Spirit Of Religion Research Articles

L’Amérique et la France face à “l’esprit de religion”. Retour sur une comparaison tocquevillienne

L’auteur propose une variation autour de deux articles de cette livraison, celui de Nancy Ammerman, qui analyse la situation du religieux aux États-Unis, et celui de Corinne Valasik, qui explore la société française. Il reprend l’exercice tocquevillien de la comparaison des deux nations atlantiques. L’auteur de “La Démocratie en Amérique” avait pointé toute la distance qui séparait les deux sociétés sur la question de l’“esprit de religion”. Près de deux cents ans après son voyage, on décrit une situation plus nuancée. Certes, l’histoire n’a pas aboli les différences: aux États-Unis, le religieux demeure, dans les rhétoriques publiques tout autant que dans les pratiques privées, bien plus présent qu’en France. Cette structure pérenne n’empêche pas des rapprochements. Sous l’effet de l’individualisation du rapport au monde, les deux sociétés se sont engagées dans des processus analogues de “corporatisation” des Églises et de subjectivation des croyances. Sans doute faut-il les approcher désormais, ensemble, comme des “sociétés post-séculières”.

BARBARA ALLEN. Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution: Harmonizing Earth with Heaven. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. 2005. Pp. xix, 393. Cloth $80.00, paper $25.95

Alexis de Tocqueville set out to discover the earliest roots of liberty's seeming abundance in America, how expressions of it evolved, and why it was as likely to wither under certain conditions as it was to find new beginnings and thrive. He was one of the first to point out that the promise of liberty in a democracy is not fulfilled when it is regarded only as an electoral exercise. He thought of democracy as an opportunity to enlarge participation and deliberation with the goal of sorting out the separate spheres of private and public life, yet keeping them linked together without damaging one or the other. In their democracy, Americans showed that they were far removed from the apathy marking life in the French communes. Tocqueville saw in the New England townships “activity … information and the spirit of innovation … a … society [which is] always at work” bent on achieving through government “the welfare of a people.” Americans were “ardent sectarians and daring innovators.” They were uniquely able to combine “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty” (Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Phillips Bradley [1945], Vol. I, p. 95, n. 50; p. 45, italics his).

Protestantism and the American Founding

Protestantism and the American Founding. Edited by Thomas S. Engeman and Michael P. Zuckert. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 296p. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. Thomas Engeman and Michael Zuckert's unique collection of essays and commentaries, most written specifically for this volume, offer competing interpretations of the relationship between the “spirit of liberty” and the “spirit of religion,” as Tocqueville would put it, in the American Founding. The collection begins with a long essay by Zuckert that sets the terms of discussion of the book to which many of the contributors respond, and it concludes with a response by Zuckert to each of his critics.

‘A Dark Image in a Phantasmagoria’: Pastoral Idealism, Prophecy, and Materiality in Mary Shelley's The Last Man

I. GENERIC CONTEXTS In Thomas Campbell’s short poem ‘The Last Man’ (1823), published three years before Mary Shelley’s novel of the same title, we witness a significant conjunction of Christian prophecy and millenarian pastoral. Selfrighteously defiant in the face of his own impending demise, Campbell’s narrator-protagonist stands ‘prophet-like’, the last remaining human witness of the earthly apocalypse. According to a contemporary reviewer, Campbell’s Last Man behaves in a manner entirely worthy of respect and emulation, embodying indeed the very ‘spirit of religion’. To a certain extent, the poem was understood to merit such praise because, following orthodoxy, it situates a restored Edenic pastoral not on the materially corrupt Earth but in a spiritually redeemed millennium or heavenly afterlife. As Campbell’s narrator piously explains,

The Origins and Foundations of the First Amendment and the Alien and Sedition Acts

