Democracy Doesn’t Work Without Religion

French diplomat, political scientist, and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville analyzed the improved living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies.  His most famous work,  Democracy in America, was published after Tocqueville’s travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science. He wrote that Catholics “constitute the most republican and the most democratic class of citizens which exists in the United States.” The reason for this, he argued, was Catholicism’s emphasis on equality:

Many of the Framers believed religion was indispensable to their republican experiment. George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Rush and John Adams who once said that the U.S. Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people.” all, believed that good government cannot exist absent sound religious principles.

Harvard professor Clay Christensen spoke with a Marxist Economist for China who came to the United States to study democracy. When Christensen asked the economist what he learned that stood out the most the economist from China replied:

“I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy.”

The reason why democracy works is not because the government was designed to oversee what everybody does. Rather, democracy works because most people most of the time voluntarily choose to obey the law.

In your past, most Americans attended a church or a synagogue every week, and they were taught there by people who they respected. Americans followed these rules because they had come to believe they were uncountable to society, they were accountable to God.