Religio, Ligare, Ligamentum: To Bind or to Liberate?

A Reflection on Faith, Morality and Democracy: Questioning Religious Virtue as the Moral Foundation of Democracy through Alexis de Tocqueville

Table of contents

• Author’s Note

• Abstract

• Introduction: Moral Collapse and the Transformation of Religion.

• De Tocqueville’s Diagnosis: Estrangement and the Crisis of Virtue.

• Sacred Survival: Dialectical Response to Tocqueville.

• Afro-Diasporic Pedagogy: Vodou as Moral Framework

• Liberatory Frameworks: Revolutionary Moral Pedagogy.

• Fidel Castro: From Jesuit Ethics to Revolutionary Conscience

• Paulo Freire: Education as Sacred Moral Awakening

• Epilogue: Yearning for Moral Structure in Late Liberalism

• The Simpsons: To Bind or to Liberate?.

• Conclusion: From Nihilism to Revolutionary Memory.

• Bibliography

Author’s Note

This past winter semester, 2025, I took my first Advanced Seminar in political theory—and it was all about Alexis de Tocqueville. He lived from 1805 to 1859, observing and analyzing the rise of modern democracy in the West.

In the syllabus, my professor described his political thought as “empirically and historically grounded as well as theoretically complex. He identified many concerns regarding the trajectory of modern democracy that remain with us to this day, and he offered numerous predictions that proved prescient in hindsight.”

And honestly? Gosh, was that description spot-on.

Since that very first class—when I presented on The Old Regime Part II and declared, boldly, that the French Revolution wasn’t truly a revolution—I knew I was setting myself up to uncover contradiction after contradiction in Tocqueville. And I was thrilled.

I fell for him, in all his complexity. He surprised me. He disappointed me. He enlightened me. He made me laugh.

This essay is the culmination of that journey: a reflection on democracy, morality, and memory. It’s my attempt to trace the sacred traditions buried beneath collapse—the moral frameworks that endure long after the center falls. It’s also an act of imagination: wondering how collective conscience might be rebuilt, not from the seats of power, but from the margins of history.

I write from the perspective of a West African Ewe, living in the belly of the Western world through my family’s survival of colonization. In honoring these submerged traditions, I honor the struggles—and the dreams—that continue to rise from below.

Abstract

This piece pushes back on Alexis de Tocqueville’s long-standing anxiety about democracy descending into moral ruin. But here’s the twist: Tocqueville, like many thinkers steeped in Eurocentric assumptions, missed the point entirely. He looked for morality in the wrong places—upward, toward institutions of power—when he should’ve been looking downward and outward, to the communities pushed to the margins.

Through the lens of Haitian Vodou, Christiane Essombe’s decolonial ethics, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary pedagogy, and Paulo Freire’s liberatory framework, this essay explores how sacred traditions—often dismissed or demonized—have actually served as deep wells of moral clarity and political resistance. Rather than fading in the face of liberal modernity, these traditions have endured, adapted, and continued to shape visions of freedom and justice rooted in struggle and collective memory.

This isn’t just about reclaiming the past. It’s a call to reimagine how we live, fight, and care for one another in a time when the moral scaffolding of empire is collapsing. The future won’t be saved by institutions—it’ll be built by people who remember how to make meaning in the ruins.

Introduction: Moral Collapse and the Transformation of Religion

What happens when a society loses its moral foundation? Alexis de Tocqueville asked this question while reflecting on the upheaval left behind by the French Revolution. He feared that democracy, once separated from religion, would collapse into selfishness, apathy, and despair. Religion, he believed, had once restrained what he called the “madness of the heart.” It gave freedom a sense of responsibility. Without it, society would drift without purpose, producing isolated individuals unable to act in common cause.

Tocqueville was not merely a philosopher, but a political figure shaped by the turbulence of early nineteenth-century France. Living through the fall of the July Monarchy and the instability of the Second Republic, he defended abolition and constitutional order—yet also supported colonialism and the repression of socialist uprisings. Though he praised liberty, he often chose order over freedom when confronted with revolutionary unrest.

