America in 1830, hoping to explain, among other things, the young republic’s prosperity that had surprised many Europeans. Among the reasons for America’s success, he gives special credit to Americans’ religion, “the first of their political institutions.”
He writes that religion “does not give [Americans] the taste for freedom”; that comes rather from living under “equality of conditions.” But contrary to what today’s secular progressives might think, religion “singularly facilitates” Americans’ use of their freedom. In a democracy where “the law permits the . . . people to do everything, religion” (particularly Christianity, the religion of nearly all Americans at the time) “prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything.” It nourishes men’s natural longing for immortality in “another world,” a longing produced by man’s “disgust for existence [in this life] and . . . [his] immense desire to exist.” To reach that other world (religion teaches) believers must follow moral precepts, which chasten their boldness in political projects. Such ethical restraints kept Americans from becoming like the French Revolutionaries, who followed the logic of secular rationalism into the bloody Terror.
Religion has this effect on politics even though it “never mixes directly in the government of society.” In fact, all Christians in America thought that “the complete separation of church and state” was “principally” what caused “the peaceful dominion that religion exercises in their country.” Tocqueville “did not encounter a single man, priest or layman, who did not come to accord on this view,” at a time when America was, to all appearances, much more religious than today. Christian ministers scrupulously avoided exercising political power, as though from “a sort of professional pride.” They believed that “there is no more sin in erring in matters of government than in being mistaken about the manner in which one must build a dwelling or plow a furrow.” In America, “everything is certain and fixed in the moral world” of religion, while “the political world seems to be abandoned to the discussion and attempts of men.”
Separating the realms of political and eternal truth ended up making politics and religion more vibrant. With clear moral limits to check them, citizens experimented more confidently with public policy, just as, in G. K. Chesterton’s famous analogy, children romp more energetically on a playground that has a strong fence to protect them. Tocqueville saw this phenomenon especially among his co-religionists, American Catholics. He found them to be “the most independent of citizens,” because their priests expected them to submit to “revealed dogmas . . . without discussing them” but left them completely free in political matters. That careful respect for laymen’s authority in politics in turn earned for priests the complete devotion of the laity in religion: “Catholics in the United states are . . . the most submissive of the faithful,” Tocqueville observed.
Thus, Tocqueville found that America, “the most enlightened and most free” country on earth, was “the place in the world where the Christian religion has most preserved genuine power over souls,” a power that increased as religious ministers withdrew from politics.
Diminishing Religion’s Apparent Force Increases Its Real Power
The positive relationship between Christianity and democracy contradicted what many of Tocqueville’s fellow Europeans, both liberals and conservatives, had expected. Like many progressives and conservatives today, they framed the question of religion and politics as a choice between Enlightenment secularism and Christian integralism: political freedom and religion seemed opposed. In America, however, the more Christian the population, the stronger the democracy; and the more religious leaders respected their flocks’ political freedom, the more laymen obeyed in matters of faith.
To the “learned” European secularists who insisted that America’s religiosity could only be opposed to its happiness, Tocqueville said, “I have truly nothing to respond if not that those who hold to this language have not been in America, and have no more seen religious peoples than free peoples.” He could have said the same to his integralist peers who thought America’s freedom undermined its Christianity. As Tocqueville recognized, political theory must begin from political facts; and the fact was that, in America, democracy and Christianity seemed made for each other.
Tocqueville then determined “to bring the facts back to [their] causes.” Why was it, he asked, “that in diminishing the apparent force of a religion,” by separating it from political power, “one came to increase its real power”? He found the answer in the nature of the desire for immortality that connected religion to political life.
As we already noted, Tocqueville identified this desire as the ultimate check on the anarchy toward which democracy can tend. The thought of an afterlife, which depends on living morally in this life, gives citizens an incentive for following civil law that the law itself cannot give.
But although political society is interested in the temporal consequences of religious beliefs, it has no further interest in their content: “it serves man very much as an individual that his religion be true,” but “[s]ociety has nothing to fear nor to hope from the other life.” The temporal order of politics is necessarily of this world, not the next. Politics might help citizens pursue religion in a secondary way (a useful but not necessary help), given that man comes to contemplate eternity first by contemplating his material, temporal existence. But the direct means to citizens’ religious ends are solely God’s grace and men’s own moral striving, in their immaterial intellect and will, all of which transcend temporal affairs. If people seek other men’s help to reach God, they will obtain it not from the state, but from the religious organizations whose talent is guiding souls to heaven—a task for which government is a clumsy instrument. If the state is interested in keeping citizens’ eyes on eternal life, it should give free rein to religious institutions that form men’s spiritual vision.