The Origins and Foundations ofthe First Amendment and the Alien and Sedition Acts Murray Dry We seem to accordmore importance to the FirstAmendment freedoms, and the Bill ofRights in general, today than the American Founders did. Where they focused on the structure and powers ofgovernment, we focus on individual rights against government. I overstate the differ­ ence in orderto make this point: the best way to study the FirstAmendment freedoms ofreligion and speech is to examine their relationship to the purpose of government as a whole. This article has three main parts. In part one, I consider the significance of what could be called our country’s dual founding: by Puritan settlers in the early seventeenth century and then by rights-based constitution-makers in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In part two, I look to the state constitutions for instruction about the meaning of religious freedom and free­ dom ofspeech. In part three, I examine the FirstAmendment, from the federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights to Madison’s response to the Alien and Sedition Acts. I. Origins and Foundations of Our First Amendment Freedoms In his introduction to volume one of De­ mocracy in America, published in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized democratic revolution as the characteristic ofhis age. “This whole book has been writtenunderthe impulse of a kind of religious dread inspired by con­ templation of this irresistible revolution....”1 Tocqueville calls for a “new political science...for a world itselfquite new.” More­ over, he viewsAmericaas the country to study, since “I saw in America...the shape ofdemoc­ racy itself...its inclinations, character, preju­ dices, and passions....”2 Convinced that freedom cannot survive without good mores, and that good mores re­ quire religion, Tocqueville is most impressed with the way religion supports freedom in America. In France, on the otherhand, “[m]en ofreligion fight against freedom, and lovers of liberty attackreligions...honest and enlightened citizens are the enemies of all progress, while men without patriotism or morals make them­ selves the apostles of civilization and enlight­ enment!”3 130 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Tocqueville’s concern for the opposition between religion and freedom in France may account for his discussion of the Puritans in chapter two, which is titled “Concerning Their Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo Americans.” Remarking on the importance of origins for understand­ ing human beings, and then analogizing nations to human beings, Tocqueville calls this chap­ ter, on the Puritans, “the germ of all that is to follow and the key to almost the whole work.”4 The Puritans came from England with a common language, the germ ofdemocracy, and a high level ofeducation. The education comes from their religion: “[I]nAmerica it is religion which leads to enlightenment and the obser­ vance of divine laws which leads men to lib­ erty.”5 Thus, the Puritans present Tocqueville with “a marvelous combination,... the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.” Religion regards civil liberty as a noble exercise of men’s faculties, the world of politics being a sphere intended by the Creator for the free play of intelli­ gence. Religion, being free and pow­ erful within its own sphere and content with the position reserved for it, real­ izes that its sway is all the better estab­ lished because it relies only on its own powers and rules men’s hearts without external support.6 Tocqueville’s discussion of Puritan com­ pacts and their criminal codes complicates the relationship between liberty and religion how­ ever. Here is a part of the Mayflower Com­ pact, which he quotes: We whose names are underwritten ...having undertaken for the glory of God, and advancement ofthe Christian faith, and the honor of our king and country... do enact, constitute, and frame suchjust and equal laws ...as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good ofthe colony....7 After quoting a part ofConnecticut’s crimi­ nal code—“If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death—,” Tocqueville adds: Blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, and rape are punish[able] by death; a son...

The Secular Practice and the Spirit of Religion

Argumentant à partir du fait que des « pratiques séculières » en parfait accord avec l'esprit du capitalisme se sont déve loppées parmi certaines élites européennes bien avant le XVI e siècle, l'auteur réexamine les thèses de Max Weber concernant l'éthique protestante. Il présente une typologie des attitudes et des actions pro fanes indicatrices de ces « pratiques séculières ». Il en fait une analyse quantitative et qualitative parmi les élites urbai nes à partir du XIe siècle. C'est au sein de ces élites qu'un dissentiment religieux se manifeste le plus tôt : dès le Moyen Age. Ceux qui mani festent ces « pratiques séculières » étaient les plus disposés à participer aux mouvements dissidents du XVIe siècle. L'auteur exprime enfin le souhait que, dans l'analyse socio logique, l'explication historique soit menée tant en termes subjectifs qu'en termes objectifs, assumant ainsi la dialectique qui existe entre, d'une part les attitudes et les pratiques quoti diennes et, d'autre part, les cadres institutionnels.

