‘Sunday,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “is rigorously observed [in America]. . . . Public opinion, much stronger than the law, obliges everyone to show himself at church and abstain from all diversions. And yet, either I am much mistaken, or there is great depth of doubt and indifference hidden under these external forms.” Tocqueville, to say the least, was most pessimistic about the fate of religion in a bourgeois democracy. “In the long run,” he stated, “I am sure that democracy turns man’s imagination away from externals to concentrate it on himself alone. … It is about themselves that Americans [are] really excited.”
There is some comfort to be obtained, as Richard Reeves has recently remarked, from the knowledge that the aggressive secularization of American society has been proceeding for at least a century and a half, with the result that 85 per cent of Americans believe— in a.d. 1982—the Bible to be the Word of God. Nevertheless, while America remains privately religious, it has assuredly become officially agnostic, owing to the operations of people for whom the First Amendment has become the Eleventh Commandment. These progressives argue that the Constitution of the United States, in its intent and proper effect, mandates agnosticism as the state religion, and are fond of pointing out that after all Thomas Jefferson was a Deist.
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