Secular Europe, religious America

Public Interest, Spring, 2004 by Brian C. Anderson

Europe's point of departure

How are we to explain this divergence in religiosity within the liberal democratic universe? One thing that cannot help us is the "secularization theory" once popular among sociologists. It holds, in Berger's words, that "modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals." This theory now seems suspect, as Berger, a former proponent, acknowledges. If modernity inevitably brings secularism, a "disenchantment of the world," then how is it that the United States--the modern nation par excellence--is so religious? Nor is secularization increasing in modernizing areas of the world, from Latin America to the Middle East, Berger points out. Europe today seems more the exception than the rule when it comes to religious belief.

A more plausible explanation points to the very dissimilar histories of how democracy arrived in America and in Europe. The European democratic tradition, the model for which originated in the French Revolution, has been hostile to religion from its inception, and religion, especially the Catholic church, had until recently been hostile to it in return. In America, however, democracy and religion have mostly been friends. Alexis de Tocqueville understood this divergence clearly. "Among us," he wrote of the French in Democracy in America, "I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions." In America, by contrast, Tocqueville found the spirits of religion and democracy "united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil."

Tocqueville believed religion would necessarily lose any battle with democracy if it sought to oppose it outright. The "providential" advance of the "equality of conditions" in the modern world, he argued, made some form of democracy a fate, not a choice. Yet such an accommodation with democracy would have been hard to justify or even imagine for the Catholic church and its supporters in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Before the French Revolution, one could find within the Catholic church's ranks advocates of social and democratic reform as well as adherents of the old regime. The gathering of the three estates that began the revolutionary process in France could not have taken place without the support of many clergy. But the French revolutionaries, influenced in particular by Rousseau's notion of the "general will," conceived of democracy in a way that imposed no limits on its power--putting man in God's place as sovereign and controller of existence. Throw off superstition and the old power structures, let Reason rule, and the perfectibility of man was possible--or so the revolutionaries believed. The idea of original sin was for them a myth, invented by the benighted and prudish church to darken minds and maintain social control.

The revolutionaries' Promethean ambitions meant they had to eradicate the spiritual and institutional power of the church, since it made rival claims for human allegiance. "These priests ... must die because they are out of place, interfere with the movement of things, and will stand in the way of the future," Georges Danton pronounced in a spirit typical of the revolutionaries.