“America Was a Providential Fact” – Did Tocqueville Get It Right?

Posted on | December 26, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

We find ourselves in the middle of America’s most important religious, political, and economic holiday. The current Administration has made a point of pushing the envelope toward state sponsored religion for example with this official Homeland Security greeting on their X platform: “Christ is Born! We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.” The integration of church and state is advanced despite its explicit disapproval in the First Amendment to our U.S. Constitution.

The debate over whether this is appropriate or not is a longstanding one. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, he was struck by our individualism, decentralized forms of governance, and (notably) our extreme religiosity. As we have seen now over a two century experience, each of these traits, when carried to an extreme can undermine the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Equality and tyranny remain two sides of the same coin.

Tocqueville was an idealist but also a partial critic (at best) of slavery and the mass relocation and near extinction of native Americans. He saw our citizen forebears as displaying extreme individualism and possessing an “immense opinion of themselves.” Not surprisingly, he came from privilege. His parents were servants of the French Royalty, nobility imprisoned and nearly executed by guillotine during the French Revolution.

His family history helps explain why he was both an elitist and a populist in writing and behavior. His two volume observations of our still freshly minted nation appeared in 1835 and 1840 under the title “Democracy in America.”

Our forebears under his constant glaze are too “relaxed” in our “love of present enjoyments.” In his view, contentment would eventually lead to contempt. His words: Our version of democracy “does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born.”

Tocqueville is anxious for us and our future. That is in part why he saw integration of Church and state as desirable in the extreme. To him our form of government was “providential.” Christian equality underpinned social equity. Religion was not a subsidiary of the aristocracy as in France. Rather American history was flesh on a theological skeleton. Or as he described, “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.”

He experienced with emotion our homegrown injustice on a large scale. At a little river town next to Memphis, he watched as a group of Choctaw Indians being delivered by federal agents (under the auspices of the Indian Removal Act of 1830) to a steamboat for the first leg of a relocation to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. He recognized the apocalyptic nature of the event stating later, he had witnessed “the expulsion—one might say the dissolution—of the last remnants of one of the most celebrated and ancient American nations.”

He also saw Christianity in America make peace with slavery, but with significant hedging justification. He wrote, the state endorsed religion allowed slavery “but they accepted it only as an exception in their social system, and they took care to restrict it to a single one of the human races. They thus made a wound in humanity less large, but infinitely difficult to heal.”

Literary critic, James Wood, noted that Tocqueville believed that “Religion doesn’t have to be true, Tocqueville thought, but it is very important that people profess it… religion leads democratic man away from the narcissism and materialism endemic to non-aristocratic societies… Tocqueville is really writing a theological history of society’s rise, which culminates in the founding of America….America was a providential fact.”

History, and the current administration in the extreme, makes the opposite case – that leaning into religion is not always prudent or fortunate. Our Founding Fathers, in penning the First Amendment to our Constitution, knew what they were doing.

Comments

3 Responses to ““America Was a Providential Fact” – Did Tocqueville Get It Right?”

Mike Magee
December 26th, 2025 @ 5:21 pm

Sally Gershman on Tocqueville and Slavery: https://www.jstor.org/stable/286232
ARTHUR ULENE
December 27th, 2025 @ 11:54 am

There is no hate as pure as Christian love. That sums it up for me.
Mike Magee
December 28th, 2025 @ 9:54 am

I think Mahatma Gandhi summed up well the two sides of this coin when he said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”