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28 2 Tocqueville and Lincoln on Religion and Democracy in America Joseph R. Fornieri I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions. Here I found them united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville and the American statesman Abraham Lincoln provide comparable wisdom about the moral and religious foundations of American democracy. Tocqueville, a foreign observer, is the famed author of Democracy in America, a work that has been aptly described as “at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.”1 Lincoln, a native citizen, is the savior of the American democratic experiment and its most eloquent spokesman. While there are notable differences between the two, both Lincoln and Tocqueville view religion as an indispensable source of moral instruction that ennobles and preserves democracy. Tocqueville speaks for both when he says, “the reign of freedom cannot be established without mores, nor mores founded without beliefs” (Democracy, 11). Indeed, Lincoln’s ultimate moral justification of American democracy, what I have elsewhere described as his political faith, embodies Tocqueville’s memorable description of religion as “the first of [America’s] political institutions . . . necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions” (280).2 In what follows, I seek to compare Tocqueville and Lincoln on the compatibility between religion and democracy in American public life.3 In concluding, I will explore their contemporary relevance as Tocqueville and Lincoln 29 well as some of the areas of divergence between them. What guidance do these two teachers of democracy provide us on the perennial question of religion and politics in America? Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 to a noble family that was caught up in the tumultuous events of the French Revolution. His parents were imprisoned and spared the guillotine’s blade at the last moment. Tocqueville lived through a series of revolutions that convulsed France and Europe in the nineteenth century: the fall of Napoleon; the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy; the abdication of Charles X during the July Days of 1830; the Second Republic in 1848; the fall of the Second Republic; Napoleon II’s coup d’état of 1851; and the Second Empire. He thus had firsthand experience of the turbulence of democracy in France and its unhappy tendency to vibrate between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. Though he was an aristocrat, Tocqueville may be characterized politically as a moderate liberal who sought to reconcile the aristocratic concern for greatness of the few with the democratic concern for equal justice for all.4 His foremost intent, one that recurs throughout his writings, was to preserve the precious inheritance of political liberty—namely, the responsible governance of free, self-determining citizens. Americans, he believed, mistakenly conflate freedom and equality. They presume that greater equality in all areas of life necessarily translates into greater freedom. This is erroneous, according to Tocqueville. He maintained that liberty was threatened just as much by subtler forms of radical egalitarianism as by more overt forms of absolutism and aristocratic privilege. Indeed, part of his genius as a thinker is to emphasize the inherent tension between liberty and equality in democracies (Democracy, 52).5 After the July Days, Tocqueville and his friend Gustave Beaumont sailed to America with the ostensible purpose to study the prison system (both were lawyers). This was merely a pretext for their real purpose: to study America—the quintessence of democracy—up close and personal. The fruit of Tocqueville’s ten-month journey to the United States was his classic work Democracy in America, published in two volumes, 1835 and 1840. The book was an immediate success in Europe. It was even reviewed by the great liberal thinker and reformer John Stuart Mill. Tocqueville died in 1859, on the eve of the American Civil War. More than two decades before Lincoln’s “House divided against itself” speech of 1858, he similarly predicted a crisis over the incompatibility between freedom and slavery: “[W]hatever the efforts of Americans of the South to preserve slavery they will not succeed at it forever. Slavery contracted to a single point on the globe, attacked by 30 Joseph R. Fornieri Christianity as unjust, by political economy as fatal; slavery, in the midst of democratic freedom and enlightenment of our age, is not an institution that can endure. It will cease by the deed of...

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