America's War on Christianity Explained | Tocqueville on Religion
There is no Christian Revival
America is hostile to Christianity. Democracy slowly but surely corrupts the faith from within.
Reading Tocqueville & the Founding Fathers between the lines convinced me of this.
Look at the sorry state of Christianity at 250 compared to America’s Puritan founding. That is the result of two centuries of democratic corrosion and this weakening will only continue. What people are calling a “Christian revival” is a mere blip on this macro downward trajectory, a knee-jerk reaction to the excesses of progressivism of the last 20 years. Reading Tocqueville convinced me that America will never be truly Christian, unless it gives up being a liberal democracy (e.g. Integralism).
Look at American Christianity today, it is already more American than it is Christian:
Jesus preaches against wealth and yet I’ve rarely heard an american pastor do so. I hear the prosperity gospel quite often, but never sincere urges to poverty, asceticism, or monasticism as can be loudly heard in every Christian society prior.
Christianity teaches love and humility; the American right co-opts it for hate and superiority. The Bible prescribes universal gender norms, sexual codes, ethical standards; the American left appropriates it for the latest political fads of the day.
But the most hostile democratic force against all religions, not just Christianity, is toleration. The Bible is clear about Jesus’ singular status: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” It’s clear about the demonic or, at the very least, inferior status of the other faiths. And yet most American christians show not just tolerance but a puzzling affirmation of other religions.
Tocqueville saw the terrible cost of this toleration, in a private letter in 1831, he wrote: ”this so-called tolerance … is nothing but a huge indifference.” Christianity could flourish for a 1000 years under persecution. Christianity did flourish for a 1000 years persecuting others. But just 250 years under liberal toleration and what Christians left have already stopped caring about ultimate questions, masking their indifference under the banner of toleration. Perhaps this was the Founders’ plan all along, Jefferson writes: “the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them.”
To see how strange and corrupting American religious toleration is, one need only look at how other cultures practice toleration. Look at how the ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel treat their Christian minority: they look down upon them as fools deceived by a false Messiah. They don’t hide their contempt either: they openly mock the Christians, but they stop at organized, legal persecution. This was the original meaning of toleration. Toleration came from the Latin root tolerare which meant “to bear, to suffer, to endure.” The ultra-orthodox merely “put up with” their Christian minority.
American Christians, even (maybe especially) the hyper-religious ones, do not behave like that towards their jewish minority. If you behave like that in America, you will be called “intolerant.” Because American toleration requires not just the lack of legal discrimination but a positive affirmation of the other. This concession doesn’t seem like much (in fact, it has infinite benefits) but it completely subverts the original concept. Tolerare originally meant that the thing I’m tolerant of is bad, but I endure it for a greater good. American toleration demands you to affirm the thing you are tolerant of as good to begin with.
This is a radical subversion because tolerare preserves a precious freedom of the mind to come up with one’s own judgements: as long as you do not compel the others’ body you are free to think as you wish in your soul. American toleration does not compel the body but strikes directly at the soul: you are not allowed to discriminate in thought and must affirm the other as good. This is why you hear so often “all religions teach the same lesson” (which, it always turns out, is some mushy platitude around love). American toleration is the most radical and thorough form of intolerance and the death of serious religious thinking.
The ultra-orthodox Jews in their hostility secure the freedom that American Christians lose in their compassion.
Tocqueville came to similar conclusions, on the deadly effects of religious toleration, in that private letter from 1831. And yet, in Democracy in America he defended the separation of Church and State and advocated for the liberal order. In this lecture, I am going to attempt to reconcile this seeming contradiction. What we are going to find is terrifying: democracy unleashes not just one, but four separate forces hostile Christianity. And the separation of Church and state is to protect the Church from these forces as much as it is to preserve the state, for democracies can not function without religion. That is to say, as much as America is hostile to christianity, it needs it even more. This is the tragedy of Democracy: it endlessly attacks the very religious pillar that sustains its existence.