THE MARKS OF “A GREAT POLITICIAN”–A VIEW FROM 1776

Hello!  If you are a regular subscriber to this blog, you know that I have been on sabbatical this year and that my posts have been few and far between.  I am looking forward to interacting with you regularly come autumn, but for now I am trying to make as much progress as I can on a book on the rise of American democracy, tentatively titled “We the Fallen People.”

John Adams

I did come across a passage in my reading today that seemed timely, however, and I couldn’t help sharing it.  I spent a glorious morning at nearby forest preserve, and as I sat in the sun on one of my favorite benches, I encountered this from our nation’s second president, John Adams.  The date was January 8, 1776, and Adams, at the time a member of the Second Continental Congress, was writing to Mrs. Mercy Otis Warren, the sister and wife of distinguished patriot leaders and an accomplished political writer in her own right.  In context, Adams was sharing his preference for a republic over a monarchy, as well as his doubts whether Americans possessed sufficient virtue for a republic to survive.  Listen to his conclusion:

It is the Part of a great Politician to make the Character of his People; to extinguish among them, the Follies and Vices that he sees, and to create in them the Virtues and Abilities which he sees wanting. I wish I was sure that America has one such Politician, but I fear she has not.

As timely in 2016 as in 1776.

 

ADVENT REMINDERS FOR POLITICALLY-CONSCIOUS CHRISTIANS

I’m not really a politics junkie, but I found the extraordinary divisiveness of the recent presidential campaign mesmerizing (not to mention deeply disturbing).  For Christians, the danger of becoming so engrossed in an election like the one we just experienced is that it’s easy easy to lose perspective.  Unaware, we can gradually forget what we claim to believe about the sovereignty of God as we agonize over the triumph of this candidate or the failure of that one.  This is one reason I called your attention recently to Vince Bacote’s book The Political Disciple.  It is filled with reminders of Biblical truths that will keep us grounded if we cling to them.

Before I forget about it, I thought I would also call attention to another voice that I needed to hear in the aftermath of election day.  Michael Gerson is one of my favorite writers on public life.  A graduate of Wheaton and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, his op-ed column in the Washington Post is regularly engaging and insightful.  And for those who doubt that a “mainstream media” source like the Post could possibly feature a substantive Christian perspective, Gerson’s editorials consistently prove otherwise.

A case in point was his November 21 piece, “Pushing Back Against the Mortal Risk of Politics.”  With candid humility, Gerson reflects on the ways that, in our fallenness, we so regularly take on the attributes of those we criticize.  The “mortal risk of politics is becoming what you condemn,” he writes, and it’s a danger “not limited to one side of our political divide.”  Gerson goes on to confess,  “I have found myself angry at how [pro-Trump evangelicals] have endorsed the politics of anger; bitter about the bitter political spirit they have encouraged; feeling a bit hypocritical in my zeal to point out their hypocrisy.”

But then Gerson preaches the gospel to himself–and to us–by recalling that “an attitude of fuming, prickly anxiety” should be foreign to followers of Jesus for at least two reasons.  First. “Christian belief relativizes politics.”  He elaborates,

The pursuit of social justice and the maintenance of public order are vital work.  But these tasks are temporary, and, in an ultimate sense, secondary.  If Christianity is true, C. S. Lewis noted, then “the individual person will outlive the universe.”  All our anger and worry about politics should not blind us to the priority and value of the human beings placed in our lives, whatever their background or beliefs.

The practical implications of this truth are clear and convicting: “‘Those people’ are also ‘our people.’ . . . No change of president or shift in the composition of the Supreme Court can result in a repeal of the Golden Rule.”

Second, “Christians are instructed not to be anxious.”  In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught us not to worry about tomorrow, trusting by faith that God is good and that He is in control.  The atheist may see the universe as “indifferent to the lives and dreams of jumped-up primates crawling on an unremarkable blue ball,” but our faith assures us that “that blue ball was touched by God in a manner and form that Homo Sapiens might understand.  And the vast, cold universe is really a sheltering sky.”

Gerson ends with words of encouragement:

After a dismal and divisive campaign season, many of us need the timely reminders of the Advent season: That people matter more than all our political certainties.  That God is in control, despite our best efforts.  And that some conflicts can’t be won by force or votes–only by grace.

TOCQUEVILLE ON AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY: PART FIVE OF “AMERICA IS GREAT BECAUSE SHE IS GOOD”

So what did Alexis de Tocqueville really think of American Christianity, and why should American Christians care?