If Religion Unites with Government, It Forfeits Its Hope of Saving All
Integralists might think that, if a church and a state have care of the same people, they could cooperate directly in each other’s affairs for that people’s benefit. Tocqueville suggests that scheme would backfire.
Religions like Christianity offer salvation to all peoples, in all times and places. Such religions will succeed to the extent that their teaching has a universal appeal, which will be so only if the religion “found[s] its empire . . . on the desire for immortality that torments the hearts of all men equally.” “[B]ut when [religion] comes to be united with a government, it must adopt maxims that are applicable only to certain peoples”—the particular people(s) under that government. Religion then perhaps “increases its power over” that particular nation, but it “loses the hope of reigning over all.” Furthermore, while eternal truths never change, governments and political parties come and go. If a religion becomes “bound to ephemeral powers, it follows their fortune, and often falls with the passions of a day that sustain them”: “it sacrifices the future with a view to the present, and in obtaining a power that is not due to it, it risks its legitimate power.”
That is what has happened to Catholicism in much of Europe. Beginning in the Middle Ages, many Catholic priests “left the sanctuary to enter society as a power.” Popes ruled central Italy, French cardinals (like Richelieu) were prime ministers to kings, bishops became dukes of the Holy Roman Empire, and they frequently “used [their] religious influence to assure the longevity of the political order of which [they were] a part.” Because that order happened to be aristocratic and monarchical, many came to presume that Catholicism was compatible only with aristocracy and monarchy. People who rejected such governments (like many French Jacobins) concluded they could not be Catholics, and many Catholics (like Joseph de Maistre) presumed that they could not support democracy. Ironically, Catholicism, in Tocqueville’s view, was one of the religions “most favorable to equality of conditions,” and therefore to democracy, by dint of its requiring “the same beliefs, . . . the same practices, [and] . . . the same austerities” of all its members.
While Christianity and the state were united, the former appeared to hold remarkable influence over Europeans, as evidenced by the Christian art, monuments, and institutions that still cover Europe today. But that union created grave problems for the Church in the French Revolution, which, seeing Christianity as essential to Europe’s ancien régime, destroyed much of the cultural legacy of European Christianity, leaving it one of the weaker branches of the Church today. That decline had already started in Tocqueville’s day, when he observed that “common opinion,” for the first time ever, disfavored all religion. “In America,” by contrast, he saw that “religion is perhaps less powerful” than it had been in Europe before the Revolution, “but its influence is more lasting.”
A Boon to Freedom and Religion
Contemporary experience bears Tocqueville out. Despite the weakening of American Christianity today, on the whole Americans continue to be more Christian than Europeans. Parts of America that strove to integrate church and state in the past are today among the least Christian. The Christian groups that are dying, whether mainline Protestant churches or Catholic religious orders, are those that have become highly politicized, or that have tried to be more worldly and less traditionally religious. Being in the world and ordering it justly are all well and good, but to do those things one need not join a church. That many religious bodies now seem like just another political or social club surely explains why so many people don’t see the need to identify with any religion. If American churches are to regain the strength they had in Tocqueville’s time, they need to rediscover their distinctive mission to raise people’s minds to their eternal destiny.
Enlightened democratic government, as John Adams said (anticipating Tocqueville) is only for people who are “moral and religious”; hence progressives cannot have political freedom unless they give religious bodies the freedom to form people for heaven. Far from leading to the abuse of individual rights (as secularists fear), giving churches freedom to foster a strong religious culture is the greatest protection for those rights, because it lets churches foster in men’s hearts, as no state can, an abiding fidelity to justice. Moreover, the more freedom secularists give people to live their faith in public, the more they reduce the risk that believers be tempted to use political power improperly to defend themselves. That some religious believers today entertain reviving church-state integration perhaps has something to do with the excesses of church-state separation promoted by courts in the twentieth century.
Religious people, for their part, should not hope to instill a religious spirit in their country by using civil law to enforce supernatural law. The subjects of the orders of grace and justice—the individual members of human society—are the same, but the laws of the two orders are not; hence the government of the church and the government of the state are separate. Each complements the other, but indirectly, not by stepping into the other’s domain. Such separation not only respects the dignity of man and his right not to be coerced by civil law into or out of religion, but it benefits religion in the long run. Far from separating morality from law (as many integralists fear), separating church and state makes morality stronger, by keeping churches faithful to their true, trans-political mission. If churches ally with a political movement, they risk undermining their God-given mission to draw souls to heaven.
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