[While I generally abhor writing about the subject-du-jour, I decided to challenge myself today and write about Mitt Romney's speech on religion while not making any references to John F. Kennedy's speech on religion while doing so. This alone, I believe, will set this post out from the pack, since I'd be willing to bet nobody else has managed to do so.]

While many have commented on various different quotes from Mitt Romney's speech on religion today, there was one passage that stood out for me:

Today's generations of Americans have always known religious liberty. Perhaps we forget the long and arduous path our nation's forbearers took to achieve it. They came here from England to seek freedom of religion. But upon finding it for themselves, they at first denied it to others. Because of their diverse beliefs, Ann Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts Bay, a banished Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, and two centuries later, Brigham Young set out for the West. Americans were unable to accommodate their commitment to their own faith with an appreciation for the convictions of others to different faiths. In this, they were very much like those of the European nations they had left.

You don't hear that sort of thing very often from politicians, especially not ones running for president. Instead, you normally get spoon-fed platitudes straight out of a fourth-grade textbook: "The Pilgrims came here for religious freedom. This freedom was enshrined in our Constitution and has grown and grown in America, until today."

Romney's version is a lot closer to the actual truth than anything I've heard lately from any politician of either party. I guess being from Massachusetts brings these uncomfortable facts closer to the surface.

The truth is that the Pilgrims (who didn't call themselves that, that was a later addition) came here to preserve religious intolerance. They didn't come from England, they came from the Netherlands. They had indeed fled England so they could practice their religion, but the famously tolerant Dutch didn't have a problem with that. The trouble was, their children were being seduced by those same tolerant Dutch into realizing there were other ways to worship than the harsh and unrelenting ways their parents were forcing on them. Because this problem was so threatening (there would be no Puritans left if all the kids abandoned the faith), they hit upon a novel idea -- take the kids to America, live in the wildernesses of the New World, and the kids wouldn't have any choice but to follow their creed.

Got that? The Pilgrims came here in order to deny their own children religious freedom. Which they then proceeded to deny to anyone else in their colony who didn't believe exactly as they did (the Quakers really got the short end of the stick on this one).

But just because that is our true history doesn't mean politicians usually point it out. Which is why I give Romney credit for doing so. Sure, there are plenty of things wrong with other parts of his speech, which you can read about just about anywhere in the blogosphere today, but I still have to give him credit for mentioning the names of Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams.

As for the rest of his speech, I'm going to totally ignore it for now.

Instead, I'd like to provide a snapshot of America, circa 1830, by Alexis de Tocqueville. Now, Tocqueville's seminal work Democracy In America is (ironically enough) similar to the Bible in one important respect: no matter what side of an argument you're on, if you look hard enough, you can find something in it to justify your position. This is why DIA is so frequently quoted at length by both conservatives and liberals alike.

Something often lost in the debate is Tocqueville's intended audience -- he was writing for the French intelligentsia, trying to influence a violent political debate in his own country. He was reporting on the then half-century old "American Experiment" in democracy to a Europe astounded those upstart Americans had been able to pull off such a successful revolution in government (most Europeans thought the grand experiment was going to die within ten or twenty years, so a half a century was seen at the time as unprecedented and unbelievable). France, you have to remember, was at the time going through a cyclical upheaval in government that had started with their own revolution, continued through Napoleon's reign and fall, and was right in the middle of the Les Misérables revolutionary times -- meaning the heavy thinkers of the day were still pondering the bedrock question "What form of government is best?" The two strong contenders were democracy and aristocracy (or monarchy). Tocqueville was trying to view America in the 1830s through the lens of: which pieces of this experiment would work successfully back in France, and which pieces just would not?

While there are many passages in DIA which extol Christianity and Christian mores and Christian nations, Tocqueville devoted a whole chapter to "The Main Causes That Make Religion Powerful in America." Again, you have to consider his audience. France had been Catholic under its monarchy, then violently anti-religion after its revolution (they even started their own calendar to get away from the Christian "BC / AD" calendar), then a confusing tug of war of factions grabbing for power, with one side or the other in the ascendancy. So the question of "separation of church and state" was a very important one to French thinkers at the time, not just a quaint phrase from the New World.

So, as kind of a snapshot in time, here are two rather long passages from this chapter of Democracy In America.

Eighteenth-century philosophers had a very simple explanation for the gradual weakening of beliefs. Religious zeal, they said, was bound to die down as enlightenment and freedom spread. It is tiresome that the facts do not fit this theory at all.

There are sections of the population in Europe where unbelief goes hand in hand with brutishness and ignorance, whereas in America the most free and enlightened people in the world zealously perform all the external duties of religion.

