Alexis de Tocqueville argues in the 2nd volume of Democracy in America that men need “ready-made beliefs” in order for there to be society at all, and all the more so a prosperous society. “Common action” requires “common ideas.”
Not even the philosophers are immune from having to adopt some of them: “There is no philosopher in the world so great,” he writes, “that he does not believe a million things on faith in others or does not suppose many more truths than he establishes.”
In making ourselves dependent on others’ opinions, a man “puts his mind in slavery; but it is a salutary servitude that permits him to make good use of his freedom.”
For Tocqueville it is always necessary for society to have some source of authoritative opinion. In a democracy, “in times of equality,” people are less likely than they are otherwise “to place the intellectual authority to which they submit outside of and above humanity.”
By contrast, “in aristocratic times” they are examples of “individuals who are very enlightened, very learned, and of very powerful intellect, and a multitude who are very ignorant and very limited,” and it is easier to guide the masses into taking “the superior reason of one man or one class as a guide for their opinions,” than in a democracy.
In a democracy, Tocqueville reasons, the authoritative source for dogmatic thought is public opinion. The dominance of public or majority opinion in the democratic United States worries him, and he writes that it should “cause profound reflection by those who see in the freedom of the intellect something holy and who hate not only the despot but despotism,” meaning, of course, the despotism of public opinion.
So men need dogma, and in a democratic society they don’t get it from above but rather from the everyman. At the same time, every man believes that he can reason independently about every question that concerns him.
That is the “Cartesianism” of the American mind that Tocqueville finds so conspicuous. “I think there is no countries in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States,” he writes. And yet, though American’s don’t study Descartes, they do “follow his maxims”:
To escape from the spirit of system, from the yoke of habits, from family maxims, from class opinions, and, up to a certain point, from national prejudices; to take tradition only as information, and current facts only as a useful study for doing otherwise and better; to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone, to strive for a result without letting themselves be chained to the means, and to see through the form to the foundation […] If I go still further and seek among these diverse features the principal one that can sum up almost all the others, I discover that in most of the operations of the mind, each American calls only on the individual effort of his reason.
That’s a problem, since it makes it harder for man to accept a dogma based on religious revelation.
And yet that’s what men need.
“Among all dogmatic beliefs,” Tocqueville writes, “the most desirable seem to me to be dogmatic beliefs in the matter of religion.”
There is almost no human action, however particular one supposes it, that does not arise from a very general idea that men have conceived of God, of his relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and of their duties toward those like the,. One cannot keep these ideas from being the common source from which all the rest flow. Men therefore have an immense interest in making very fixed ideas for themselves about God, their souls, their general duties towards their Creator and those like them; for doubt about these first points would deliver all their actions to chance and condemn them to a sort of disorder and impotence.
Religion helps provide those fixed ideas. It helps remove doubt. It facilities order in society.
“The first object and one of the principal advantages of religions is to furnish a solution for each of these primordial questions that is clear, precise, intelligible to the crowd, and very lasting.”
“When religion is destroyed in a people,” by contrast:
Doubt takes hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about matters that most interest those like him and himself; one defends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as one despairs of being able to resolve by oneself the greatest problems that human destiny presents, one is reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about them at all.
Cowards avoid thinking about the greatest problems of human destiny. Doubt and despair beget such cowardice. They weaken man’s will and prepare “citizens for servitude.” Thus, the freedom that accompanies democracy in times of equality undermines religion and sows the seeds of servitude.
“As for me,” our author declares, “I doubt that man can ever support a complete religious independence and an entire political freedom at once; and I am brought to think that if he has no faith, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe.”
Because religion and democracy move as it were in opposite directions, because “the greatest advantage of religions is to inspire wholly contrary instincts” to those of equality, which “opens [men’s] souls excessively to the love of material enjoyments,” it is very important “that men keep to their religion when becoming equal.”
Religion must check the vices of democracy and equality.
Tocqueville, in a manner fitting of a political philosopher, considers this question “only from a purely human point of view” and examines how religions should conduct themselves in a democracy in order not to “risk no longer being believed in any matter.”
He gives the examples of Islam as a religion that is incompatible with democracy because in it there are “not only religious doctrines” but also “political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and scientific theories,” whereas the Gospels “speak only of the religion relations of men to God and among themselves.” The Christian teaching is, and the Islamic is not, “destined to reign in these centuries as in all the others.” To repeat, that is hid judgment “from a purely human point of view.”
Another observation Tocqueville makes about religion in itself and religion in democratic times is this: “The principal business of religions is to purify, regulate, and restrain the doo ardent and too exclusive taste for well-being that men in times of equality feel; but I believe that they would be wrong to try to subdue it entirely and to destroy it.”
In a word, religions have to make their peace with the spirit of the times if they want to remain relevant to it and not lose all authority and legitimacy with the people. “In centuries of equality, kings often make one obey, but it is always the majority that makes one believe; it is therefore the majority that one must please in all that is not contrary to the faith.” Religion must not offend “democratic instincts,” even as it acts to check “the spirit of individual independence that is the most dangerous of all to it.”
These arguments are quotes are from Democracy in America, Volume 2, Part 1, Chapters 1-5. I hope they encourage you to find time to read Tocqueville and to think through the many topics he raises, including the one we briefly focused on here: democracy and religion.