SOURCE: "Tocqueville and Religion: Some New Perspectives." The Tocqueville Review IV, No. II (Fall-Winter 1982): 303-21.

In this essay, Schleifer discusses Tocqueville's attitudes toward religion in America as expressed in Democracy in America.

Anatomy of the Subject

Tocqueville's major ideas about religion appear very early in his American journey notes and remain by and large unchanged during the nine years when he was writing the Democracy. As early as the end of June 1831, after less than two months in the New World, his travel diaries and letters home refer to nearly all of the key themes relating to religion which would later appear in the 1835 and 1840 portions of his book.¹

This is not to imply that there were no changes in Tocqueville's ideas between May 1831, when he arrived in America, and 1840, when the last part of the Democracy was finally published. His basic message about religion was fixed very...