Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism

13. The Religious Situation in the United States 175 Years After Tocqueville

c h a p t e r 1 3 The Religious Situation in the United States 175 Years After Tocqueville José Casanova In Democracy in America there is a passage in which Tocqueville clearly states what he takes to be the real relation between religion and freedom, and it is only appropriate to begin by citing it: Eighteenth-century philosophers had a very simple explanation for the gradual weakening of beliefs. Religious zeal, they said, was bound to die down as enlightenment and freedom spread. It is tiresome that the facts do not fit this theory at all. . . . In America the most free and enlightened people in the world zealously perform all the external duties of religion. The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States. The longer I stayed in the country, the more conscious I became of the important political consequences resulting from this novel situation. In France I had seen the spirits of religion and of freedom almost always marching in opposite directions. In America I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land. My longing to understand the reason for this phenomenon increased daily. To find this out, I questioned the faithful of all communions . . . all thought that the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their 253 254 José Casanova country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.1 One can derive four basic propositions from this lengthy quotation. First, Tocqueville is one of the few modern social theorists, William James and Vilfredo Pareto being perhaps the only two others, who did not share the basic premises of the theory of secularization, which the social sciences adopted uncritically from the Enlightenment critique of religion. The basic premise of all versions of the theory of secularization, which until very recently had attained the status of an uncontested paradigm within all social sciences, and particularly in my own discipline sociology, was that the more ‘‘modern’’ a society the more ‘‘secular’’ it will be, that religious beliefs and practices will tend to decline in modern societies, and that religious institutions and norms will tend to become an increasingly marginalized, privatized and publicly irrelevant social phenomenon. Originally , as seen by Tocqueville’s response, it was either the advancement of knowledge, science, mass literacy, and secular education, in a word, Enlightenment, or the advancement of liberal democracy and political freedoms, which were allegedly responsible for the decline of religion. Later theories placed greater emphasis either on indicators of economic modernization, such as economic well-being and the expansion of the welfare state or on more abstract theories of functional differentiation and expansion of the secular spheres at the expense of an equally differentiated but greatly diminished religious one. Second, in America Tocqueville found empirical confirmation of his doubts concerning the Enlightenment assumptions about the future of religion. Like so many other European visitors, Tocqueville was immediately struck by the vitality of religion in America and by the ‘‘innumerable multitude of sects’’ he found there. Today we would talk instead of an innumerable multitude of ‘‘denominations.’’ But in Tocqueville’s times, although he already observed the phenomenon, neither the name nor the theory of ‘‘denominationalism’’ as the great American institutional religious invention had yet been discovered or formulated.2 Tocqueville visited the United States in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, precisely at the time when denominationalism as the American religious system of free, voluntary, pluralistic, competitive, and formally equal religious denominations was becoming institutionalized and as the churching of the American population was taking off.3 Unlike so many later European visitors and professional observers who tended to minimize or 255 The Religious Situation in the U.S. 175 Years After Toqueville explain away the relevance of this phenomenon by referring to ‘‘American exceptionalism,’’ as if the vitality of religion in America was simply the exception that confirmed the general rule of European secularization, Tocqueville saw it clearly as a ‘‘novel’’ situation, that is, as the product of modern developments and not simply as a traditional residue that was eventually bound to disappear with progressive modernization. Third, seeking an explanation for the extraordinary religious vitality and religious pluralism, Tocqueville found it in the ‘‘complete...