Tocqueville is considered one of the most important thinkers and intellectuals for our times, best known for his works Democracy in America (1835) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). This essay seeks to give a short synopsis of Tocque-ville's most important conclusions and to shed light on his understanding of the importance of religion in a modern democracy.
Provides a forward to the book The Founders on God and Government in which the author argues that political historians have overlooked the ties between religion & politics in the founding of the United States. Adapted from the source document
Pits Walter Berns' thesis that John Locke's philosophy, which looked to break with the traditional Christian understanding of nature & remove religion from politics, lies at the root of the American Founding against Jacques Maritain's thesis that the modern US democracy cannot be separated from Christian doctrine. Maritain's thesis is outlined before looking at how Virginians George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, & particularly, James Madison conceptualized religious liberty. William Penn is credited with establishing religious liberty in the colonies as a natural right & providing a Christian rationale for it; Madison's pamphlet Remonstrance (1785), which Berns draws heavily on, in turn relies on Penn's scheme. Madison, to his credit, transcends Penn, Mason, & Jefferson in averring that religious liberty is prior to civil society, rooted in nature. The explicit Christian language of Madison, & the God-human relations on which it draws, suggests that Maritain's thesis holds. In closing, attention turns to three classic texts from Jefferson &/or Madison that support Berns & others who insist that American references to natural rights originate with Locke; this supposition is countered. J. Zendejas
I am sympathetic to the problem enunciated by Professors Glenn and Stack, viz., "that contemporary American democracy, by constitutionally privileging secularism, offers Catholics in public life a strong inducement to abandon, relativize, or remain silent about, their moral beliefs, insofar as these conflict with secularism. Catholics have to act like, not necessarily be, secularists. That makes it spiritually and politically unsafe, not to say impossible, for Catholics to be democrats now." However, while they have circled in on an important problem—the totalitarian impulse of contemporary liberals—they have not hit the bull's-eye exactly
