Bill Federer remembers historian Alexis de Tocqueville’s eerily accurate predictions.
On April 16, 1859, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville died.
After nine months of traveling the United States, he wrote “Democracy in America” in 1835, which has been described as “the most comprehensive … analysis of character and society in America ever written.”
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention. … In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country. …”
De Tocqueville continued: “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. … They brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion.”
In book two of “Democracy in America,” de Tocqueville wrote: “Christianity has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in America. … In the United States … Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established, that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.”
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