Reconstructing Religion-contra- Democracy in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America EMILY SALAMANCA ABSTRACT To Tocqueville, the ideal relationship between religion and democracy is one of tension, not partnership. Although Tocqueville is often taken as a staunch admirer of America’s religion, this article shows how Tocqueville, through his delicate handling of both the positive and negative tendencies of Jacksonian Protestantism, not only anticipates com- mon criticisms of American religious culture today but also offers theorists the conceptual tools to sympathetically (though substantively) critique that culture. Through a close tex- tual reading of Democracy in America, this article reconstructs Tocqueville’s idealized view of the role religion should serve in a commercialist democracy, while attending equally to the failures of American religion to serve those goals. Having built up this con- ceptual framework, it then takes a Tocquevillian lens to examine contemporary religious culture. Although Tocqueville proves to be no apologist of American religion, he does of- fer one source of hope for democratic soul crafting: philosophy and public moralism. To Tocqueville, equality and individualism—the two animating principles of democratic society—are also the sources of its greatest dangers. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville recounts how, in America, the benefits of such individ- ualist egalitarianism (Feldman 2008, 70)—including the extension of social equality to family life, education, religious experience, politics, and economic status—are immediately apparent and recognized by all, whereas the potential defects are largely opaque to the democratic population (Tocqueville 1838, 2.2.1). Tocqueville, however, as an outside observer and a self-proclaimed neutral commentator, is able to extrapolate the long-term threats equality and individualism pose to democracy (Mitchell 2006, 277). I see “an innumerable American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture, volume 13, number 4, fall 2024. © 2024 The Jack Miller Center. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press for the JMC and in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association. https:// doi.org/10.1086/732278 Emily Salamanca is a graduate student in the Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA (emilycs@princeton.edu).