Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).
- Our system of government was designed for a moral people who understood that ordered liberty required a profound sense of duty and character.
Alexis de Tocqueville crossed the Atlantic searching for the secret of America’s government. He returned convinced he had been asking the wrong question.
The young Frenchman had come to study our young republic. He examined our courts, legislatures, elections, and Constitution. He admired the ingenuity of America’s political institutions. Yet when he returned home to write Democracy in America, it was not Congress that fascinated him most.
It was the American people.
Tocqueville concluded that America’s remarkable experiment in self-government rested upon something far deeper than a brilliantly written Constitution. It rested upon the character of the citizens themselves. Long before Americans entered polling places, served on juries, or held public office, they had been taught honesty, sacrifice, humility, duty, charity, fidelity, and self-restraint.
Religion, Tocqueville concluded, was indispensable to that process.
He observed that while American churches possessed little direct political power, they exercised enormous moral influence. Religion shaped the conscience of the people, and the conscience of the people sustained the republic.
In many ways, Tocqueville merely confirmed what America’s Founders already believed.
We often remember George Washington as the victorious general, James Madison as the architect of the Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence. We spend countless hours studying the institutions they built.
We spend far less time considering what they believed those institutions required in order to survive.
Washington answered the question plainly in his Farewell Address.
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” he wrote, “Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
He did not stop there.
He warned that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
John Adams was even more direct.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he wrote. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Even Thomas Jefferson, whose personal theology differed substantially from Washington’s and Adams’, grounded the Declaration not in government but in “Nature’s God.” Rights were not bestowed by kings, legislatures, or majorities. They were endowed by a Creator. Government existed not to invent rights but to secure them.
The Founders did not all worship alike. They did, however, largely agree on something fundamental. They believed that republican government required a moral people.
And in late eighteenth-century America, they overwhelmingly understood Christianity to be the principal source of that moral formation.
Christianity had so deeply shaped the moral vocabulary of the American people that ideas such as equality before God, stewardship, work ethic, and the obligation to love one’s neighbor were woven into the nation’s social conscience.
Those convictions did not remain inside church walls. They shaped expectations of what it meant to be an honorable citizen.
Historian Michael Novak argues that the American Founding succeeded because it flew on “two wings.”
One wing was the Enlightenment, with its confidence in reason, constitutional government, and natural rights.
The other was Jerusalem, the biblical tradition that taught the dignity of every human being, the reality of sin, the necessity of moral restraint, and the accountability of every person before God.
America did not choose between the Enlightenment and Jerusalem. It drew strength from both.
That helps explain why the American Revolution differed so dramatically from the French Revolution.
Both sought liberty. Both rejected arbitrary power.
But the French Revolution increasingly viewed religion as an obstacle to freedom. Churches were stripped of authority. Christianity itself became suspect. Reason alone was expected to provide the moral foundation for a new society.
The experiment collapsed into violence, terror, and eventually dictatorship. The American founders chose another path.
They limited government not because they believed human nature was perfect, but because they knew it wasn’t. At the same time, they expected families, churches, and local communities to cultivate the virtues without which constitutional government could never endure.
James Madison designed a Constitution that restrained ambition. The churches sought to restrain the ambitious.
The Constitution limited power. Christianity formed character.
One addressed the structure of government. The other addressed the structure of the soul.
Sociologist Jonathan Haidt argues that societies generally hold together through a shared god, shared blood, or shared enemies.
America has never been united by common blood. From the beginning we were a nation of immigrants, speaking different languages, tracing our ancestry to different continents. Nor have we depended upon permanent enemies to sustain our identity.
What has held this country together is something rarer. A shared moral vision. A belief that liberty is inseparable from responsibility.
Those ideas were not invented by the Constitution. They were carried into American public life largely through the Christian faith that shaped our civilization.
Ordinary Americans built churches, schools, charities, businesses, and communities because they believed freedom demanded service.
Near the end of his presidency, Ronald Reagan reframed a Tocquevillean truth.
“America is great because America is good,” he said. “And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
The American experiment has never depended solely upon parchment barriers or clever constitutional design. It has depended upon a people whose moral convictions were shaped, in no small measure, by Christianity.
The Constitution can preserve liberty only if the people possess the character to preserve the Constitution.
It is one of the greatest inheritances the Founders left us. And if we forget it, no institution, however brilliantly designed, will save us.
Russ Latino