His political career ended after his opposition to Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup, and he later died of tuberculosis in 1859 at the age of fifty-three. His marriage to Mary Mottley, seen as too liberal and Protestant by his aristocratic family, reflected his personal tensions between tradition and change. Beyond companionship, Mottley served as his editor and intellectual soundboard, particularly shaping Democracy in America, where her feedback sharpened his observations on the evolving social order. Tocqueville’s Catholicism, too, was pragmatic rather than devotional: he saw religion as a necessary social glue rather than an ultimate spiritual truth.

The religious world Tocqueville inherited had been irrevocably changed. Before the Revolution of 1789, the Catholic Church had been one of the great pillars of the French monarchy: it controlled vast lands, collected tithes, monopolized education, and reinforced social hierarchy. Church lands were seized by the state, clerical privileges were abolished, and education was secularized. Religious authority was stripped of its political power and confined increasingly to the private sphere. Faith, once inseparable from civic life, became a fragile remnant—suspicious in the eyes of republicans, nostalgic in the eyes of conservatives. Tocqueville grew up in a society where religion no longer commanded public life, but where its absence revealed how easily democracy could lose its moral anchor.

This was the political, social, and religious context in which Tocqueville formed his fears about moral collapse—a context shared, though differently understood, by his contemporary Harriet Martineau. Where Tocqueville perceived moral decay among the oppressed, Martineau uncovered vibrant ethical systems—clandestine education, mutual aid societies, cooperative networks—that challenged prevailing narratives of social disorder.

Yet Tocqueville misunderstood the deeper reality. What he saw as the breakdown of virtue was not caused by irreligion or ignorance. It was the result of estrangement—the severing of people from the moral worlds they had historically inhabited. These traditions were not confined to churches or aristocratic elites. They lived in rituals, oral teachings, customary law, seasonal rites, and communal practices—structures of meaning forged and transmitted by ordinary people, even within rigid hierarchies.

It was the rise of empire, capitalism, and bureaucratic modernity that shattered these moral worlds. Religion hardened into regulation; education into indoctrination; morality into enforcement. This essay traces the sacred pedagogies Tocqueville could not see—buried but never destroyed. Through Martineau’s witness, Haitian Vodou’s Revolutionary Spirit, Christiane Essombe’s decolonial ethics, Fidel Castro’s moral formation, and Paulo Freire’s liberatory education, we will follow the sacred memory that endures—and how it resurfaces today, from revolutionary movements to classrooms, to cartoons, and even to the digital spaces where meaning collapses and must be rebuilt.

Even in a fractured world, the sacred has not vanished. It is still fighting to be remembered—and reborn.

De Tocqueville’s Diagnosis: Estrangement and the Crisis of Virtue

He watched the French Revolution with horror, seeing not liberation but disorientation:
“When the French Revolution overthrew civil and religious laws together, the human mind lost its balance. Men knew not where to stop or what measure to observe.”[1] Without ethical grounding—what once came from religion—freedom turned frantic. In his eyes, liberty without internal discipline would become self-destruction: “He that is too desiring of liberty… must needs fall into serfage.”[2]

France, he believed, had lost its anchor. The people had forgotten how to think politically: “Political life had been so long and so thoroughly extinguished…”[3] and though “everyone is dissatisfied,”[4] they lacked the moral tools to rebuild.

For Tocqueville, religion was not just belief—it was social glue, the quiet architecture beneath democracy. He mourned that “the Christian faith was furiously assailed, but no attempt was made to raise up another religion on its ruins,”[5] leaving a void filled by passion, not principle. In his view, socialism offered only dependence, not virtue: “Relief given by the State… dries up the source of private virtues.”[6]

Tocqueville feared a world where the state replaced conscience, where “the poor man… has a right to demand relief,”[7] and gratitude withered into resentment. He warned that relief given by the state “substitutes itself for the compassion of men,”[8] drying up the private virtues that sustain social life. But Tocqueville’s vision had limits. He feared democracy without formation but never questioned why the conditions for formation had been so unequally distributed. He believed that before emancipation, the enslaved must be educated in religion, intellect, and morality. Yet he admitted that slavery itself blocked these very conditions: “If all these preparations cannot be made in a state of slavery… to insist on them is… to declare that it never shall cease.”[9] This is the paradox he could not resolve—demanding virtue from people in chains while denying them the conditions to grow.

