The Spirit of Religion and the Spirit of Liberty

In his enduring classic, Democracy in America (1835-1840), Alexis de Tocqueville located the distinctive character of American civilization in the unforced blending of “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.” In America, unlike revolutionary France, liberty did not assert itself against religion but rather saw in it “the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its rights.” Religion reminded a commercially minded people about the things of the spirit and prevented them from succumbing to an excessive engrossment in material things.

If the political realm remained “agitated, contested, and uncertain” — as it always will — the moral world, informed by religion, resisted the pull of lawlessness and limitless self-assertion. It gave human beings a sense of limits and an understanding of the ends and purposes that ought to inform the exercise of human freedom. Despots, who necessarily have contempt for all restraints, could do without religion, Tocqueville argued, but a free people could not.

For a century and a half, this understanding of the connection between religion and democratic liberty remained the American consensus. Americans didn’t confuse liberty with moral relativism or indifference to truth. While the consent of the governed was our sacred political principle, our political heritage always discreetly bowed before the sovereignty of God. Unlike totalitarian revolutionaries who wished to deify man, the American revolutionaries wisely affirmed what Tocqueville called “liberty under God and the laws.” Such was the path of a decent, ordered liberty that resisted fashionable efforts to separate freedom from a humble deference to truth and moral conscience.


Liberals once applauded religion, at least as an instrument for justice and as a reminder that everyone, including the highly placed and powerful, remained subject to the judgment of God. Abolitionism, the Social Gospel, and the civil rights movement were peopled by ministers and people of faith who freely appealed to moral conscience informed by the Gospel. Today’s left, with a few notable exceptions, appeals to a highly moralistic conception of social justice and doctrinaire equality. Their conception is shorn of any real emphasis on human sinfulness as a universal attribute, or on humility — and with it, the concomitant need for repentance, forgiveness, and mutual accountability. Those accredited with “victimhood” are said to be without sin, thus having no need for humility and self-limitation. Victimizers, ever more arbitrarily defined, are condemned as guilty for who they are rather than what they have done.