Femininity and religion are destroyed by America’s pursuit of equality
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831 to study the prison system, he found himself in the midst of a rapidly developing commercial society. He produced his two-volume work, Democracy in America, reflecting on a new nation at a transitional moment. Andrew Jackson expanded suffrage, the West was open for settlement, the Mexican-American war would come in the 1840s and further fulfill Manifest Destiny, the deep tensions over slavery were still growing, and American commerce was booming. Globally, Queen Victoria assumed the English throne, the British-Chinese Opium Wars brought forward issues of worldwide trade and violence, and ongoing unrest in France following the July revolution brought social upheaval.
Commercial society was spreading, progress was pushing forward, and the old order was rapidly dissolving. Tocqueville knew that the progress of Europe would be unlike that of the United States. The United States was a new nation, defined by a singular pursuit: the passion for equality.
It was equality, not liberty, which Tocqueville emphasizes as America’s defining characteristic. In the United States, where Enlightenment ideals and a restless pursuit of equality filled citizens with energy, Tocqueville observed that “What grips the heart most powerfully is not the peaceful possession of a previous object but the imperfectly satisfied desire to possess it and the constant fear of losing it.”1
Undeniable human differences, determined by nature or, “stemming directly from God, will always elude laws…the desire for equality becomes ever more insatiable as the degree of equality increases.”2 According to Tocqueville, this “insatiable” thirst for the leveling out of the world is restrained and purified by two powerful opponents: women and religion.
The search for something newer, something better, something yet unseen or unknown pushed early Americans towards a deep dissatisfaction. In 1830s America one would “find men constantly changing course for fear of missing the shortest road to happiness.”3
Still, “No equality instituted by men will ever be enough for them.”4
The energy of early America has stagnated. Now, perhaps the “American dream” consists of cheap consumer goods, numbing drugs like marijuana, free access to internet pornography, and the rejection of marriage and family life. Instead of conquering new horizons, the average American now spends over 7 hours per day on a screen.5
The decline of the American exploratory spirit is wholly foreseeable. The desire for equality, together with immediate, cost-free internet communication, has made our day-to-day realities public, fearful, and desperate for meaning. The combination of a technology-obsessed culture, no shared religious foundations, and the gradual disappearance of women in the home has left us unmoored.
In a nation influenced by political philosophers who understood society as a part of a greater social contract, the citizenry is permeated by the powerful words of Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”6 In the present-day United States, we are beginning to see the destructive effects of such a misleading philosophy.
We do not have the power to begin the world over again, and it is a great mistake to attempt to. We have dissolved the restraints of femininity and faith identified by Tocqueville and are heading towards a fundamental undoing.
Paine, Hobbs, Locke, and Rousseau set the stage for man to define himself most fundamentally as an individual. Tocqueville’s reliance on women and religion is no longer feasible. The false liberal understanding of human nature as well as of the world’s temporal and spiritual ends, has led to the morally degraded, secular, consumeristic, listless globalism of the 21st century.
Thomas Paine thought his political philosophy was a new way of approaching nature for, “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn.”7 Far from the arts of philosophy and theology, state of nature theorists sought to place a study of society and government within the realm of science.
In the modern day, it is often asserted that the human person is most fully and really understood through science and engineering, or through the social sciences of economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology rather than the fields of theology, literature, and history. Traditional humanities funding has decreased dramatically in recent years, while STEM grows ever more aggressively.8
Why is this distinction important? Because liberalism has radically redefined the human person. Thomas Paine defines a nation in a deeply subversive manner, stating that “A nation is composed of distinct, unconnected individuals…and it [the public good] is the good of every individual collected.”9 Although human beings are made with social necessities, as well as the rationality to recognize that social ties can reduce vice, ultimately “government is an artifice created by human will.”10
The artificiality of government leads Paine to claim that through political reorganizations and revolutions, we progress towards a new world. This claim denies all traditional social structures in favor of the liberal view of the fundamentally equal, rational man.
A blind acceptance of liberalism simply because it is the water in which we are swimming is unwise. Instead, we ought to rebel against the notion that we are pure individuals who form society through consent with a “great and chief end” which is “the preservation of their property,” as Locke stated.11 Man and his institutions ought to recognize their higher duties to right relationships, justice, and the common good.
In Tocqueville’s view, women and religion held on to these aristocratic tendencies and a higher nature of man. They limited democratic restlessness and allowed for moral guidance. These limits have dissolved in our present century.
In an increasingly godless world which deemphasizes marriages, we are faced with unique challenges: less than 18% of American households are married-parent households,12 birth rates are declining towards population collapse,13 women are reportedly less religious than men,14 and church attendance continues its long decline.15
Revolutions against biology ensue, such as the transgender movement, and the push for unchained, individual fertility continues, as in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy are normalized. The rejection of reality is done in the name of equality.
Tocqueville’s American woman and family strongly withstood the pressures of democratization. Although traditional structures, such as primogeniture, were dissolved, “It divides their inheritance but allows their souls to come together.”16 It is clear that Tocqueville was wrong.
He argued that the equal conditions allowed for women to “marry only when their reason is practiced and mature…the things that amused the girl cannot be allowed to divert the wife; and that for a woman the sources of happiness are to be found in the conjugal home.”17
Tocqueville theorized that removing marriage from its old aristocratic enforcement would allow it to be honored more highly. He writes, “without external hindrance or compulsion, what brings the man and woman together is usually nothing but similarity of tastes and ideas, and that same similarity keeps them together and steadily at each other’s side.”18 Instead, the pursuit for equality in marriage has led to the decentering of marriage in all developed nations.
