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American Minute with Bill Federer
Apr. 16 - Alexis de Tocqueville, French political writer visiting America |
 On APRIL 16, 1859, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville died.
After nine months of traveling the United States, he wrote Democracy in America in 1835, which has been described as
"the most comprehensive...analysis of character and society in America ever written."
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:
"Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention...
In
France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit
of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they
were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same
country..."
De Tocqueville continued:
"The
Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so
intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive
the one without the other...
They brought with them into the New
World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by
styling it a democratic and republican religion."
In Book Two of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville wrote:
"Christianity has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in America...
In
the United States...Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly
established, that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it."
Alexis de Tocqueville visited Algeria and wrote to Arthur de Gobineau, October 22, 1843 (Tocqueville Reader, p. 229):
"I
studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the
conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men
as that of Mohammed.
So far as I can see, it is the principle
cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though
less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political
tendencies are in my opinion to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a
form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to
paganism itself."
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:
"In the United States the sovereign authority is religious...
There
is no country in the whole world where the Christian religion retains a
greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can
be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature
than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened
and free nation of the earth." |
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