ABSTRACT
Americans like to quote from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 book Democracy in America. It’s seen by some as a “one-stop-shop” for insight into the character of a new and expanding nation that, according to the 25-year-old Frenchman, served as a model of democratic principles for the world to aspire to. Originally commissioned by the French government to study the American prison system, Tocqueville was so “struck” by “the general equality of condition among the people” of the United States that he enlarged the scope of his inquiry to include all of “American society.” He was especially interested in knowing how America’s democratic experiment might translate to Europe’s “Christian nations.” Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America with a firm belief in
divine providence. He argued that the spread of democracy was a gift from God, and that the United States was the nation that best represented the progress and promise of God’s will on earth. Tocqueville began his book with a description of the geography of North America before European colonization, a vast and beautiful landscape that “seemed prepared to be the abode of a great nation yet unborn.” As for the native inhabitants of the continent, Tocqueville believed that they were “placed by Providence amid the riches of the New World only to enjoy them for a season; they were there merely to wait till others came.” The “others” who came, according to Tocqueville, were Anglo-Saxon colonists from England, the most important being the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth with “their national characteristics … already completely formed.” The Pilgrims were Puritans, a Protestant sect described by Tocqueville as “not merely a religious doctrine, but
corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories.” Why did the Puritans leave their homeland for North America? According to Tocqueville, it was to “live according to their own opinions and worship God in freedom.” Despite his belief in the power of God to spread democracy,
Tocqueville still recognized the “great evils” aimed at people of Native American and African descent. “I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish,” he wrote, while “oppression has, at one stroke, deprived the descendants of Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity.” He foreshadowed the expansion of the United States to the Pacific, and with it the continued displacement of Native Americans and expansion of African slavery. He also anticipated “great calamities” between Northern and Southern states over slavery. But he wrote little about the religious beliefs and practices of Native Americans and Africans, saving such commentary for white “Christians of America.” Despite “a multitude of sects” within Protestantism, Tocqueville had “seen no country in which Christianity is clothed with fewer forms, figures, and observances than in the United States, or where it presents more distinct, simple and general notions to the mind.” Why so much religious diversity and tranquility in the United States? If you asked Tocqueville, the answer was democracy. Tocqueville was one of the first people to comment on religion
in America for massive audiences in Europe and the United States. But he wasn’t the last, as we will see in this chapter on how people have interpreted the history and memory of American religions. On one hand, I share in Tocqueville’s recognition that Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans were the main actors who shaped the complex religious entanglements of American history (Asians weren’t strongly represented in the United States when Tocqueville wrote his book). But I deviate from Tocqueville’s providential and democratic attitude toward the trajectory of that history, as do most of today’s scholars. This turn away from exceptionalist narratives of religion in America is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that still provokes the censure of those who view the past through a combination of nationalistic and Christian lenses. It is not my intention to debate the matter, but simply to
demonstrate that the religious past of the United States is a contested topic with a long history of revision. Most of this chapter
tracks the evolution of scholarly interpretations of American religious history. It begins in the nineteenth century, an era deeply influenced by a so-called “Protestant moral establishment” which perpetuated the image of America as a Christian nation. And it ends in the present, at a moment when the study of religion in America is a reflection of the modern attention to diversity and pluralism. The last section of the chapter takes a critical look at the so-called “civil religion” of America and the ways in which religion has been memorialized in the public sphere. Controversies over the portrayal of religion reinforce the point that the legacy of religious entanglement in American public life is a live matter, and therefore one that requires careful historical evaluation.
