The Cement of Democracy

The National Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Fund for Adult Education presents Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. In Europe, Christianity has been intimately united to the powers of the Earth. Those powers are now in decay, and religion is as it were buried under their ruins.

The living body of religion has been bound down to the dead corpse of superannuated policy, but the Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.

Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. For what can be done with the people who are their own masters, if they are not submissive to the deity. The Cement of Democracy A study in American Religion Item 6 in the series Democracy in America, prepared by the Division of General Education of New York University, under the direction of George Probst, American Historian.

A series designed to bring to life the America of 1831, as recorded by Alexis de Tocqueville, and so to illuminate the image of democracy itself. A study in American religion. The cement of democracy. It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society.

In the United States in 1831, religion has as it were laid down its own limits. Religious institutions have remained wholly distinct from political institutions, so that former laws have been easily changed, while former belief has remained unshaken.

In the United States, Christianity is an established fact, but Christian sects are infinitely diversified and infinitely tolerant. This struck us very forcibly on the Sunday-Bumor and I spent in the great prison of Sing Sing, where the warden showed us the chapel.