Liberty of Conscience
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 67, No. 1 - Fall 2024
Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
In France, Alexis de Tocqueville saw that the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom were often at odds with one another. But Americans had harmonized them. He wrote in the first volume of Democracy in America, “[Anglo-American civilization] is the product . . . of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere are often at odds. But in America, these two have been successfully blended, in a way, and marvelously combined. I mean the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.”1 Tocqueville saw that through the symbiotic interaction between public spirit and religion in citizens’ exercise of rights and fulfilling of duties, freedom was maintained. We have wisdom to gain from Tocqueville’s observations of how public spirit mediated between religion and freedom in the early nineteenth century. Conservatives in particular should resist the urge to look back on 1831 America with overweening nostalgia, but we also should resist the tendency to expel religion to the outermost corners of society, thus rendering it null and void. And religious people today should heed Tocqueville’s warnings about mixing religion with political agendas, rendering it as nothing more than another political faction. While much has changed since the nineteenth century, much of what Tocqueville offered us in his masterful Democracy in America serves to give admonition and encouragement about the prospects for maintaining freedom in a democratic age.
The aspirational conservative disposition seeks to preserve and extend the best of the American tradition because that tradition is an inheritance passed down to us from our ancestors who strove and sacrificed to secure it for us. The tradition of religious freedom is part and parcel of the American tradition. America is not perfect and Americans have not applied religious freedom flawlessly and consistently according to the ideals of the founding documents. Similarly, conservatives are not always faithful to their own traditions, nor do they perfectly balance public and private interests, or social obligations with their attending privileges. There are no “true” conservatives in this sense, just as there are no “true” Americans. We are all on the path, striving for the attainment of ideals but recognizing that we have miles to go before we arrive at the ideal.
Tocqueville’s observation that the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom were in harmony in the United States in 1831 is consistent with an American tradition going back to the colonial founding and continuing to the present day. As tradition, we can understand the harmony between freedom and religion as being intentionally and consciously established in practice, enshrined in the Constitution, articulated, clarified, defended, and extended over time, and handed down from one generation to another since the seventeenth century. Americans have revered the tradition of this harmony for centuries—albeit imperfectly—such that hardly anyone questioned it. For example, in 1993, the Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—unanimously in the House and 97-3 in the Senate. In 1998, sixty-two percent of Americans believed that religion was very important to the national character, and seventy percent of Americans thought that patriotism was necessary for citizens. But in 2023, only thirty-eight percent of Americans valued patriotism, and thirty-nine percent valued religion.2 By 2024, the so-called religious nones—atheists, agnostics, and those who claim no religious faith—comprised the largest single “religious” group in America. Twenty-eight percent of Americans check the none box on religious identity surveys. The nones outnumber Protestants (24%) and Catholics (23%). By contrast, in 2007, only sixteen percent identified as having no religion.3
These are alarming statistics for anyone who cares about the Great Commission or the success and flourishing of the American republic. Part of revering tradition means acknowledging that there are no questions in the present that have not been asked and answered in the past. Tocqueville is a figure from the past that Baptists overlook, but he is an incredible resource in helping us understand the necessity of religion to freedom.
When Tocqueville came to the United States, he saw that religion in America was different than in his native Europe. Furthermore, he found that Christianity was eminently suited to American culture. Consistently since the thirteen colonial foundings, people emigrated to America to get away from religious supremacy in Europe, bringing with them a desire to practice their faith freely. Tocqueville said, “They brought to the New World a Christianity that I cannot portray better than by calling it democratic and republican.”4 Thus, “from the onset, politics and religion found themselves in accord, and they have not ceased to be so since.”5 A primary reason was that in America, contrasted with the situation in Europe, Christianity is advanced through persuasion of the mind and the heart rather than legal or physical coercion. Moreover, Christianity affirms the equality of every man, woman, and child. All persons are given the duty to obey God’s commands, and all persons are affected by the Fall. Tocqueville put it this way: “Only the religion of Jesus Christ has placed the sole grandeur of man in the accomplishment of duties, where each person can attain it; and has been pleased to consecrate poverty and hardship, as something nearly divine.”6 Since all people face poverty in some measure—some have more financial resources, but all are bound by time—and hardship is universal, Christianity is a religion of equality.
