About a century and a half ago Alexis de Tocqueville rebuked his European readers for treating the apparently flourishing religious life of American democracy as an unnecessary relic of pre-democratic society. Civic morality, upon which liberty in a democracy depends, itself depended above all upon religion, Tocqueville claimed. On the other hand, Tocqueville also indicated that the foundations of this religious life, so essential to liberty, were shallow indeed. Widespread religious belief in democracy does not reflect general assent to the dogmatic truths upheld by biblical revelation or Church authority. Rather, if most members of democratic society profess to be believers, it is only because they regard religious belief as socially valuable, or even as a necessary condition of a decent society, and because they (wrongly) suppose that most of their fellow citizens are also religious believers. What Tocqueville called "the natural condition of religious belief in our time" was a kind of implicit mutual understanding whereby the skeptical agreed not to sneer at the faith of their fellow citizens-sometimes the skeptics even half regretted their own lack or loss of faith-and the believers agreed not to impose their beliefs in any way upon their fellow citizens lest the skeptics retaliate by a direct attack upon their fragile faith. Under this pact it became difficult or impossible to know how far the open display of religious belief reflected any real strength of religious belief within the souls of democrats. In any case, as an implication of this understanding, religion and morality have become altogether privatized. The practical import of the arrangement was captured by a Los Angeles Times survey on abortion that showed a large majority opposed to abortion because they thought it murder, and almost as many opposed to any law that would limit the choice of abortion.

The condition of religious belief we see, at least in North America, as we approach the twenty-first century seems to conform very well to Tocqueville's analysis. For all but the tiniest handful of undergraduates I meet in a medium-sized, secular Ontario university, the God of Christianity and Judaism is a matter of indifference or repugnance; the stories of the children of Israel and the teachings of Christ are equally unfamiliar. The few who identify themselves-apologetically-as "religious" would not dream of imposing their beliefs, or the moral rules they link with their beliefs, on anyone else. Even those who do know that there are such rules have little hope of applying them in the public sphere; instead, they take up home-schooling. Believers and non-believers alike seem to differently confirm an observation commonly attributed to Chesterton, that what replaces the God of tradition is not so much believing in nothing as believing in anything-or everything. It may be that human despair-in the face of human mortality-stands in the way of any perfectly agnostic acceptance of the human condition, but I would hesitate to call whatever might result from this despair a religious revival, much less to assume its goodness.

As a convert to Catholicism, I must believe that the gates of Hell cannot prevail against the Church Christ established; as a political scientist, on the other hand, I cannot easily point to the evidence that would link this certainty of faith with anything we may expect to see in the century that starts in two years. To be sure, the prospect of preserving democratic liberty in the absence of religious belief looks no better than it did to Tocqueville, but the need of religious revival does not make it any more or less likely. What can be said instead is this. The notion of private morality, which seems to have arisen in turn out of the idea of religion as essentially private-"as something we do with our privacy"-is, if not oxymoronic, then "idiotic", at least as the Greeks used that word. Private morality is another name for the moral vacuum that George Grant perceived at the heart of liberal society. The small flicker of hope in our present circumstance lies in the strange fact that moral controversy continues, for example, about issues like abortion. What is remarkable is not that the losers in our moral battles continue to object, but that the winners seem unable to content themselves with their victories unless and until those who dissent can be made to abandon their moral objection. In any case, a revival of religion in the twenty-first century that is more than a media event will be one that recognizes that the mutual agreement that Tocqueville called the natural basis of religious health was always based on a misunderstanding.

William Mathie is professor of political studies at Brock University.