For the past couple of weeks, I have been writing about a reassuring adage popularly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, namely that “America is great because she is good.”  This line has long been favored by politicians and pundits, and just this summer it’s cropped up in places as disparate as Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention and a policy statement by the Harvard Republican Club.

Alexis de Tocqueville, circa 1850

If you’ve been following the series, you know by now that Tocqueville never penned these exact lines—they’re almost certainly plagiarized (though inaccurately) from the writings of two British Congregational ministers who visited the United States shortly after Tocqueville did.  More importantly, Tocqueville didn’t argue anything as simplistic as the bumper-sticker slogan we’re fond of attributing to him.  Tocqueville didn’t write as a partisan.  He wanted his analysis of what was then the most democratic nation on earth to be useful to a world moving fitfully in the direction of ever greater democracy, but he bristled at the prospect of his painstaking analysis being hijacked in the service of a particular political or religious faction.  This is why one of the most prominent features of Democracy in America is its complexity.  There’s a good reason why it’s more than eight hundred pages long.

Tocqueville visited seventeen states and conducted more than two hundred interviews during his nine-month tour of the United States, and then he meditated and reflected on what he had seen and heard for the better part of another decade as he sought to make sense of it all.  He concluded that there were numerous factors that helped to explain the flourishing of liberty in the United States.  Least important, though still hugely significant, were “a thousand circumstances independent of man’s will that ease the way for the democratic republic in the United States.”  Even more important were laws and political practices inherited from an earlier time, some brought to American shores by 17^th-century Puritans, others codified by the Revolutionary generation in the structure of American federalism and the specific features of the U. S. Constitution.  More important still were what Tocqueville labeled “mores,” by which he meant “the whole range of intellectual and moral dispositions that men bring to the state of society.”  In sketching the latter, Tocqueville described Americans as acquisitive and materialistic, independent-minded, individualistic, rationally self-interested, and religious.

Clearly, this does not boil down to a conclusion that “it was the ‘goodness’ of America’s people that made America work,” as Eric Metaxas curiously insists in his recent summary of Democracy in America.  But rather than leave it at that, we need to dig deeper into what Tocqueville actually believed about American Christianity.  It’s in Tocqueville’s description of the role of religious belief in Jacksonian America that the casual reader will most likely be led astray.  Why is this?

The main reason is that, when it comes to the Frenchman’s views on American Christianity, there are really two Tocquevilles.  There’s the Tocqueville who underscores the importance of Christianity to American democracy, and the Tocqueville who raises questions about the influence of democracy on American Christianity.  This is a historical problem, obviously, in that it makes it harder for us to figure out what Tocqueville is actually saying.  But there’s a sense in which it’s also a moral problem.  All things equal, we—and here I mean Christian readers—will like the first Tocqueville better.  The first Tocqueville pats us on the back, tells us that democracy can’t survive without us, and hands us any number of effective quotes to hit our unbelieving neighbors over the head with.  The second Tocqueville is a less pleasant conversation partner.  He’s less impressed with American Christianity and seems to suggest that there was a fair amount of conforming to the world among Jacksonian-era believers.

Put simply, the first Tocqueville congratulates us, the second wants to convict us. Because of this, Democracy in America lays bare one of the great temptations that we face when we study history: the temptation to use the past as ammunition rather than learn from it and be changed by it.  Consciously or unconsciously, we’ll be inclined to highlight the passages that reinforce what we already believe (or want to believe) and tune out the inconvenient parts that don’t advance our agendas.  With regard to Democracy in America, if we’re not careful we’ll be all ears for the Tocqueville we want to hear and deaf to the Tocqueville we may need to hear.

Title Page of the first American edition of Tocqueville’s classic, published in 1838.

Let’s start with the first Tocqueville, the one who many American Christians will be glad to listen to.  Without doubt, Democracy in America offers one of the most eloquent arguments for the importance of religious belief to political liberty ever penned.  The “spirit of freedom” and the “spirit of faith” were intimately intertwined in America, Tocqueville maintained, and it was no coincidence that the United States was simultaneously “the most enlightened and the freest” of nations and “the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over men’s souls.”  There was a general principle at work: democracies need religion if they are to survive and flourish.