He saw that slavery bred “those vices to which slavery naturally gives birth,”[10] and warned that abolition would bring unrest; but instead of preparing the world to receive the free, he asked the enslaved to wait. “The most formidable of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of the Blacks on its soil.” [11] In this chilling sentence, Tocqueville reveals the deeper fear—not that the oppressed would lack virtue, but that they might one day claim freedom regardless. He acknowledged that “the negroes are eager for religion,”[12] and that “masters… opposed the preaching of the Gospel to the negroes,”[13] fearing it might awaken “instincts of liberty.”[14] He even admitted that true Christianity would make slavery untenable: “Christianity is a religion of free men.”[15] But instead of defending that truth, he lamented the disruption it might cause.

This fear extended into his broader suspicion of collective welfare. He believed that when the state guaranteed support, it replaced moral responsibility. The poor were no longer individuals in need of solidarity—they were burdens, “fertile seeds of discord and misery.”[16]

Tocqueville longed for virtue, but only in forms he recognized. He could not imagine that moral formation might come after freedom—or from the very people he saw as unformed. He demanded virtue before liberation but could not see that only liberation makes virtue possible.

However, Tocqueville's contemporary, Harriet Martineau, did not shy away from what he feared—she faced it, named it, and listened where he theorized.

“There is no part of the United States where slavery is not felt as a sore place in the heart of society.” [17]

Martineau did not write from above—she listened from below. She was deaf, a woman in a man’s world, and an abolitionist in a white supremacist society. “I had neither health, strength, money, influence, nor employment… I had only myself to rely on,” [18] she wrote in her autobiography. She described her transformation as “a gallant breasting of my destiny,” [19] revealing not just an awareness of injustice, but the personal cost of surviving it. Her physical exclusion sharpened her moral insight.

In America, she saw clearly what Tocqueville avoided: “Slavery makes mockery of American ideals.”[20] She warned of a society corrupted by false morals and hollow law: “There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”[21]

Martineau, too, lived in contradiction—she retained paternalist views of her time. But unlike Tocqueville, she did not prescribe from fear—she bore witness. Tocqueville did not support the Revolution—not because he failed to see injustice, but because he never truly sided with the people most burdened by it. His critique of the bourgeoisie was sharp, but incomplete. He mourned the collapse of aristocratic virtue yet offered little to the serfs who had suffered under that virtue for centuries. In The Old Regime, his gaze remained fixed on institutions and elites—centralization, the monarchy, the Church—not the peasantry who lived at the margins of power. He condemned the moral decay of the new ruling class, but did not imagine what the poor, the rural, or the colonized might have done with freedom, had they truly been given the chance.

Martineau, by contrast, bore witness to those Tocqueville avoided. Her politics were imperfect, but her attention was different. She did not theorize virtue as an inheritance of class. She looked for it in those denied structure and status. That act of watching is what leads us to Haiti—where the sacred, silenced elsewhere, became action.

Sacred Survival: Dialectical Response to Tocqueville

Afro-Diasporic Pedagogy: Vodou as Moral Framework

While Tocqueville feared that religion’s decline would unleash moral chaos, the Haitian Revolution reveals a deeper truth: the sacred never vanished—it migrated, survived, and taught freedom from the underside of history. At Bois Caïman, enslaved Africans enacted a Vodou ceremony that was not symbolic, but pedagogical. According to colonial reports,
“a pig, entirely black… the conspirators drank its blood greedily. Boukman swore…”[22]
What they swore was not just secrecy, but solidarity. As C.L.R. James wrote, this ritual “forged the religious, social, and military cohesion of the slaves.” [23] It embedded loyalty, courage, and discipline into their collective body—religion not as retreat, but as preparation. Vodou itself became a curriculum, teaching mutual aid and responsibility in the face of terror. As one scholar puts it, “The Vodou worldview carries moral principles… respect for ancestors, obligation to community…”[24] These were not Tocqueville’s private, paternalistic virtues—they were communal necessities, honed under brutal conditions.

Despite relentless colonial persecution, Vodou endured. “Vodou, once shunned and persecuted, is gaining acceptance… spirits known as ‘Iwa’’ provide hope…”[25] It survived in Haiti, in diaspora, and in rebellion, offering a moral language rooted not in the state but in the sacred.

Tocqueville mourned the moral void left by Christianity’s collapse, but in Haiti, that void was filled with African cosmologies like Yeʋe,[26] where justice, discipline, and initiation were already integrated into spiritual life. He feared that liberty without religion would collapse into chaos—but in Haiti, the enslaved created a revolutionary faith that taught freedom as responsibility.

