I happened upon an article today which gives voice to my own personal feelings about the path our country must pursue in order to secure the liberties we have all been blessed to enjoy and for which many have sacrificed "their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor".
President George Washington identified the link between morality and religion. According to Washington, “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” For Washington, morality presupposed religion, and both virtues cultivated a healthy society. Perhaps this is why he said that “[o]f all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
John Adams was of the same mind. He argued that without religion and morality, our government could not stand because “avarice, ambition, revenge, and gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net.” Hence his famous observation that the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people.”
For Washington, Adams, and many others who helped establish our constitutional system of self-government, religion, morality, freedom, and democracy are necessarily interlinked. Without the moral sensibilities that religion can provide, freedom is all too easily corrupted, endangering the very foundation of democracy.
Our Founding Fathers were not alone in calling attention to the inextricable connection between religion and a healthy democracy.
The renowned political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville offered his own analysis on the subject. After spending several months observing American government and society, Tocqueville wrote his famed Democracy in America in an attempt to explain American political culture to his French counterparts. When Tocqueville published his work in the early 19th century, the United States was a burgeoning democracy and unique as one of the only countries in the world that guaranteed religious liberty to its citizens. At this intersection of democracy and religion, Tocqueville made his most compelling observations.
Like Washington and Adams, Tocqueville believed that religion was essential to the success of the American political experiment. Without the moral strictures of religion, the nation’s democracy would collapse on itself. In Tocqueville’s own words, “Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot …. 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?”
In other words, Tocqueville asked how the experiment of self-government could succeed if individuals refuse to submit to any moral authority beyond themselves. By posing this question, Tocqueville argued that democracy needs religion and morality to ensure that citizens exercise their freedom responsibly. Democracy needs religion to help refine the people’s moral sensibility and instill the virtues of good citizenship that make democracy possible in the first place.
Tocqueville also taught that democracy needs religion to temper the materialistic impulses of a free-market society. By setting our hopes and desires beyond imminent, temporal concerns and turning our hearts instead toward those in need, religion engenders charitable behavior and saves democracy from its own excesses. In Tocqueville’s view, the free exercise of religion is not just a condition of liberal society; it is a precondition for a healthy democracy. Without religion and the moral instruction it provides, freedom falters and democracy all too easily dissolves into tyranny.
In this regard, religion is not merely a boon to democracy, but a bulwark against despotism. Laws alone are incapable of instilling order and regulating moral behavior across society. As was once observed, “Our society is not held together just by law and its enforcement, but most importantly by voluntary obedience to the unenforceable and by widespread adherence to unwritten norms of right…behavior.”
Of course, religion and a basic sense of morality help induce such voluntary obedience to the unenforceable that Elder Oaks describes. George Washington conceded that individuals may find morality without religion, but political society needs the spiritual grounding that only religion can provide. In this regard, religion complements law in cultivating a moral citizenry.
Both law and religion are necessary to engender good citizenship. As the influence of religion diminishes, governments must enact more laws to fill the void and maintain a moral citizenry. So the consequence of less religious activity is not greater human freedom but greater state control. Religion, then, acts as a check on state power. It cultivates morality so governments don’t have to through the cold, impersonal machinery of law.
By acting as a shield against state overreach, religion is a friend to both democracy and freedom. Expanding religious freedom empowers democracy. But limiting religious freedom weakens our democratic institutions. In the most extreme case, eliminating religious freedom altogether results in tyranny and human suffering on a massive scale.
Consider the catastrophic state of affairs in countries that have explicitly outlawed religion. The Soviet Union, communist China under Mao, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and North Korea are prominent examples. In each of these countries, leaders committed unspeakable atrocities to enforce their own godless morality. In the absence of faith, there was no religious horizon to keep political ambitions within limits. Unencumbered by the moral restraint of religion, dictators systematically killed millions of their own people to establish their own secular vision of heaven on earth. These illustrations of totalitarianism, torture, and genocide demonstrate that a society without religion is a society without freedom.
Society needs religion to keep political ambitions in check. And democracy needs religion to maintain morality so that freedom can flourish.