The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States. The longer I stayed in the country, the more conscious I became of the important political consequences resulting from this novel situation.

In France I had seen the spirits of religion and of freedom almost always marching in opposite directions. In America I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land.

My longing to understand the reason for this phenomenon increased daily.

To find this out, I questioned the faithful of all communions; I particularly sought the society of clergymen, who are the depositories of the various creeds and have a personal interest in their survival. As a practicing Catholic I was particularly close to the Catholic priests, with some of whom I soon established a certain intimacy. I expressed my astonishment and revealed my doubts to each of them; I found that they all agreed with each other except about details; all thought that the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in American I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.

This led me to examine more closely than before the position of American priests in political society. I was surprised to discover that they held no public appointments. [4] There was not a single one in the administration, and I found that they were not even represented in the assemblies.

In several states the law, [5] and in all the rest public opinion, excludes them from a career in politics.

When I finally came to inquire into the attitudes of the clergy themselves, I found that most of them seemed voluntarily to steer clear of power and to take a sort of professional pride in claiming that it was no concern of theirs.

I heard them pronouncing anathemas against ambition and bad faith, under whatsoever political opinions those were at pains to hide. But I learned from their discourses that men are not guilty in the sight of God because of these very opinions, provided they are sincere, and that it is no more a sin to make a mistake in some question of government than it is a sin to go wrong in building one's house or plowing one's field.

I saw that they were careful to keep clear of all parties, shunning contact with them with all the anxiety attendant upon personal interest.

. . .

When governments seem so strong and laws so stable, men do not see the danger that religion may run by allying itself with power.

When governments are clearly feeble and laws changeable, the danger is obvious to all, but often then there is no longer time to avoid it. One must therefore learn to perceive it from afar.

When a nation adopts a democratic social state and communities show republican inclinations, it becomes increasingly dangerous for religion to ally itself with authority. For the time is coming when power will pass from hand to hand, political theories vanish or alter daily, and that not for a limited time but continually. Agitation and instability are natural elements in democratic republics, just as immobility and somnolence are the rule in absolute monarchies.

If the Americans, who change their head of state every four years, elect new legislators every two years and replace provincial administrations every year, and if the Americans, who have handed over the world of politics to the experiments of innovators, had not placed religion beyond their reach, what could it hold on to in the ebb and flow of human opinions? Amid the struggle of parties, where would the respect due to it be? What would become of its immortality when everything around it was perishing?

The American clergy were the first to perceive this truth and to act in conformity with it. They saw that they would have to give up religious influence if they wanted to acquire political power, and they preferred to lose the support of authority rather than to share its vicissitudes.

In America religion is perhaps less powerful than it has been at certain times and among certain peoples, but its influence is more lasting. It restricts itself to its own resources, of which no one can deprive it; it functions in one sphere only, but it pervades it and dominates there without effort.

Now, as I said, elsewhere Tocqueville comes out pretty strongly for Christianity being the bedrock of society, and "separation of church and state" may not have meant the same thing to him in his day that it means to us today.

From the previous chapter, there is a telling footnote:

This is how the New York Spectator of August 23, 1831, reported the matter: "The court of common pleas of Chester county a few days since, rejected a witness who declared his disbelief in the existence of God. The presiding judge remarked that he was not before aware that there was a man living who did not believe in the existence of God; that this belief constituted the sanction of all testimony in a court of justice; and that he knew of no cause in a Christian country, where a witness had been permitted to testify without such belief."

The text of this chapter has a paragraph which could have been quoted by Mitt Romney today:

For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other; it is not a question with them of sterile beliefs bequeathed by the past and vegetating rather than living in the depths of the soul.

Also telling are the two footnotes referenced above:

[4] Unless the phrase is taken to cover their work in the schools. The greater part of education is entrusted to the clergy.

[5] Tocqueville cites the constitutions of New York, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana; then goes on to quote from New York's:

"And whereas the ministers of the gospel are, by their profession, dedicated to the service of God and the cure of souls and ought not to be diverted from the great duties of their functions, therefore, no minister of the gospel or priest of any denomination whatever. . . be eligible to or capable of holding any civil or military office of place within this state."

So while both sides of the religion debate can find quotes in Tocqueville's Democracy In America which seem to support their stance, what I conclude from all this is that Alexis de Tocqueville wouldn't be shocked at Mitt Romney, Mormon, running for president -- but that he would indeed be shocked at Mike Huckabee, ex-minister, running for the same job.

-- Chris Weigant