Let’s review his reasoning: One of Tocqueville’s greatest concerns was what he called the “tyranny of the majority.”  “The people rule in the American political realm as God rules the universe,” Tocqueville found, and with this unchallenged popular power came the potential to abuse the politically vulnerable.  When Tocqueville spoke of tyranny, he meant not simply absolute power—which he often referred to as despotism—but rather the exercise of power that resulted in oppression or injustice.  “In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise . . . from their weakness, but from their strength,” he reflected.  “I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.”

And yet—and this is the crucial observation that so intrigued Tocqueville—the American majority did not fully utilize its power to oppress the minority.  Acknowledging the enormous exception of southern slavery, Tocqueville believed that, on the whole, in America the potential for injustice vastly exceeded its actual extent.  To use Tocqueville’s terminology, in America the majority was omnipotent but not tyrannical.  Why was this, Tocqueville wondered?

Here is where mores come in.  Americans, Tocqueville found, had inculcated “habits of restraint” that, becoming second nature, reminded them daily in conscious and unconscious ways that not everything you have the power to do is good to do.  Some of these “habits of restraint” were expressions of what Tocqueville called “the doctrine of self-interest properly understood,” which I wrote about in a previous post.  Americans had learned that denying themselves short-term pleasures often maximized their long-term well-being.  This helped to create “a multitude of citizens who are disciplined, temperate, moderate, prudent, and self-controlled.”

But Americans’ religious beliefs were also a crucial source of these “habits of restraint.”  In the United States “Christianity reigns without obstacles,” he observed, which is why

No one in the United States has dared to profess the maxim that everything is allowed in the interests of society, an impious maxim apparently invented in an age of freedom in order to legitimate every future tyrant.  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.

This contribution was so critical that Tocqueville concluded that, although “religion . . . never intervenes directly in the government of American society,” it nevertheless functioned as “the first of their political institutions.”  If religion did not give Americans “their taste for liberty,” he concluded, “it does notably facilitate their use of that liberty.”  Yes, we like this Tocqueville.

But what about the second Tocqueville, the one that’s far less reassuring?  Let’s listen to him for a while.  To begin, it’s important to note that Tocqueville’s focus was always on the external, political consequences of religious belief in America.  He commented on American religion in much the same way that a political scientist or sociologist would. This meant, among other things, that he overtly declined to say whether he thought Americans’ religious beliefs were either true or genuine—“for who can read the bottom of men’s hearts?”—although he did hazard the conviction that “hypocrisy must be common.”

Whether Christianity was true or American Christians’ faith was authentic were both irrelevant for his purposes.  “Though it matters a great deal to each individual that his religion be true,” he explained, “that is not the case for society.  Society has nothing to fear from the other life, and nothing to hope for, and what matters most to it is not so much that all citizens profess the true religion as that each citizen profess some religion.”

And yet in private moments Tocqueville revealed considerable skepticism of American Christianity.  In Democracy in America Tocqueville recalled that “it was the country’s religious aspect that first captured my attention.”  But in his personal letters home he shared considerable misgivings about what he was observing.  Less than two months into his stay, he shared his reservations in a lengthy report to an old family friend.  “I even doubt that religious opinions hold as much sway as I originally thought they did.”

Americans were admittedly very strict in their observance of the Sabbath, and Tocqueville saw numerous other examples of external religious zeal, but he remained unconvinced.  “Unless I’m sadly mistaken, these external forms conceal a reservoir of doubt and indifference,” he conjectured.  “Faith is obviously inert,” he went on.  “What was once a strong impulse is growing feebler by the day.  Enter any church (I refer to the protestant kind) and you will hear sermons about morals; not one word about dogma—nothing at all likely to fluster one’s neighbor or awaken the idea of dissent.”   The conclusion to the young Frenchman was clear: “On the whole, religion doesn’t move people to the depth of their soul.”

Tocqueville was more circumspect about what he shared in public, but he still peppered Democracy in America with observations that should give us pause.  For example, even while emphasizing the compatibility between Christianity and political liberty, Tocqueville hinted that Americans had so conflated the two that they tended to support Christianity as an expression of patriotism.

“In the United States, religion never ceases to warm itself at patriotism’s hearth,” he observed.  He spoke with numerous missionaries to the American West during his journey and found that “eternity is only one of their concerns.” Carrying Christianity to the frontier was one means of spreading American values and protecting America’s borders.  “If you were to question these missionaries of Christian civilization,” he related, “you would be quite surprised to . . . find politicians where you had thought there were only men of religion.”

