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Alexis de Tocqueville was born JULY 29, 1805.
A French social scientist, he traveled the United States in 1831, and
wrote a two-part work, Democracy in America (1835, 1840), which has been
described as:
"the most comprehensive and penetrating
analysis of the relationship between character and society in America
that has ever been written."
In it, de Tocqueville wrote:
"Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the
country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I
stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences
resulting from this new state of things, to which I was unaccustomed.
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:
"They brought with them...a form of Christianity, which I cannot better
describe, than by styling it a democratic and republican religion...
From the earliest settlement of the emigrants, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved."
De Tocqueville wrote:
"Religion in America...must be regarded as the foremost of the
political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a
taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it...This opinion is not
peculiar to a class of citizens or a party, but it belongs to the whole
nation."
De Tocqueville observed:
"The sects that
exist in the United States are innumerable. They all differ in respect
to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in
respect to the duties which are due from man to man. Each sect adores
the Deity in its own peculiar manner, but all sects preach the same
moral law in the name of God...
Moreover, all the sects of the
United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and
Christian morality is everywhere the same."
De Tocqueville added:
"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 than in America...
America is still the place
where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over
men's souls; and nothing better demonstrates how useful and natural it
is to man, since the country where it now has the widest sway is both
the most enlightened and the freest."
De Tocqueville continued:
"In the United States the influence of religion is not confined to the
manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the
people...Christianity, therefore reigns without obstacle, by universal
consent..."
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; and with them this conviction does not spring
from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the
soul rather than to live."
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."
In August of 1831, while traveling through Chester County, New York, Alexis de Tocqueville observed a court case:
"While I was in America, a witness, who happened to be called at the
assizes of the county of Chester, declared that he did not believe in
the existence of God or in the immortality of the soul. The judge
refused to admit his evidence, on the ground that the witness had
destroyed beforehand all confidence of the court in what he was about to
say. The newspapers related the fact without any further comment.
The New York Spectator of August 23d, 1831, relates the fact in the following terms:
'The court of
common pleas of Chester county (New York), a few days since rejected a
witness who declared his disbelief in the existence of God.
The presiding judge remarked, that he had not before been aware that
there was a man living who did not believe in the existence of God; that
this belief constituted the sanction of all testimony in a court of
justice: and that he knew of no case in a Christian country, where a
witness had been permitted to testify without such belief.'"
In Democracy in American, Vol. II, (1840), Book 1, Chapter V), Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:
"Mohammed brought
down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only,
but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories.
The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general
relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that,
they teach nothing and do not oblidge people to believe anything.
That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will
not be able to hold its power long in an age of enlightenment and
democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such age, as in
all others."
Alexis de Tocqueville 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."
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