Our Countercultural Churches

To begin with a simple point, one basic insight of Tocqueville is that things are always getting better and worse.  And so it would hardly be surprising that Tocqueville could be used to defend the advantages of religious establishment.  He, more generally, is unrivaled in arousing a kind of selective nostalgia that helps us remember the advantages of aristocracy.  He says, in Democracy’s conclusion, that aristocracy is better in cultivating great individuality, and, as a partisan of greatness himself, he’s chilled when he thinks about how little room there will be for men such as himself in a democracy.  Democracy, however, is more just.  Tocqueville takes the Creator’s view, and not his own, by preferring democratic justice to aristocratic greatness.  His tasks are to make democracy as compatible with greatness as possible, and to see greatness in democracy.

Tocqueville says modern democracy is, in fact, Christian in inspiration.  What Aristotle and Plato taught was, in the crucial respect, untrue:

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