Towards the Unification of the Faiths (Comparative Religion)

In a period of positivism, skepticism, and existentialism, systematic speculation may be frowned upon. And when this speculation starts by taking religion seriously and ends by calling itself naturalistic, it may find itself attacked not only by the traditional idealists and spiritualists but also by positivists, logical empiricists, and critico-naturalists. Thus it is that, at the present time, a full-blooded speculative naturalism may find itself, like the social liberal, criticized by both the right and the left for not being either consistently right or consistently left. This time it is G.P. Conger who gives us a systematic, speculative naturalism. As such it is easy to criticize, particularly from a narrowly empirical point of view. But before rushing in with a critical axe, it is well to remind ourselves that philosophy in its most characteristic form, from Thales to Whitehead, has been speculative; and thus philosophers who, at the present time, shun speculation as if it were poison (or at least in execrable taste) may be exhibiting not so much insight as failure of nerve. It is clear that the traditional questions of philosophy are questions to which both meaningless and misleading answers can be (and have been) given; but it does not follow from this that the questions are either meaningless or impertinent. A burnt child may shun the fire, but only a fool will put all fires out on the ground that they are potentially dangerous and that it is better to shiver than to burn. And so we may begin this review by thanking Conger for helping to keep some rather important fires going; and yet we must also warn him that a work of this kind invites many kinds of criticism. Conger's problems are the problems of traditional philosophy, both East and West: the generic nature of the universe, the nature of man, the place of man in the universe, and the nature of the good life for man. Willing to accept the contributions of the sciences and unwilling to reject in toro the spiritual insights of the great religions (Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), his over-all goal is, one might say, similar to Spinoza's: that of reunderstanding the nature and goal of religion against the background of the undeniable achievements of an age of science, a reunderstanding which, once more, attempts to separate the spirit of religion from the magic, superstition, and folklore which the common man (and even the parish priest) tends to identify, rightly or wrongly, with religion itself. His conclusions, however, are by no means identical with Spinoza's conclusions, partly because Conger has responded profoundly to post-Spinozistic evolutionary thinking, both scientific and philosophical. All in all, Conger is looking for a world view which is in accord with the major scientific findings of the last one hundred years and which will provide a place for religion without reducing religion to a watered-down and washed-out ethical humanism. His method is that of arguing from fact and presumption to a picture of phical judgment. The cr ticisms he offers are usually rather general in their scope, t an analytically trained reader may fnd in them hints toward ways of more precise structive reformulations f some of the problems with which and the Indians concerned. -KARL H. POTTER, Un versity of Minnesota. BOOK REVIEWS 149

Book Review: III. Religions and Missions: Endeavors after the Spirit of Religion

Book Review: III. Religions and Missions: Endeavors after the Spirit of Religion

The Religion of a Mature Mind

A LARGE-SPIR1TED bookI by Professor George A. Coe, bearing the above striking title, first appeared in I 902, and has within eighteen months gone through four editions, an unusual record. This success, too, is well deserved. The book is beautiful in its fineness of literary excellence; there is a grandeur and impressiveness about its utterances; it is bold and even daring in its criticism; there is, no less markedly, a warrnth and delicacy of appreciation of the good in creeds, forms, and cereInonies both old and new; it is all this and lllore. But whatever impression one carries from the volume, one must at least feel that there is a magnanimity about it-a breadth of view, a depth of insight, an inspiration which makes it easily occupy an important place in the thought-life of the present. One wonders at times whether the motive which called it forth was religious, or theological, or scientific, or philosophical, or practical. It is certainly all these. It erbodies the large outlook of a man who has worked abreast of his time long enough to feel its ideals, its needs, and its vital problems intimately. So that many of the topics treated the scientific spirit in religion, the question of religious authority, the relation of morality and religion, the way of entra-nce into the spiritual life, the tests of religious experience, the immanence of God, prayer, the relation of Christ to modern life, and others while common enough in recent discussion, and topics that might easily be commonplace, are presented with unusual force and conviction. A work of this kind is especially opportune. If Christianity were a system and not an inner experience, if it were a final product instead of a great growing life which asserts itself from within and ad justs itself to every new situation as does every other growing thing, it would be threatened at the present tilne. The often expressed opinion that during the last decades, in the presence of new discoveries and shifting ideals, religion has had such a test as perhaps rarely before, can hardly