Civil Religion in Political Thought

7. Alexis de Tocqueville on “Civil Religion” and the Catholic Faith

167 7 Alexis de Tocqueville on “Civil Religion” and the Catholic Faith Douglas Kries In 2004, Marcello Pera, philosophy professor at the University of Pisa and president of the Italian Senate, addressed a letter to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. In the course of the letter, Pera, generally thought to be a secularist, proposed to Ratzinger the advantages of a civil religion for awakening Europe from its state of moral and spiritual indifference . In his reply, Ratzinger states that Pera’s proposal reminded him especially of the view articulated by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, which he summarized as follows: During his study of the United States, the French scholar had noticed, to put it briefly, that the unstable and fragmentary system of rules on which, to outward appearances, this democracy is founded, functioned because of the thriving Protestant Christian–inspired combination of religious and moral convictions in American society. No one had prescribed or defined these convictions, but everyone assumed them as the obvious spiritual foundation. The recognition of this basic religious and moral orientation, which went beyond the single denominations and defined the society from within, reinforced the corpus of the law. It defined the limits on individual freedoms from within, thereby creating the conditions for a shared, common freedom. Ratzinger also reminds Pera of Tocqueville’s distinction between the American view of separation of church and state and the French view; the former , he says, is “a separation whose motivation and configuration could not be more different from the conflictual separation of church and state imA grant from the Earhart Foundation supported the research for this essay. 168 Douglas Kries posed by the French Revolution and the systems that followed it.” Indeed, says Ratzinger, “On the basis of the structure of Christianity in the United States, the American Catholic bishops made a unique contribution to the Second Vatican Council....... They brought ..... to the Catholic tradition the experience of the non-state church (which had proven to be a condition for protecting the public value of fundamental Christian principles) as a Christian form that emerged from the very nature of the Church.” In recent times, Ratzinger suggests, the Protestant denominations have not been able to sustain Tocqueville’s vision for religion in America; in his view, it is an alliance between Catholics and Evangelicals that is defending America’s “Christian consciousness” and its “civil Christian religion” against the forces of secularization. Ratzinger does not simply endorse the American situation described by Tocqueville, but he does clearly say that it is superior to the situation that generally prevails in Europe, which is still too indebted to the secularizing longings of the French revolution.1 In invoking Tocqueville’s name in the letter exchange with Pera, Ratzinger is not attempting a detailed academic argument. As a result, his remarks invite new scholarly reflections on Tocqueville’s understanding of America’s religious orientation and the role that civil religion and the Catholic Church might play within it. The present essay will therefore attempt to answer two questions that come to mind upon pondering Ratzinger’s comments: First, to what extent, and in what sense, does Tocqueville advocate civil religion for American democracy? Second, to what extent, and in what sense, does Tocqueville think it is truly possible and desirable for the Catholic faith to participate in such a civil religion? Before such questions can be addressed directly, however, it is necessary to consider, or reconsider, what Tocqueville says about religion in Democracy in America. For roughly two decades now, Tocqueville’s thought about religion has been the subject of great interest and much discussion among scholars in the United States.2 This American conversation has been aug1 . The entire letter exchange between Ratzinger and Pera has been translated into English by Michael F. Moore and published in a brief collection titled Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 95–6 and 108–113. In referring to the contributions of the American bishops at the Second Vatican Council, Ratzinger is referring especially to the debate surrounding the conciliar statements on religious liberty and on the church’s relationship to the world. The American Jesuit John Courtney Murray played a very visible role in the early stages of that debate. 2. Indeed, even earlier came the publication of Doris Goldstein’s Trial of Faith: Religion and Alexis de Tocqueville 169 mented...