When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1830, democracy was still a new phenomenon. In the introduction to his book, Tocqueville views democracy as an inevitable social tide that is sweeping the world, ordained by the will of God. He argues that in America religion and politics were uniquely combined in the approach of the early colonialists. The Puritans came here, he says, both to worship God in freedom and to be self-governing and states, "Puritanism.was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine" (23). .

             The Puritans (or pilgrims) were almost entirely middle-class people who came with the idea of forming an orderly and moral society. In every law that they passed, the preamble was religious and had to do with obedience to the will of God. The pilgrims believed, he says, that "observance of divine laws.leads man to liberty" (Toqueville 30). This was a far cry from simply doing whatever one wanted. Tocqueville quotes from a speech by Governor Winthrop in which he said, .

             There is in fact a sort of corrupt liberty, common to animals as well as to man, which consists in doing whatever one pleases. This liberty is the enemy of all authority; it suffers all rules impatiently; with it, we become inferior to ourselves; it is the enemy of truth and peace; and God believed He had to combat it! But there is a civil and moral liberty which finds its strength in union, and which it is the mission of power itself to protect: this is the liberty to do without fear all that is just and good. We must defend this sacred liberty against all hazards, and if necessary risk our lives for it (Mather, cited in Tocqueville 31).

             Toqueville argues that it is this marriage of religion with political liberty and self-government that forms the American character. "Held within the narrowest bonds of certain religious beliefs, they were free of all political prejudices" (31) and far ahead of their European contemporaries in their political ideas and practices.