The significance of Christianity to the security of liberty in America could not be overstated, in Tocqueville’s mind. He wrote, “The people see in religion the safeguard and the divine origin of liberty.”7 Eighteenth-century Europeans assumed that religious fervor would wane, and as it did so, secular philosophy would grow in influence and liberty would thus expand. Tocqueville disagrees: “It is unfortunate that facts do not agree with this theory.”8 Religion and liberty were “intimately joined” and “reigned together over the same soil” in America.9 Even though there were many different denominations when Tocqueville came to America, the diversity of Christian practices and dogmas did not detract from the unity of Christian ethical understanding. “Each sect worships God in its way, but all sects preach the same morality in the name of God,” Tocqueville observed.10 Because of this unity in diversity, Tocqueville did not believe that there was any place in the world where Christianity did not dominate a culture so thoroughly. Thus, nowhere else in the world could see political, economic, and religious liberty in such fullness.
One of the key arguments Tocqueville advanced in Democracy in America, and this is worth the price of the book, is that religion is necessary to preserve liberty in the face of the despotic tendencies of democratic societies. A society’s taste for equality of conditions would overcome its desire for liberty without watchful vigilance and patience. Americans, Tocqueville wrote, “want equality in liberty, and if they cannot obtain that, they still want equality in slavery. They will suffer poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not suffer aristocracy.”11 Equality yields immediate material gain because in America there is no limit to bar financial success except one’s own creativity and work ethic. Unlike in France, where one is either born to wealth or not, in America, rags-to-riches stories were all too common. Excessive wealth results in social isolation, and social isolation results in citizens being more and more willing to let the government handle the problems faced by towns, states, and the nation as a whole. But religion orients people’s perspectives to eternity, to those things that transcend the self and selfish interests that are encouraged in democratic societies, where the people are sovereign. Religion also serves as an impetus to bring citizens together to work for common causes. Associating together voluntarily in common cause was foundational to the strength of liberty in America because, while individuals are always easy prey for a tyrannical state, citizens who pool their resources have strength in numbers. It is far less easy to tyrannize a well-funded, numerically strong, and motivated group of people who are willing to sacrifice for their cause, even if they are in the minority. The great irony of American democracy is that while church and state were separate, Tocqueville called religion “the first of their political institutions.”12
One additional feature bringing religion and liberty in harmony, according to Tocqueville, was American mores. Tocqueville called mores “habits of the heart” and “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people.”13 We might refer to the mores as the moral and intellectual culture of a people, those things that a people consider values that characterize their society. Historically, hard work, honesty, cooperation, devotion to God, family, and flag have all been definitive American mores. Tocqueville saw that the laws in the United States set the patterns for American practices, but he insisted that the mores were more powerful than the laws in informing American democracy as a whole.
By informing the mores of the people, Tocqueville argued that religion uniquely instills habits that lead to the preservation of freedom. When Tocqueville came to America in 1831, religion was the most powerful intellectual influence on the American people. It shaped American customs, from which American laws emerged. He considered one of his most important observations in his 300,000-word book that the mores of the people do more to secure freedom in democratic America than any other single category. “If in the course of this work, I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance that I attributed to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, to their opinions, in a word, to their mores, in maintaining their laws, I have missed the principal goal that I set for myself by writing it,” wrote Tocqueville.14 Through marriage and family life, religion informs the mores that undergird the political, social, and commercial life of the republic. Marriage and family life are indispensable to success in commerce and politics because infidelity leads to failure in both of those realms. At the heart of fidelity in the home is the virtue of courage. Courage drives one to take risks in order to make money, but it also serves to motivate a person to sacrifice on behalf of others.
