The Catholic challenge

America’s founders wanted to ensure that the people, not God, would govern. This is now changing.

In his quest for the secret of US democracy in the 1830s, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville reflected on the important role played by religion in American life. Having escaped from the authority of the Pope, he argued, American Christians were free from any religious authority. Christianity in the New World, he concluded, could only be described as ‘democratic and republican’.