Michael Knowles

He writes it around 1830.

Alexei de Tocqueville predicted that even though America is a Protestant country, it would tend in two directions as time went on.

It would tend toward atheism on the one hand and toward Catholicism on the other.

And the reason, Tocqueville said, is because in democracies,

You heard Tucker's guest actually say that democratic Republican government is the greatest form of government ever.

That's in itself a dubious claim, but we'll leave that for another time.

Tocqueville observed that if you're going to have democracy, people under democracy are going to want to throw off all authority, including religious authority, so they're going to become atheists.

However, if they are going to accept religious authority at all, because man is a religious creature, you can't get away from those eternal questions.

If he's going to accept religious authority, he wants it to be uniform and universal, which is what you get in Catholicism.

There's a distinction between the clergy and the laity, perhaps, but among the laity, everybody's equal.

And so he saw, not just because of migration, not just because there were Irish coming into America and Germans coming into America, those mass waves of immigration actually didn't happen

For years after Tocqueville published Democracy in America, what Tocqueville was seeing was something intrinsic to, in the nature of American democracy, democracy generally, that would tend toward Catholicism.

That's one reason.

The other reason is that man is a liturgical creature.

And a lot of modern Protestantism, not high church Protestantism,

Not the Presbyterians and the Anglicans and the Episcopalians, but more of the low church, evangelical, Baptist, non-denominational, capital N, capital D. That kind of Protestantism is less liturgical.

They don't have rites and rituals.

They often don't have icons.

It's much more personalist.

It's much more emotivist.