Tocqueville credited the New England Puritans as the ones who instilled Christian morality into American culture. These were the spiritual fathers of America. While he acknowledged Virginia as the first of the English colonies, it was the New England Puritans that instilled their moral conception of liberty—to do all that is right and just without fear of force or restraint—into American culture. “The civilization of New England has been like those fires kindled on the hilltops that, after spreading warmth around them, light the farthest bounds of the horizon with their brightness.”15 The New England townships were the model of local democracy because the towns succeeded in balancing the interests of the private citizen with those of the citizens of the town. Citizens saw themselves as having a personal stake in the success of the town, such that if the town was flourishing, then the individual citizens were also flourishing; but if the town’s fortunes were sinking, no citizen could escape sinking fortunes themselves. This public spirit that existed in the towns of New England was informed by the Christian understanding of ordered love—that every person should look not only to their own interests, but to the interests of others also. Striking a balance between public and private interests is exceedingly difficult to achieve, but American democracy, informed as it was by religion on the level of the mores, set the conditions for such an achievement. Tocqueville wrote,
Religion sees in civil liberty a noble exercise of the faculties of man; … religion knows that its dominion is that much better established because it rules only by its own strength and dominates hearts without other support. Liberty sees in religion the companion of its struggles and triumphs, the cradle of its early years, the divine source of its rights. Liberty considers religion as the safeguard of mores, mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration.16
Tocqueville offers us a unique perspective in time on the tradition of harmony between religion and freedom. Through Tocqueville’s writings, we see as through a window a moment in American history in which Americans cultivated and lived by a rule that was handed down to them by their ancestors, a rule would also be stewarded for future generations. Still, we recognize that Americans are just persons with a human nature. That human nature exists in a profound tension. On the one hand, human nature is dignified by the fact that persons are created in the image of God (Psalm 8). On the other hand, human nature is fallen as a result of the Fall (Isa 59:1-2; Rom 3:23). A mark of the mature and fully formed conscience in a person is that one is able to hold two opposing forces in an idea without tearing that idea asunder. Conservatives strive to hold the tension between dignity and fallenness in human nature without exalting one and ignoring the other. Christians know that this tension in human nature has been resolved in the Incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. So, while the tension between dignity and fallenness in human nature is there for us to grapple with in the past and present, we recognize that such an effort is not in vain.
Americans in the past were not innocent of moral failings and frightfulness, and they have not always been true to the ideal of maintaining a harmony between freedom and religion, at least not for everyone. But transgressions against the ideal do not disprove the legitimacy of that ideal—they confirm it. Furthermore, we know that not every tradition is worth conserving or revering. Some traditions are no longer practical in the same ways they were in the past (like the husbanding of horses), and some traditions are immoral (like chattel slavery and legal racial segregation). Still, Americans have historically been a people to revere tradition as a category, even though they have generally received individual traditions critically. The tradition of maintaining and extending the harmony between Tocqueville’s two American spirits—the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty—is a tradition worthy of receiving from our ancestors who are now dead, of stewarding for our own enjoyment, and of preparing them for generations yet to be born.
Considering the tension between two opposing realities, take the example of the American founders. There were fifty-five delegates to the Philadelphia Convention that drafted the Constitution in the summer of 1787. Twenty-five of those delegates were slaveowners. Thomas Jefferson, who was in France during that summer, penned the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves over the course of his lifetime at his Virginia plantations of Monticello and Poplar Forest. It is fashionable today to call the founders “hypocrites” because many of them owned slaves all the while endorsing Jefferson’s ideals in the Declaration. Such people who are unable to hold two historical realities in tension with one another also seem not to have the capacity to grasp the concept of aspiration. To aspire to an ideal, one first understands that he has not arrived at the ideal but has a path to follow. He is willing to take that path and stay on that path no matter how difficult the way may be because the upward path he is on is the path of improvement, and thus it offers its own reward.
Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Chicago during his 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas, in which he modeled how to hold in tension the reality that the founders maintained the institution of slavery while setting the nation on the aspirational path of abolishing it. Lincoln argued that the founders kept the institution of slavery in the United States at the national founding, not because they thought it was morally good, but because it was necessary that they do so in order to achieve the federal union of the states. The Constitution that created the federal union made the states greater than the sum of their parts, better than they would have ever been if they had pursued their own national careers as independent states or if they had formed a number of smaller unions. “We had slavery among us, we could not get our constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more, and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties,” Lincoln said.17 In other words, the necessity of keeping slavery for the sake of creating the federal union does not render the Constitution false to its dedication to freedom.
