"Alexis de Tocqueville was a liberal, but, as he once wrote, a “new kind of liberal.” For us, no feature of his new liberalism is more remarkable than the alliance between religion and liberty that he saw in America and proposed to be imitated, wherever it can, in every free society. In liberalism today, there is a debate over whether liberal theory needs— or should avoid—a “foundation.” Tocqueville seems to take the anti-foundational side: lie never mentions the “state of nature,” which was the standard foundation of 17th-century liberalism, and in Democracy in America he omits any reference to the Declaration of Independence with its ringing foundational assertion that “all men are created equal.” Yet, if he avoids laying a foundation in reason, he also thinks that religion is essential to political liberty because of the “certain fixed ideas” that it offers to ground the practice of self-government. These are doctrines of faith, since for Tocqueville “religion” means revealed religion, not a rational or natural religion."(...)