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About the time the billboard loomed over La Crosse advocating the separation of church and state, I was turning page 520 in a new translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume “Democracy in America.”
Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who came to America in the 1830s to study our young democracy, suddenly, with the turn of a page, became my guide to the status of Christianity in the early years of our nation. His book is regarded as the best ever written on America, and I clearly should have read it long ago.
It was only by chance that my progress in the book and the latest spurt of discussion about religion and politics should intersect so conveniently. My friend Mike gave me the book for my birthday last summer. I decided the best way to read it would be as it was formatted — in short takes preferably early in the morning with coffee. And so it has been since July — a morning dose of Tocque with my Joe.
The billboard, which was placed by the Wisconsin Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, reads, “Constitutional separation of church and state. The best friend religion ever had. Protect it and it will protect you.”
It set off the usual conversation about whether the founding fathers were Christians and whether we, in fact, are a Christian nation, implying that religion should not be excluded from public affairs. So I was grateful to find what Tocqueville had to say about that.
Tocqueville found an America that honored the Sabbath — Americans who “show by their practice that they feel every necessity of making democracy more moral by means of religion.” And, in a caution for modern-day pollsters, Tocqueville found that “some profess Christian dogmas because they believe them, others because they are afraid of not looking like they believe them.”
He also found agreement in America on the need for a complete separation of church and state. “I do not fear to affirm that during my stay in America I did not encounter a single man, priest or layman, who did not come to accord on this point.”
He believed there were “inevitable dangers that beliefs risk when their interpreters mix in public affairs, and I am so convinced that one must maintain Christianity within the new democracies at all cost, that I would rather chain priests in the sanctuary than allow them to leave it.”
So I could see why the editors, in their introduction to this book, said that Tocqueville had a way of providing perspectives that both sides of a controversial subject could accept and cite in support of their position whether left or right.
And his conclusion seems to fit well in this view — his advice for maintaining the uplifting effects of religion in governance: “I believe that the only efficacious means governments can use to put the dogma of the immortality of the soul in honor is to act every day as if they themselves believed it; and I think it is only in conforming scrupulously to religious morality in great affairs that they can flatter themselves they are teaching citizens to know it, love it and respect it in small ones.”
And to that, I can only add, amen.
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ht bast wrote on Feb 4, 2010 12:43 PM: