Religion in God We Trust, Term Paper

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Some of America's oldest cities had been newly infused with evangelical faith, and most primitive frontier areas were filled with tent revivals. From a more liberal perspective, Unitarianism had taken root in New England universities. ("Toqueville and Religion," (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/religion/intro.html) This strain of American religious thought stressed the connections between self and nature, even to the entire exclusion of a religious doctrine, dogma, and community, almost to the breaking point. (Bickman, 2005)

Tocqueville's warnings about religion in America seem eerily predictive at times. His vision of an American religion of the self seems to summon up images of self-help books that dominate the best seller lists today. The stress upon the confessional in the second Great Awakening, where so long as the self was cleansed, America was cleansed, seems to suggest the modern fascination with 'telling all' on Oprah. The increasing stress upon religion or psychology as a way to improve the self materially, rather than in a long-standing transcendent fashion that has ramifications beyond one's life on earth, is also predicted in Tocqueville's text. Even apparently superficial aspects of modern life, such as isolating suburban sprawl and the stress upon privacy might be seen as symptoms of the conditions of Tocqueville's America, where there is a confusion between the sacred and the secular, and the importance of the self above the community combined with an apparently contradictory sense that simply because one's neighbors sees a nice car as making one close to purity and righteousness, one's neighbor must be right.

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Thus Tocqueville, as well as cataloguing the positive aspects of religious tolerance and diversity, also points out the dangerous homogenizing aspects of capitalism fused with faith, and of democracy and selfishness stifling and creating a pluralism that is really no pluralism at all.

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