Democracy in America: In Two Volumes

Chapter 5.a How, in the United States, Religion Knows How to Make Use of Democratic Instincts

742 s4s4s4s4s4 c h a p t e r 5a How, in the United States, Religion Knows How to Make Use of Democratic Instinctsb a. 1. I showed that dogmatic beliefs were necessary; the most necessary and the most desirable are dogmatic beliefs in the matter of religion. Reasons to believe. [In the margin: To change the title. Put one that places it more clearly under the rubric of ideas and operations of the mind.] 1. Fixed ideas on God and human nature are necessary to all men and every day to each man, and it is found that there are only a few, if any, men who are capable by themselves of fixing their ideas on these matters. It is a science necessary to all at each moment and inaccessible to the greatest number. That is unique. So it is in these matters that there is the most to gain and the least to lose by having dogmatic beliefs. 2. These beliefs particularly necessary to free peoples. 3. Id. to democratic peoples. 2. So I am led to seek humanly how religions could most easily assert themselves during the centuries of equality that we are entering. Development of this: 1. Necessity that religions be based on the idea of a unique being imposing at the same time the same rules on each man. 2. Necessity of extricating religion from forms, practices, figures, as men become more democratic. 3. Necessity of not insisting on remaining immobile in secondary things. 4. Necessity of trying to purify and regulate the love of well-being, without attempting to destroy it. 5. Necessity of gaining the favor of the majority. 3. All this proved by the example of America (YTC, CVf, pp. 6–7). b. Twice there must be the question of religion in this book. 1. The first principally in a separate chapter placed I think after the first in which I would examine philosophically the influence of democracy on religions. religion and democratic instincts 743 I established in one of the preceding chapters that men cannot do without dogmatic beliefs, and that it was even much to be desired that they had such beliefs. I add here that, among all dogmatic beliefs, the most desirable seem to me to be dogmatic beliefs in the matter of religion; that veryclearly follows, even if you want to pay attention only to the interests of thisworld alone. [⫽Religions have the advantage that they provide the human mind with the clear and precise answer to a very great number of questions.⫽] There is hardly any human action, no matter how particular you assume it to be, that is not born out of a very general idea that men have conceived of God, of God’s relationships with humanity, of the nature of their soul and of their duties toward their fellows. You cannot keep these ideas from being the common source from which all the rest flows.c [Experience has proved that they were necessary to all men and that each man needed them daily in order to solve the smallest problems of his existence.] So men have an immense interest in forming very fixed ideas aboutGod, their soul, their general duties toward their creatorandtowardtheirfellows; for doubt about these first points would leave all their actions to chance and would condemn them in a way to disorder and impotence. So this matter is the one about which it is most important for each one of us to have fixed ideas, and unfortunately it is also the one on which it is most difficult for each person, left to himself and by the sole effort of his reason, to come to fix his ideas. Only minds very emancipated from the ordinary preoccupations of life, 2. The second incidentally somewhere in the second volume where I would say more oratorically how it is indispensable in democracies in order to immaterialize man (Rubish, 1). See Agnès Antoine, “PolitiqueetreligionchezTocqueville,”inLaurenceGuellec,Tocqueville et l’esprit de la démocratie ([Paris:] Presses de Sciences Po, 2005), pp. 305–17; and also by the same author, L’impensé de la démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 2003). c. In the margin: “” 744 religion and democratic instincts very perceptive, very subtle, very practiced are able with the help of a great deal of time and care to break through to such necessary truths. Yet we see that these philosophers themselves are almost always...