America's Founding Principle

A French dignitary, Alexis de Tocqueville, toured America in 1831-1833 to research our prisons and justice system. The American experience had a lasting effect on him, causing him to write his hallmark Democracy in America. For a child raised in the politically tumultuous country of revolutionary France, this expansive volume was the result of his fascination with our government and its founding.

His research and observations uncovered many things about our young country, not the least of which was his realization that a belief in God played a very critical role in its birth. "The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds," he wrote, "that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other."

Yet Alexis also had a warning:

Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?