This sacred pedagogy lives on in the work of Christiane Essombe, who writes from post-apartheid South Africa about how colonization “programmed” people to forget how to relate—how to belong to each other and themselves.[27] She explains that memory is a method, and that healing comes not from nostalgia but from “reconstructing oneself through relationship, orality, and affect.” [28] Through silence, story, and gaze, the oppressed reassemble moral life from fragments.

Tocqueville believed enslaved people could not be freed until they were trained in virtue—yet admitted, preparations cannot be made in a state of slaver and to insist on them is to declare that it never shall cease.[29] He conceded the paradox, recognizing that the Christian faith of the enslaved contrasted sharply with the moral failures of their masters.

Yet he could not imagine that this faith might become a foundation for liberation. Though he noted that the enslaved had religious desires, [30] and that “masters… opposed the preaching of the Gospel… fearing it might awaken instincts of liberty,” [31] he did not grasp the revolutionary potential buried within these instincts. What he did see was that “Christianity is a religion of free men,” [32] and that this was precisely what slaveholders feared. Instead, he warned that “the most formidable of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of the Blacks on its soil.” [33] He feared not moral failure, but freedom ungoverned by empire.

Liberatory Frameworks: Revolutionary Moral Pedagogy

Fidel Castro: From Jesuit Ethics to Revolutionary Conscience

While Haiti and Essombe show how moral worlds survive in the margins, Fidel Castro shows how they can be built into a revolution. His vision of justice was not only political—it was ethical, grounded in the formative power of education, community, and experience. “Ethical values came from my education, that is, from school, from teachers, and I would say, from my family, from home,” [34] Fidel explained. “I was told early in my life that I should never lie” and that his ethics “Were based on a religious ethic.” [35] This ethic was not imposed—it was lived: modeled by elders, shaped by teachers, and deepened through struggle. “Later on, […] my experiences in life began to create a feeling of what was wrong, the violation of an ethical standard: a sense of injustice, abuse, or fraud.” [36] Moral clarity, for Fidel, was not abstract—it was embodied. Learned in childhood, assessed in life.

In this way, Fidel was not unlike Tocqueville. Both were formed by elite institutions. Both inherited religious ethics. Both watched their societies veer toward collapse. But where Tocqueville observed, Fidel acted. Tocqueville mourned the decay of aristocratic virtue yet never stepped outside of it. He circled through drawing rooms, documenting decline with elegant clarity: “Astonishment is expressed at the blindness with which the upper classes helped to ruin themselves,” [37] he wrote—yet he, too, remained within that silence. He saw revolution coming but did not join it. Fidel, by contrast, betrayed his class. He left the aristocracy not only politically, but physically joining the poor, fighting in the mountains, refusing to remain a spectator.

Religion, too, was not abstract in Fidel’s Cuba—it was shaped by class, geography, and power. “Seventy percent of the people lived in the countryside; there weren’t any rural churches,”[38] he noted. Religion was not a grassroots institution but a tool of elite reproduction: “It was disseminated mainly through private schools… attended by the children of the wealthiest in the country, members of the old aristocracy, or those who considered themselves aristocrats.” [39] This created a spiritual caste system where “those children were the only ones who received a religious education,”[40] often practiced with laziness or superficiality: “Some of them didn’t even go to mass… and many others went only as a social practice… They weren’t noted for their observance of religious principles.” [41]

This elite religiosity was not only hollow—it was weaponized. “Those sectors wanted to use the Church as a tool against the revolution,”[42] Fidel observed, pointing to the clergy’s foreign roots and aristocratic alliances: “As a rule, the rich classes had family ties with bishops… A large part of the clergy was of foreign origin.” [43] Christianity had arrived in Cuba through colonial violence, not communal belief: “There wasn’t a tradition of organized, systematic religion… but there was religiousness in Cuba.” [44] What existed instead was a tapestry of beliefs—African animist traditions, Catholic rituals, and spiritualism. “We also had an African legacy… which later mixed with the Catholics and other religions.” [45] This syncretism became part of the revolutionary spirit—a sacred inheritance, not from Rome, but from the enslaved.

