ABSTRACT
On June 29, 1831, eight weeks into his nine-month tour of the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville reported home from Yonkers, New York, that his early impressions of America were forming “a jumble of contradictory notions” in his mind. In this chapter the author proposes that what underlies the angst Tocqueville witnesses in America is, in fact, Americans’ concept of the immortal, a connection that becomes evident when people examine the revivalist theology that was sweeping the country in the early 1830s. By the time he published Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s puzzlement over the character of American religion had ripened into an intricate, and today well-known, thesis concerning the relationship between religion and democracy. Democracy in America offers something of a rebuttal to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s claim that Christianity is inherently subversive to democracy—that self-governing nations instead need a civil religion grounded in the prerogatives of the state.