This emphasis on Christianity’s earthly benefits was widespread, according to Tocqueville:

American preachers refer to this world constantly and, indeed, can avert their eyes from it only with the greatest of difficulty.  Seeking to touch their listeners all the more effectively, they are forever pointing out how religious beliefs foster liberty and public order, and in listening to them it is often difficult to tell whether the chief object of religion is to procure eternal happiness in the other world or well-being in this one.

George Caleb Bingham, “The Verdict of the People,” 1854-55

In Tocqueville’s view, Americans had effectively married the “doctrine of self-interest properly understood” with their commitments to Christianity.  Not only did they “adhere to their religion out of self-interest,” but the self-interest they had in mind was as much about earthly benefit as heavenly reward.

It is no coincidence that Tocqueville uses his observation on American preachers referring constantly to this world as a segue into his chapter “On the Taste for Material Well-Being in America.”  The central theme of that chapter is that “love of well-being has become the national and dominant taste, and a sub-theme is that Americans have combined the passion for well-being with religious sentiment, with the result that “the people want to be as well off as possible in this world without renouncing their chances in the next.”

Finally, we need to listen to Tocqueville’s observations about American Christianity in light of what he has to share about American values more broadly.  Tocqueville tells us that Christianity “reigns” in America “by universal consent,” but he also tells us that Americans’ near universal motive is self-interest, that they are skeptical of any authority (even within the church) not granted by the people themselves, and that there is “no other country where the love of money occupies as great a place in the hearts of men.”  What are we to make of this?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

In the end, I think we need to listen to both Tocquevilles, the one that underscores the centrality of faith to freedom and the one that reminds us that political influence doesn’t always go hand in hand with spiritual vitality.

I’ll be back in a bit with some concluding thoughts on “America is great because she is good.”

TOCQUEVILLE ON THE AMERICAN CHARACTER: PART FOUR OF “AMERICA IS GREAT BECAUSE SHE IS GOOD”

Did Alexis de Tocqueville think that “America is great because Americas is good,” as scores of politicians and pundits over the years have insisted?  Did he conclude that “the secret to American freedom is American virtue,” as Eric Metaxas has recently claimed to be the Frenchmen’s “inescapable” conclusion?  What did Tocqueville really believe about the American character, and why should we care if he has been misrepresented?

Alexis de Tocqueville, circa 1850

In my last post I reviewed the three main categories that Tocqueville identified to explain why liberty had endured in the United States in the presence of unprecedented equality.  He began by pointing to the crucial importance of “providential” circumstances “independent of man’s will,” most notably the propitious geographic situation of the United States and its vast store of natural resources.   More important still were the system of laws inherited from the Founders, especially the overarching structure of American federalism, the safeguards built into the national Constitution, and the key role played by the American judiciary at both the state and national levels.  Finally, Tocqueville underscored the paramount importance of what he labeled “mores,” the habits of heart and mind that shaped the ways that Americans interacted with each other and with their government.

The first two categories had little to do with Americans’ character, and as I mentioned last time, to the degree that they helped to explain the perpetuation of liberty in the U. S., Tocqueville seems to be saying that American freedom has much more to do with divine grace than human goodness.  The third category is different, however.  In turning to mores—to what Americans believed and how what they believed affected how they behaved—Tocqueville is indisputably arguing that part of the reason that liberty is flourishing in America is because of American values.  But what were those values?

Before answering that question, I have to stop and interject what is my single most favorite quotation from Democracy in America. It’s an observation that speaks volumes about Tocqueville’s reading of human nature and also explains why Americans have found it so hard to hear what Tocqueville had to say.  Here’s the quote, which I feature on the syllabus of just about every course that I teach:

A false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.

Tocqueville’s sketch of the American character is nothing if not complex, and to condense it to the simplistic assertion “America is good” makes an effective political slogan but misrepresents his argument badly.

Remember that the central focus of Democracy in America is Tocqueville’s quest to understand the consequences of equality on society and politics.  When it comes to the American character, he is most interested in those traits that either are shaped by American equality or shape equality’s effects on American liberty.  He has much to say on the topic—almost the entirety of volume II is relevant—but here are the character traits that I would say Tocqueville finds paramount:  Generalizing broadly, Americans as Tocqueville describes them are materialistic and acquisitive, independent-minded, individualistic (up to a point), rationally self-interested, and religious.  Let’s take each in turn, and as we consider each, ask yourself how each might be viewed in the light of orthodox Christian teaching.