Fidel recognized revolution as both structural and spiritual. He joked that if an Aztec had gone to Spain, he might have found their practices barbaric for burning heretics rather than making sacrifices.[46] The point was not to valorize violence, but to critique Eurocentric moral superiority. All peoples, he insisted, have known forms of religious life. What was missing in Cuba was not spirit, but system—and that system, elitist and hierarchical, had become a tool of oppression.

This is why he remembered Father Sardiñas, a priest who did not preach ideology, but offered connection: “Baptism was very important to the farmers… a social ceremony of great significance… His presence helped strengthen the people’s ties with the revolution.” [47] Just as the Bois Caïman ceremony in Haiti fused religion and revolt, baptism in rural Cuba became a ritual of belonging. It was not about doctrine—it was about dignity. Religion became relationship. Formation. Trust.

Tocqueville warned that the French Revolution produced “a new order of revolutionists… whose boldness was madness,”[48] who “shrunk from no novelty, knew no scruples, listened to no argument.” [49] It was not madness he feared—it was commitment. Fidel responded with precisely that commitment. He believed morale was central to revolutionary success: “Those who do not understand that morale is a fundamental factor in a revolution are lost, defeated. Values and morale are humanity’s spiritual weapons.” [50] His revolution depended not just on force, but on moral education.

That education, he emphasized, came through experience and collective will:

“When we controlled a territory, planes could find us at dawn or sunset… but the compañeros who fought in the underground took many risks… The guerrillas… became more disciplined, shared more in a collective spirit… The open struggle helps more… to promote the emergence of brotherhood, discipline, and group spirit.” [51]

These were not merely tactics—they were the ethical grounds of the revolution itself.

He also believed in humility and collective responsibility: “We could have said, ‘We are stronger than all the other organizations. Let us not share responsibilities.’… Yet that was not what we did.” [52] For Fidel, power was not to be hoarded but shared. The revolution’s strength came from refusing the authoritarian temptations of its own success.

This commitment extended to confronting religious hypocrisy abroad. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” [53] Fidel quoted, before observing that “Reagan and many capitalist governments do exactly that… Colonialist, imperialist, and fascist policies are often applied in the name of God.” [54] It was not faith that he rejected, but false prophets—those who sanctify exploitation.

When the Church justified inequality and conquest with promises of heavenly reward, it laid the groundwork for its own rejection. One of the clearest historical examples of this betrayal was the doctrine of the "Curse of Ham,"[55] [56]

a misinterpretation of the Bible used to justify the enslavement of Black people. Rather than offering liberation, religion was weaponized to sanctify oppression, distorting the sacred into a tool of empire. In doing so, the Church not only betrayed the oppressed—it alienated them from the very faith it claimed to represent.

As Tocqueville feared and Martineau insisted, once the moral contradictions of a society are placed in full view, they cannot be contained. Fidel, standing generations later, did not just name the contradiction—he moved to resolve it.

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville remarked that “when you put the question of slavery in the public square, it is impossible to keep it there long without it shaking the foundations of society.” [57] Tocqueville had already warned that the unresolved presence of Black Americans posed a permanent ethical contradiction to the democratic project.[58] But unlike Fidel, Tocqueville never resolved this contradiction through action—he simply observed it and feared its implications.

Here is the dialectical tension: Tocqueville diagnosed the moral fissures of modernity—how religion, once the anchor of virtue, had become detached from social life, and how revolutions might birth new dogmas rather than new ethics. But he remained bound by his aristocratic detachment. He could name contradictions but not live through them. Fidel, on the other hand, moved through contradiction and emerged with a transformed consciousness.

In dialectical terms, Tocqueville’s insight remained at the thesis-antithesis stage—he saw the fracture between moral tradition and democratic modernity. Fidel enacted the synthesis: the forging of a revolutionary ethic, not from abstract doctrine, but from struggle, sacrifice, and solidarity. Where Tocqueville feared that the erosion of religion would lead to moral collapse, Castro recognized that the real collapse came from religion’s collusion with oppression. He re-rooted the sacred in the people. By doing so, he fulfilled a dialectical trajectory that Tocqueville could only anticipate: the transformation of religious morality from an elite inheritance into a revolutionary pedagogy.

This same moral thread runs through Paulo Freire’s work, where education becomes the site of sacred awakening—a liberation not from religion, but through it.