It is not merely Obergefell v. Hodges which devastated American marriage, although it did deal the deathblow. It was no-fault divorce and the feminist movement, even the earliest suffragette movements of the 1920s, which transformed America’s understanding of political participation. Suddenly, the husband and wife, or the family, were no longer a single unit. They were divorced in voting, separating the natural from the social.
The passion for equality has disabled the mechanism of women to elevate from vulgar to enlightened self-interest for the last 100 years. Women’s role as wives and mothers has been systematically destroyed. No longer a moderating force on their husbands or children, women have entered commercial life as pure individuals, alongside men.
Now that children are no longer considered essential, the situation is entirely more dire. Child-rearing, once and always deemed the central aim of human existence, is increasingly not only optional, but discouraged.
A recent viral video of lesbian 27-year-old popstar Chappel Roan, exemplifies modern attitudes towards family life. In an interview, she comments: “All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I actually don’t know anyone who’s, like, happy and has children at this age.”
She goes on to specify that she is particularly opposed to young children, saying, “One-year-old, three-year-old, four and under, five and under, I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.”19 The deepest irony is that she presents herself as a miserable, embittered person, for all of her talk of happiness.
Still, her comments are deeply revealing. To this empowered, free, liberal woman, children are obstacles to happiness—after all, they disrupt sleep schedules, making your life a hell. Roan’s “hell” commentary is particularly interesting. Hell is the separation from God; for Roan, self-defined, egocentric happiness and regular sleep is god, and children must be rejected for the sake of these modern prizes.
Women have embraced democratic equality, not by encouraging marriage and monogamy as Tocqueville predicted, but by living restless lives alongside men.
American religious life has also failed to develop as Tocqueville suggested it might. The two restraints are self-enforcing. After all, “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” and the melt-down of faith is tied together with the decline of femininity.
Tocqueville saw an expanding United States in which Christianity offered necessary guidance. He observes strong, impassioned Christianity and writes, “The soul has needs that must be satisfied, and no matter what pains one takes to distract it from itself, it soon grows bored, anxious, and agitated among the pleasures of the senses.”20
He theorizes that in the excitement of America, the need for faith is felt most acutely. Men and women will turn to religion more strongly because of the intensity of their conditions. Instead, we have found ourselves turning towards merely deadening and silencing the needs of the soul he identifies. Instead of a social embrace of faith, we have a culture of hedonistic entertainment.
Tocqueville issued some warnings, commenting that if the American pursuit was divorced from the larger knowledge of God and His moral demands on each man, the entire project would head towards calamity. He professes that the American spirit must exist within “limits that apparently it cannot transgress. The moment it surpasses those limits; it can no longer find its bearings and often hastens without stopping beyond the limits of common sense.”21
These limits have long since been surpassed.
The quest for equality continues to govern our current socio-political landscape; as marriage and family life is decentralized, the equal individual, free to pursue his desires, is unbound by any semblance of meaningful religious life. The pursuit for human equality will continue to push forward, destroying traditional life, without Tocqueville’s suggested counterweights.
In the absence of Tocqueville’s resources, Americans who care about the moral health of their nation may have to look elsewhere, outside of the Enlightenment liberal tradition. The hard push for equality has destroyed order—only a religious revival of faith and womanhood can save us.
- Tocqueville, Alexis. Alexis de Tocqueville: A New Translation by Arthur Goldhammer. Library of America, 2004, pg. 617 ↩︎
- Tocqueville, pg.627 ↩︎
- Tocqueville, pg. 626 ↩︎
- Tocqueville, pg. 627 ↩︎
- “Revealing Average Screen Time Statistics for 2025.” Backlinko, 11 Mar. 2024, https://backlinko.com/screen-time-statistics. ↩︎
- Levin, Yuval. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. Basic Books, 2014, pg. 48 ↩︎
- Levin, pg. 49 ↩︎
- Newfield C. Humanities Decline in Darkness: How Humanities Research Funding Works. Public Humanities. 2025;1:e31. doi:10.1017/pub.2024.39 ↩︎
- Levin, pg. 46 ↩︎
- Levin, pg. 48 ↩︎
- Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett, Student edition, Cambridge University Press, 2023, § 124 ↩︎
- “How Have American Households Changed over Time?” USAFacts, 7 Oct. 2024, https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-the-structure-of-american-households-changed-over-time/. ↩︎
- U.S. Fertility Rate Drops to Another Historic Low. 24 Apr. 2024, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2024/20240525.htm. ↩︎
- Russell Contreras. “Young Women Grow Less Religious than Young Men.” AXIOS, 28 Sept. 2024. https://www.axios.com/2024/09/28/religion-poll-gen-z-men-women-gap ↩︎
- Jeffery M. Jones. “Church Attendance Has Declined in Most U.S. Religious Groups.” Gallup.Com, 25 Mar. 2024, https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, 690 ↩︎
- Tocqueville, 696 ↩︎
- Tocqueville, 700 ↩︎
- https://www.tiktok.com/@pagesix/video/7487992434111057194 ↩︎
- Tocqueville, 623 ↩︎
- Tocqueville, 634 ↩︎