Within days of setting foot in America, Tocqueville had concluded that the United States was far more materialistic than any of the nations of Europe.  “Here we are truly in another world,” he marveled in a letter to his brother Edouard.   “Political passions are only superficial.  The one passion that runs deep, the only one that stirs the human heart day in and day out, is the acquisition of wealth.”  Some of his initial impressions had changed by the time he sat down to write Democracy in America, but this one only hardened.  “I know no other country where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts,” he informed his readers.  A “breathless cupidity” drove Americans “to nothing but the pursuit of wealth.”  Related to this was a persistent discontentment that propelled the typical American to a relentless striving for things.  “Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit.”

Tocqueville also observed among Americans an “extreme love of independence.”  A love of independence could be an admirable trait in Tocqueville’s mind.  By his own admission, Tocqueville’s greatest “passion” was the “love of liberty,” and Americans’ love of independence could certainly foster that.  But Tocqueville subscribed to the classical view that moral virtues and vices come not in pairs but in threes.  Someone with too little love of independence was “servile,” with a mindset befitting a slave, but someone with an exaggerated love of independence could resent even legitimate authority.  Such a person was “recalcitrant,” and recalcitrance was one of the character traits that St. Augustine positioned at the very heart of human nature after the Fall.  In Tocqueville’s view, Americans’ passion for equality predisposed them to scorn any authority other than the unassailable moral authority of the majority.  This caused them to be resentful of any intellectual, political, or religious authority not actually awarded by the people themselves.

Title Page of the first American edition of Tocqueville’s classic, published in 1838. The word “individualism” first appeared in the English language in this book.

Americans were also prone to individualism, according to Tocqueville.  Modern-day Americans often view individualism positively, as an expression of admirable self-reliance and initiative, but Tocqueville saw it in a very different light.  Aristocracy “linked all citizens together in a long chain from peasant to king,” Tocqueville explained, whereas democracy “breaks the chain and severs the links.”  Equality placed citizens side by side but “without a common bond to hold them together.”  Owing nothing to anyone, expecting nothing from anyone, men and women gradually withdraw from society into the cocoon of the family.  In Tocqueville’s view, individualism eats away at community and undermines civic life.  Happily, Americans in the 1830s largely offset this tendency with a penchant for joining forces with others to accomplish specific tasks.  Americans were “constantly joining together in groups” to work toward common goals, whether it was the erection of a hospital, the improvement of a school, or the promotion of some moral or political goal.

That they could join forces with their neighbors to accomplish tasks that they couldn’t accomplish alone reflected another of the character traits Tocqueville emphasized: the degree to which Americans were motivated by the rational calculation of self-interest.  The pursuit of self-interest can be impulsive, reckless, and actually detrimental to wellbeing in the long run, or it can be rational, dispassionate, and prudent in a way that brings long-term benefits.  The latter is what Tocqueville meant by “self-interest, properly understood,” and he argued in vol. II of Democracy in America that it was a doctrine that prevailed almost universally among the people of the United States.

While Eric Metaxas insists that Tocqueville believed that “the secret to American freedom was American virtue,” Tocqueville begins his chapter on the “doctrine of self-interest, properly understood” with the contention that the idealization of virtue (defined as the denial of self for the good of the whole) was a hallmark of aristocratic societies, not democratic ones.  In democratic ages, he contends, the ideal of self-sacrifice for the good of others gradually gives way to the belief that the denial of self in the near term can actually further self-interest in the long run.  Americans no longer spoke of the beauty of virtuous sacrifice, Tocqueville found.  Instead, they praised the usefulness of prudent self-denial. If they had a true guiding star among the heroes of the Revolution, it was Benjamin Franklin, whose “Poor Richard’s Almanack” had shown Americans the path to health and wealth through hard work and thrift.

Self-interest properly understood did not lead Americans to classical virtue, Tocqueville acknowledged, “but it does create a multitude of citizens who are disciplined, temperate, moderate, prudent, and self-controlled.”  In many ways such character traits were a blessing to the larger society, but they originated in self-interest, not in virtuous self-denial as a noble act in and of itself.  Americans were no less selfish than the French, Tocqueville reckoned, but American selfishness was “enlightened” in a way that French selfishness was not.  “Instead of blindly yielding to his first desires,” the typical American “has learned the art of combating them and has become accustomed to easily sacrificing the pleasure of the moment to the permanent interests of his entire life.”