Paulo Freire: Education as Sacred Moral Awakening

If Tocqueville feared that democracy without virtue would spiral into disorder, Paulo Freire offers a direct response—not through state control or religious authority, but through education as moral practice. Tocqueville warned against a society where the state becomes not only “the director of society,” but also “master of each man… keeper and trainer.” [59] He feared that individuals, once dependent on external structures, would lose their internal compass.

In his view, the welfare state—by guaranteeing support—risked replacing compassion with entitlement, dissolving moral responsibility into passive expectation: “The poor man […] has a right to demand relief,” [60] he noted, critically implying that such rights eroded the bonds of duty and gratitude. His critique of socialism was not merely economic, but profoundly ethical. He saw material redistribution without moral formation as a recipe for decay: dependence without judgment, freedom without conscience.

However, Freire, too, feared this hollowing of moral life—though not for the same reasons. Where Tocqueville saw danger in the state’s overreach, Freire saw it in the silence imposed on the oppressed. For Freire, the true threat was not moral entitlement, but moral erasure: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, means to side with the powerful.”[61] His concern was not with dependence, but with alienation—the way systems strip people of their voice, their agency, and their capacity to think critically about their condition. Rather than fearing the moral decline of the poor, Freire recognized their potential to be moral agents. He rejected any model of education that treated the oppressed as empty vessels to be filled, managed, or disciplined.

Instead, he called for a pedagogy rooted in dialogue, where teacher and student co-create meaning through shared reflection and experience: “The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students.” [62] Freire’s concept of conscientização [63] —critical consciousness—is the ethical foundation of this approach. It is not simply about knowledge, but about moral awakening: a recognition of one’s dignity, coupled with a growing sense of responsibility to others. It is the slow, deliberate process of becoming human in relation to others—not through control, but through mutual recognition.

Unlike Tocqueville’s model, where virtue is inherited through tradition or religious authority, Freire’s vision is generative. Virtue is not passed down—it is built together. This spirit of moral co-creation echoed across Latin America through the rise of liberation theology—a movement that refused to separate faith from justice. Like Freire, liberation theologians argued that true religion could not remain neutral in the face of oppression. They insisted that the sacred must be lived through solidarity with the poor, and that salvation itself required collective liberation. In their view, as in Freire’s, moral formation was not about obedience to authority but about awakening the oppressed to their inherent dignity and power. It does not require fear of divine punishment or the modeling of elite behavior. It requires trust, listening, humility, and collective commitment.

In this way, Freire does what Tocqueville could not imagine: he teaches freedom without hierarchy. He constructs a moral order not through restraint, but through relationship. His pedagogy is sacred not because it is religious, but because it restores meaning to the act of learning itself. Freire offers a framework in which the sacred survives not in dogma, but in co-creation—in the shared labor of becoming ethical beings together. Where Tocqueville feared the collapse of virtue, Freire revealed the conditions under which virtue might rise again—not from above, but from below.

Epilogue: Yearning for Moral Structure in Late Liberalism

The Simpsons: To Bind or to Liberate?

This epilogue examines how the contemporary liberal imagination grapples—often unsuccessfully—with the longing for a moral center. This failure is not accidental. It stems from the abandonment of a materialist science of history—without dialectical materialism, modern liberal societies can recognize moral decay but cannot understand, much less resolve, its structural causes. In popular culture, this yearning surfaces not through revolutionary struggle, but through ironic, fractured gestures toward the sacred. The Simpsons, a cultural artifact of late modernity, offers a glimpse into this broken search for meaning. This is what Tocqueville could not imagine: that moral structure could emerge from the oppressed, not imposed upon them. That conscience could be cultivated through shared struggle rather than inherited tradition. That the sacred could be reborn—not in cathedrals or bureaucracies—but in dialogue, in community, and even… on television.

