Alexis de Tocqueville: we need you!

The Covid 19 crisis has thrown the church into confusion. At first we thought Sunday worship before a live congregation would be postponed for several weeks at the least and several months at the most. Church leaders assumed that they could use technology—Facebook, YouTube, Live Stream, Zoom—as a substitute for the short term. Such a solution was “good enough” until the curve flattened, the crisis abated, and life—including the church’s life—would return to normal.

Which has obviously not happened. The number of cases and deaths continue to climb, far above what experts predicted during what they believed would be a quiet summer (before a fall resurgence). Church leaders are beginning to discover that this crisis might continue for a long time. Sunday morning gatherings seem a remote possibility now, perhaps until a vaccine becomes widely available. It could be many months, perhaps well over a year, before the church resumes its normal business. By then how many will be left?

There are church leaders who have chosen to defy government orders and return to pre-Covid worship habits, all in the name of First Amendment rights. They claim that government interference threatens to “close down the church,” as if prohibiting worship in a building were tantamount to closing down the church. Early Christians would be puzzled, perhaps even amused, by the very notion.

I don’t want to scold or defend any religious group. We are all stumbling in the dark, unsure of what to think or how to proceed.

My purpose is quite different. I wish to use the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville to help us reconsider the role of Christian faith and church practices in the larger culture, especially during this period of profound disquiet and confusion.

Who is Alexis de Tocqueville? He was a French aristocrat who traveled to America in the 1830s to discover why democracy was flourishing, much to the surprise of European elites. He observed that it was due, at least in part, to the “habits of the heart” of the American people, which kept them from exploiting and abusing the freedoms that the Bill of Rights grants. In his mind these habits were largely the result of Christian influence.

How did Christianity exercise so much influence? According to de Tocqueville, Christianity worked best at the grassroots level—in homes, public schools, private colleges, churches, and voluntary societies (non-profits). These smaller-scale institutions served the needs of the country in a peculiar way. They helped discipline the American people, teaching them to use freedom chastely, and thus functioned to “restrain” the American people from taking advantage of the lavish freedoms spelled out in the Bill of Rights. “Thus, while the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare.”

De Tocqueville believed that democracy needs Christianity to succeed more than any other political system, assuming that Christians attend to Christianity’s unique role in society. “Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is much more needed in the republic they advocate than in the monarchy they attack, and in democratic republics most of all. How could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened? And what can be done with a people master of itself if it is not subject to God?”

Ask anyone living in America about what makes this country unique, and most people—including Christians—will say something like, “Freedom and rights. Government can’t tell us what to do.” Which is true enough. But a country can be destroyed as much by unchecked individual freedom as it can be by unchecked government control. Strangely, both appear to be a problem right now in America.

Christianity has capacity to contribute to American society in at least two ways. First, it can restrain people from exploiting the freedoms stated in the Bill of Rights. This especially applies to people in power who, left unchecked, can bend the will of the state to serve their own interests, religious or otherwise. Second, it can inspire and direct people to serve the needs of the most vulnerable, which in my mind includes the unborn, the poor, persons with disabilities, racial and ethnic minorities, prisoners, immigrants and refugees.

Christianity, de Tocqueville argued, calls the followers of Jesus to be subject to a higher authority than the state, makes them answerable to a loftier principle than the quest for freedom, and holds them accountable to live for something more noble than the expansion of their own personal rights. It awakens them to the needs of others and charges them to defend the rights and pursue justice on behalf of the most vulnerable. In short, it restrains the powerful and defends the powerless.

In our current situation Christianity seems to be doing the opposite, defending the powerful and restraining the powerless.

Alexis de Tocqueville: we need you!