In Democracy in America, Tocqueville observed that religion and republicanism had always gone hand in hand in the United States, and to the benefit of both. Not because church and state were merged or because the clergy meddled in politics but precisely because they weren’t and didn’t. There was no established religion and the clergy maintained a respectful distance from politics. Still, religion provided a powerful buttress to republican government. The churches schooled Americans in the practice of voluntary association while the clergy gently instilled respect for the nation’s laws. Not always, of course, but in their better moments at least.
In France, on the other hand, religion and republicanism were increasingly at odds with each other, and to the detriment of both. The rupture between religion and republicanism during the Revolution was succeeded by a bad marriage between religion and empire consecrated by Napoleon. There was an official religion and the clergy was politically vocal. In this ill-fated union between throne and altar, the Catholic Church supported the French monarchy, while the clergy preached obedience to authority, and republicans therefore opposed both. This same dynamic played out across all of Latin Europe. In these countries, it was politics rather than science that really drove people out of the churches.
Having discerned the likely outcome of these dynamics early on, Tocqueville sagely advised that “Religion by uniting with different political powers, can … form only burdensome alliances. It has no need of their help to survive and may die, if it serves them.”
The religious right in Trump’s America would do well to heed Tocqueville’s advice. Since the late 1970s it has embraced the Republican Party ever more tightly, alienating increasing numbers of Americans from Christianity. For a time, the adverse effects of the evangelical-Republican alliance on American Christianity were concealed by high birth rates among religious conservatives. But then, last year, a number of evangelical leaders made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump: their moral credibility in exchange for promises of political protection. As a result, the day of reckoning is coming, and coming soon.
Some evangelical leaders have taken a principled stand against this bargain, in effect a suicide pact, and rightly so. Christian intellectuals such as Russell Moore and Peter Wehner have spoken out forcefully against Trumpism; and they are paying a heavy price for doing so. But the price for the evangelical churches will be heavier still. The inevitable result will be the continued secularization of American society—and also the rapid fragmentation of the evangelical movement.