Finally, Tocqueville described Americans as surprisingly religious.  “When I arrived in the United States, it was the country’s religious aspect that first captured my attention,” he informed his readers.  To his surprise, the country that was “the freest and most enlightened” in the world, was also the country where religion’s “influence is greatest.”  What Tocqueville had to say about religion in America is so important, and at the same time so complicated, that it will take an entire post to distill his observations.

I’ll turn to that in my next post and (finally) wrap up this series on the oft-repeated claim “America is great because America is good.”  In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts.  In characterizing Americans as acquisitive and materialistic, independent-minded and individualistic, rationally self-interested and religious, was Alexis de Tocqueville making the case in the 1830s that “America is good”?

THE DANGER OF RELIGIOUS ALLIANCES WITH SECULAR POWER–A TIMELY WARNING FROM A LONG TIME AGO

It was a glorious afternoon in Wheaton and I took advantage of the perfect weather to spend several hours at St. James Farm, a former horse and dairy farm that is now a 600-acre public forest preserve.  I took a cold drink and my copy of Democracy in America and had a grand time.

I’ll return in a day or two to my series on the aphorism “America is great because America is good,” but I was so struck by a passage from Tocqueville on a different subject—in this case, lines that the Frenchman actually wrote—that I had to share them with you right away.  The passage in question comes from a section in vol. I titled “On the Principal Causes of Religion’s Power in America.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, circa 1850

Writing in the 1830s, Tocqueville begins by noting that European philosophers had been predicting since the eighteenth century that religious zeal would inevitably fade as liberty and enlightenment increased.  The opposite pattern seemed to hold in America, however.  In America Tocqueville found “the freest, most enlightened men living in the happiest circumstances to be found anywhere in the world,” and yet religion also seemed to flourish.  “When I arrived in the United States,” he relates, “it was the country’s religious aspect that first captured my attention.”

Surprised by this discovery, Tocqueville interviewed a variety of clergymen about what he had discerned, and “to a man, they assigned primary credit for the peaceful ascendancy of religion in their country to the complete separation of church and state.”  This prompted him to ask further questions about the role that the clergy played in America.  “As I listened,” Tocqueville related,

I learned that in God’s eyes no one is damnable for his political views so long as those views are sincere, and that there is no more sin in erring about matters of government than in being mistaken about how to build a house or plow a furrow.

Interesting.  Tocqueville continues,

I saw them [the clergy] carefully mark their distance from, and avoid contact with, all parties as zealously as it if were a matter of personal interest.

In the rest of the chapter, Tocqueville compares religion’s great vitality in the United States with its moribund state in France and explains the difference by comparing the separation of church and state that existed in the United States with the close alliance of church and state that had characterized France prior to the French Revolution.  When French advocates of political liberty had struck at the French monarchy, they had naturally seen the Catholic Church as an ally of the Crown and an enemy of the cause of freedom.  He then generalizes,

When religion allies itself with a political power, it increases its power over some but gives up hope of reigning over all.  As long as a religion rests solely on sentiments that console man in his misery, it can win the affection of the human race.  But when it embraces the bitter passions of this world, it may be forced to defend allies acquired through interest rather than love, and it must reject as adversaries men who love it still even as they do battle with its allies.  Religion cannot share the material might of those who govern without incurring some of the hatred they inspire. . . . But when religion seeks the support of worldly interests, it becomes almost as fragile as any temporal power.  Alone, it can hope for immortality; linked to ephemeral powers, it shares their fortune and often falls with the fleeting passions that sustain them.

I don’t know about you, but when Tocqueville writes of Christians being “forced to defend allies acquired through interest rather than love,” my mind goes to the awkward (and I believe horribly misguided) alliance of evangelicals with Donald Trump.  Tocqueville believed that such an alliance had greatly weakened the spiritual influence of French Christians.  “In Europe,” he writes.

Christianity allowed itself to become the close ally of temporal powers.  Today those powers are collapsing, and Christianity finds itself buried, as it were, beneath their debris.  A living thing, it has been lashed to cadavers.

Democracy in America is not Scripture and Alexis de Tocqueville was not a prophet, yet this passage has me wondering what long-term effect evangelical leaders’ support for Donald Trump will have on the Church’s witness to a lost world.

