And today, where do we stand? Obviously, religion in American life is on a downward slide. This fact is connected to the inequality mentioned above : since the “upper slice” is very often irreligious, and since this slice often sets the tone for the culture at large, the culture is influenced by the forces of secularization. As NPR’s Ira Glass pointed out once, when was the last time you saw a normal person in a Hollywood movie just pray?

Tocqueville understood very well that which is seemingly so hard for progressives to understand, which is that religion strengthens liberty insofar as it provides the moral foundations that prevent liberty from destroying itself. In contemporary sociological terms, we can put this differently : we can say that given the twin 21st century realities of disruptive capitalism and the administrative state, the only viable check on either of them that doesn’t turn us into a slave to the other is voluntary institutions, which ensure that we have a rich, vibrant civic life.

Ross Douthat has been the best chronicler of this phenomenon. In his priceless book Bad Religion, he notes that America has always been a land of religious heretics—and even downright crackpots—but that this heresy was by and large a fruitful influence on American religion—and civic life—whenever it was balanced by institutional, orthodox religion, precisely the kind which is at a low ebb today.

The dynamic risks becoming self-reinforcing insofar as the weakness of institutional religion leads to its oppression. As, again, Douthat has chronicled, there is a new view of religious freedom arising which says, in essence, that traditional religious rules around sex are beyond the norms of civilized society and that bodies which dare to function by them must be brought to heel. Were this conception to become truly regnant, it would lead millions of believers to have to choose between allegiance to the state and allegiance to God, and it would lead to the crushing of countless voluntary associations, leaving a vacuum that could only be filled by the administrative state.