Lincoln explained his meaning by appealing to Scripture, when Jesus taught His disciples that “you are to be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48).18 As Jesus doubtless knew that the disciples would always be unable to attain to divine perfection in this life, he also knew that to lay the aspiration before them was central to fulfilling their calling as his disciples. Lincoln said, “So I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can. … Let us then turn this government back into the channel in which the framers of the Constitution originally placed it.”19 Christ’s moral teachings were aspirational, in the same way that the founding documents like the Declaration and the Constitution were aspirational. Lincoln denied that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document but asserted that it was developed on the basis of the principle of liberty for all. If the Constitution were a pro-slavery document, then the Constitution would have to affirm that slavery was a positive moral good. But this was not so. “Necessity,” Lincoln said, “was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery. … They found the institution existing among us, which they could not help; and they cast blame upon the British King for having permitted its introduction.”20
Lincoln said that the founders were ashamed of slavery, like one is ashamed of a cancerous growth, in that they never used the term “slavery” in the Constitution, but “person held to service or labor.” True, the founders left the cancer alone in 1787, like the victim of the cancer “dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.” Nevertheless, the victim trusts to a future day when “the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”21 The first Congresses under the Constitution acted toward slavery in ways that demonstrated, in Lincoln’s words, “hostility to PRINCIPLE, and toleration ONLY BY NECESSITY.”22 Central to Lincoln’s arguments against pro-slavery Democrats was that the founders intended Jefferson’s equality clause to be meant for everyone and the Constitution to set the nation on the path toward the extinction of slavery.
This is a small example of how America is an aspirational nation. America was founded on principles of human dignity, individual freedom, free exercise of religion, and equality under the law. Have Americans been perfect in living up to these moral standards? Of course not. Americans have been conscious of their flaws and have given much to follow the path of improvement. America was not founded to preserve slavery. It was founded on a principle that made slavery untenable, as well as any form of legal or economic oppression. That is one of the reasons why millions of people from all over the world have sacrificed all they possessed to get here since America became a nation.
Similarly, American conservatives of the Burkean tradition are aspirational because they have taken on the aspirational quality of their country. Being a conservative commits a person to the flourishing of individuals, communities, and the nation guided by tradition, just law, and an ethic of love informed by the Bible. Conservatives are often vilified by the left as being inhuman, but that is utter nonsense. Faithful conservatives aspire to the good, true, and beautiful and do so, guided by concrete experience, not by utopian visions.
The tradition of harmony between religion and liberty has prevailed in America since the national founding. Have there been past exceptions? Undoubtedly. Has religious freedom been unstained in America? Certainly not. But as Lincoln said of the founders’ attitudes toward slavery, the principle of harmony between religion and liberty has been the standard since the beginning of our national life. Aspirational conservatives are among the only ones in America today who have the will to conserve that harmony. Among self-described Democrats, the political party of the progressive left, only twenty-three percent consider themselves to be patriots, while fifty-nine percent of Republicans, the party representing conservatives, do. Twenty-three percent of Democrats value religion, while fifty-three percent of Republicans say the same.23 It is not exaggeration to say that conservatives have a greater will to conserve the traditions of patriotism and religious freedom than do progressives. It is also not an exaggeration to argue that conservatives are more interested in conserving religious freedom than those on the far right—who, it is important to note, disclaim and repudiate conservatism—who support magisterial Christian nationalism, along with the establishment of state churches.
If we are going to be conservatives, and if we are going to conserve the American tradition of harmonizing religion and liberty, then we must know what a conservative is and what conservatives value. In other words, we must know what conservatives are before we know what conservatives do. The aspirational conservative is pre-political. The one possessing a conservative disposition aims for a higher moral destiny for persons and societies, guided by the light of permanent things, tradition, and just order. He also understands human fallibility and the real world. He reckons with the human condition marked as it is by limitation, imperfection, and change. The moral profit and ordered freedom of the human person is the primary consideration of the conservative disposition. For those goods to obtain in the real world of scarcity, sin, and death, we must heed the proven experience of generations past which reveals to us how we understand concepts like rights, freedoms, and ethics. We turn our backs on the past and on tradition at our peril.
Conservatives value a well-ordered imagination because an imagination that realistically takes stock of the intersection between the eternal and the temporal prepares the person to accept the world as it is, but with hope. Conservatives order their love for their nation as an extension of their family and understand that the nation is neither innocent of great wrongdoing, nor is it the earthly manifestation of the infernal regions. Conservatives know that liberty apart from order is a lie. Liberty without moral order is slavery to vice, but too much order stifles liberty. Balance between liberty and order is difficult but attainable, as earlier generations have learned over time. Conservatives look to the past and read history to grow out of childishness and into maturity. As the Apostle Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things” (1 Cor 13:11). Conservatives know that history puts us on the path to maturity. Finally, conservatives value religion because religion expands our view from our mundane concerns and our selfishness to our common fate that awaits us, as well as the world to which we go. If we do not fear God, how can we expect to find peace and contentment here on earth?
