How to revive your belief in democracy

Tocqueville's classic describes a polity that no longer exists: America in the bustling 1830s. Yet his insights about trust, community, association and civic spirit remain urgently relevant today, and not just in the United States. Tocqueville warned of the dangers of what he called egoism and, more to the point, he saw that the kind of individualistic, market-driven freedom available to citizens in the early American republic would lead to isolation and atomization and enable autocrats and demagogues to rise by exploiting a deep yearning for belonging and shared purpose.

One of the pioneers of sociology (and another 19th-century Frenchman!), Durkheim is penetratingly wise on the essential nature of religion. This book, on its surface, is about the totemism practiced by aboriginal tribes in Australia. But the insights from that study are applicable to every form of religion that has ever existed. His central argument, expressed powerfully and aphoristically, is that religion is what a society creates to honor and sustain the mystery and miracle of its own formation. It is, in very large measure, society worshipping itself.

Bellah wrote this famous essay in 1967, describing what he called "civil religion" in the United States. By that, he meant the motifs and metaphors of the Christian tradition stretched across the frame of American mythology (e.g., the Puritans in "exodus" establishing a "city upon a hill"; Lincoln as a modern Jesus, sacrificed for our sins; King, a prophetic voice fusing the biblical and political). Bellah's notion of civil religion is thus very distinct from my ecumenical humanistic concept of civic religion. But, as with Durkheim, his analysis reveals the deep drivers of the human need for collective myth and moral sense-making.