TRUMP’S “EVANGELICAL EXECUTIVE ADVISORY BOARD”

I would like to have been a fly on the wall at Tuesday’s gathering of more than a thousand evangelical leaders and activists with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.  The meeting has garnered comparatively little media attention thus far, in large part because the assembly was closed to the press—all news outlets, not just those on Donald Trump’s black list—and second-hand testimony is only slowing beginning to come in.

According to an article in the Atlantic, Ben Carson, Jerry Falwell Jr., and pollster George Barna were among those addressing the audience.  After Trump spoke,  former presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee moderated a scripted Q&A which Christian author Eric Metaxas described in a tweet as “eye-opening.”  Hmmm.  The most detailed first-hand evidence concerning the substance of Trump’s remarks comes from a tweeted video of a portion of the address from a Christian radio host in the audience.  The video captures Trump discouraging the audience from praying for our nation’s officeholders.  “We can’t be, again, politically correct and say we pray for all of our leaders,” Trump explains, “because all of your leaders are selling Christianity down the tubes.”

Three quick reactions come to mind: First, the quote is quintessential Trump—a sweeping declaration unburdened by evidence, appealing to emotion instead of reason, and designed to prey on the fear and anger that it incites.

Second, to the degree that evangelicals buy into such rhetoric, it encourages us to conceive of ourselves as an innocent and aggrieved majority in need of a political savior, rather than as pilgrims and strangers called to be light to a fallen world while recognizing that our citizenship is in heaven.

Finally, given Trump’s self-professed veneration for the Bible (he claims to  like it even better than The Art of the Deal), I am struck by his disregard for the New Testament’s stricture that “prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence” (I Timothy 2:1-2).  I guess the apostle Paul was simply too “politically correct.”

The Trump campaign followed up Tuesday’s gathering by announcing the appointment of an “Evangelical Executive Advisory Board.”  According to the official media announcement, the group of twenty-five mostly white male pastors will “provide advisory support to Mr. Trump on those issues important to evangelicals and other persons of faith in America.”  The press release goes on to explain that the creation of this board represents Trump’s “endorsement of those diverse issues important to Evangelicals and other Christians, and his desire to have access to the wise counsel of such leaders as needed.”

The announcement continues, supposedly quoting Trump as saying, “I have such tremendous respect and admiration for this group and I look forward to continuing to talk about the issues important to Evangelicals, and to Americans, and the common sense solutions I will implement when I am president.”

So let’s boil this down and see what we have: A candidate known for his erratic inconsistency and unpredictability has just issued a blanket endorsement of  “issues important to evangelicals” without naming a single one.  A supremely self-confident celebrity famous for going his own way has promised to take seriously the “wise counsel” of evangelical advisers “as needed.”  (Who will get to decide when he “needs” it?)

Should anyone find this reassuring?  More to the point, would anyone who takes the Constitution’s checks and balances seriously fail to shudder at Trump’s confidence that he can unilaterally “implement” solutions to the issues that concern evangelicals (whatever they are)?

You can find the list of Trump’s evangelical advisers here.  I’m not familiar with the majority of those on the list, but a minority I surely recognize: James Dobson, Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, Ronnie Floyd, David Jeremiah, and Ralph Reed, among others.  The Trump campaign’s press release makes clear that the individuals named to the board “were not asked to endorse Mr. Trump as a prerequisite for participating on the board,” and some of those named have been openly critical of Trump in the past.  And yet, can anyone doubt that Trump will use the very existence of the board as a campaign talking point to buttress his appeal among the evangelical rank and file?

As I write this, I am mindful of a book that I read earlier in the summer: Christianity and American Democracy, by Hugh Heclo.  Heclo is a professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a scholar who has spent much of his career exploring the interactions of faith and politics in American life.  In the book, which originated in a major public lecture at Harvard a decade ago, Heclo describes and evaluates the interplay of democratic values and Christian convictions since the American founding.  The general pattern that he describes should give every Christian pause: when tenets of orthodox Christian belief have clashed with prevailing democratic values, it is more often Christian belief that has retreated and conformed to the democratic culture, not the other way around.

Even more to the point is Heclo’s timely warning:

Worldly power, being worldly, is always ready and willing to use religion to win fights with political opponents.

 Whatever the motives of those who have accepted a position on Trump’s advisory board, I fear that they are being used.  And if Heclo is right, the end result is less likely to be a government that is more Christian than a Church that is more worldly.