Those things that harmonize liberty and religion on earth are the things that conservatives cherish. We love and seek to cultivate public spirit because public spirit is a form of patriotism, or a well-ordered love of country. We want to continue voluntarily associating for civil and religious causes because in doing so we cooperate with our neighbors, make new friends and associates, and find strength in the numbers of like-minded citizens. We see self-interest through the lens of the interests of the whole, thereby obtaining goods for ourselves and for others at the same time. We support the separation of church and state, not because we want to empower the state against the church or redefine religious freedom as a lackluster “freedom of worship,” but for the sake of free religious exercise. And we want to create a culture that values religion and religious people because a nation that values faith also values morality, truth, and just order. Those traditional features of American life that foster the health of religion and augment the scope and quality of religion are not utopian aspirations. They are concrete because we have examples of their beneficial manifestations in the experiences of those who have preceded us. And as we have enjoyed the inheritance we have obtained from earlier generations, it is our duty to the younger generations to hand them down unsullied.
We live in uncertain times. No matter. Every generation has lived in such times. No person has ever been able to see their end from their beginning. Every person who has ever lived had struggles, failures, hopes, and triumphs. It is so with all of us. Unlike the dead, our story is not finished yet, and we have the hope that tomorrow is another day. We have a God who is in control of our circumstances. We have a faith built on the truthfulness of God’s character. And we have a truly great country that has historically recognized the pre-political right of all persons to worship, obey, and speak publicly for the God which they serve. Let us not be ashamed of the inheritance we enjoy from our forebears, nor let us be ashamed to be known as true patriots. In patriotism there is courage, gratitude, vigilance, and charity. In patriotism, there is hope.
Every Christmas, the Wall Street Journal publishes an editorial first written and published in 1949 by Vermont Royster. Royster eloquently called to mind the world of Rome, the world in which Jesus was born and Paul was converted from a persecutor to a preacher of Jesus’s gospel. That world, like ours, sought salvation in power—power to redistribute wealth and power to enforce religious, political, intellectual conformity. What Augustine called the City of Man has and will continue to exalt itself and oppose any and all that stand in its way. The human tendency to grasp for power and to worship self-appointed gods for the sake of selfish ambition remains dominant, even in the freest and most democratic of societies. Only those who are realistic about the paradox of human dignity and human fallibility, who venerate tradition without worshiping it, and who understand that liberty is only manifested through just order are in the position to hold the powers of tyranny at bay. In the face of darkness, malice, ignorance, selfishness, guile, and hypocrisy, let us find courage in Royster’s closing words as we guard and steward our American heritage of religious liberty for the sake of our children and grandchildren: “And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord: Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”24
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), I.i.2.69. ↩︎
- Aaron Zitner, “America Pulls Back From Values that Once Defined It, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds,” The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values-that-once-defined-u-s-wsj-norc-poll-finds-df8534cd. ↩︎
- Jason Derose, “Religious ‘Nones’ Are Now the Single Largest Group in the US,” National Public Radio, January 24, 2024, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1226371734. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.467. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.467. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.469. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.467; note w. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.467. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.479. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.473. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, II.ii.2.878. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.475. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.466. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9.499–500. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.i.2.53. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Democracy, I.i.2.70. ↩︎
- Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858,” in Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 2009), 147. ↩︎
- Translations of Scripture are from the NASB. ↩︎
- Lincoln, “Speech at Chicago,” 147. ↩︎
- Abraham Lincoln, “Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854,” in Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 2009), 96. ↩︎
- Lincoln, “Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act,” 97. ↩︎
- Lincoln, “Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act,” 97. Emphasis in the original. ↩︎
- Zitner, “America Pulls Back,” March 27, 2023. ↩︎
- Vermont Royster, “In Hoc Anno Domini,” The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-hoc-anno-domini-christmas-editorial-vermont-royster-115e41b8. ↩︎
