The Politics of Competence

America will always be a religious nation. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote, in fact, that America will always have a Puritan character. We have had two Great Awakenings, so called, in America: one in the 1740s, whose emblematic preacher was Jonathan Edwards; and another in the 1820s, when Tocqueville visited America. That was not the end of it, however. Every major tremor that has shaken American life—the Civil War, the Social Gospel movement, Progressivism, Prohibition, the Civil Rights movement—has been thought through and justified in religious terms.