In The Simpsons episode “Warrin’ Priest: Part 2,”[64] Reverend Bode Wright delivers a sermon that crystallizes a theological shift deeply reflective of material and spiritual contradictions in modern life. Faced with dwindling church attendance, Bode addresses the alienation people feel toward institutional religion: “Fewer and fewer people are coming to church, and I get it. Usually when you tell people that you believe in God, they take that to mean you’re quietly judging their lifestyle or think everybody but you, is going to hell.” [65] He then reclaims the original meaning of religion—religio, from the Latin root for “to reconnect” [66]—and proposes an inclusive vision: “I want to bring us all together, not just Christians, but Hindus and Buddhists, even people who don’t believe.” [67]

This provokes Ned Flanders, who voices nostalgia for a more morally rigid and orderly past: “Does anyone else miss church the way it was?”[68] he asks, only to be met with silence and the sound of crickets. He then ridicules the service as a “gooey love fest run by a narcissist,” calling it Bode a “Kumbayoyo Narcissist.”[69] In this moment, the series stages a theological confrontation not merely between characters, but between two ideologies: one rooted in punishment and doctrinal purity, and the other in fluid grace and universal inclusion. The dialectic emerges through a scriptural exchange—verses wielded as rhetorical weapons in a battle over God’s nature and purpose.

Flanders insists on a punitive interpretation of divine authority: “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’” (Matthew 25:41).[70] To which Bode replies, asserting the universality of divine love: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32).[71] Flanders escalates: “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thessalonians 1:9).[72] And Bode counters: “For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (Romans 11:32).[73] Finally, Flanders reaches for the origin of sin: “So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden” (Genesis 3:23).[74] And Bode responds by returning to the origin of goodness: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).[75]

Each scriptural exchange stages a dialectical clash: punishment against mercy, exclusion against embrace, fallenness against blessing. Where Flanders presents scripture as a legal code used to regulate morality, Bode reads it as a narrative of cosmic reconciliation. His refrain— “God is the love, the yes, which sets the universe in motion. God is nothing but grace, and flow, and forgiveness. And if you do not believe that you should read the Bible a little closer” [76] —functions as both theological proposition and revolutionary re-reading.

This vision is shaped by Bode’s own contested past. At age nineteen, he was “exiled” for burning a Bible—an act he now regrets. But the reason behind it still informs his worldview: “I was 19,” he says, “I saw how people were using the Bible to divide, to exclude. People were so busy worshipping a roadmap rather than reaching the destination.” [77] Since then, he has lived a nomadic life, rejected by institutions but still committed to spiritual meaning. His ministry is a product of dialectical development—born of contradiction, rupture, and transformation.

What Bode offers is not simply a new form of church, but a synthesis: a theology attuned to changing material conditions. His God is not fixed but in motion, defined not by wrath but by “yes”—a God who forgives, who flows, who reconciles [78]. In dialectical materialist terms, Bode’s message represents an ideological shift responsive to the collapse of institutional religion’s authority. As the material base erodes, a new superstructure emerges. Religion not as a tool of judgment, but as a communal practice of repair. And in this confrontation, Tocqueville’s moral anxieties find their mirror in Ned Flanders—yearning for structure, unable to trust the people to hold virtue without constraint. But Bode, like the oppressed throughout history, shows that moral life does not end when the old order crumbles. It begins again, wherever people remember how to love.

Bode’s ministry did not merely provoke the old guard; it inspired genuine devotion. The people of Springfield, accustomed to hollow ritual, responded to his message with enthusiasm, even reverence—treating him as a messianic figure. Nowhere is this clearer than in Lisa Simpson’s musical number, “Maybe This Time.”[79] Lisa, a Buddhist, and a scientist, often portrays the broken faith of a world betrayed by its institutions. She lost faith in Christianity when she perceived its entanglement with capitalist interests (“She of Little Faith”), grieved the departure of her beloved substitute teacher Mr. Bergstrom (“Lisa’s Substitute”), and saw even intellectual peers like Sideshow Bob fall into corruption (“Sideshow Bob Roberts”). Yet in Bode, she glimpses a possibility she had almost abandoned: that goodness might survive without domination. Her song is not mere optimism—it is a revolutionary act of hope against cynicism. She sings not because she trusts the world, but because she dares to trust again. Bode’s willingness to honor Buddhism as part of his inclusive sacred vision allows Lisa to feel, for once, that she is not merely tolerated, but embraced. And yet, the tragic dialectic soon reasserts itself: when Bode’s youthful transgression is revealed, the community that exalted him turns against him. The yearning for the sacred collapses once again into fear and betrayal. In dialectical terms, Lisa becomes the figure of the oppressed yearning for a new synthesis—a moral framework that transcends both doctrinal rigidity and commodified tolerance.

The yearning for a moral center, glimpsed even in fractured cultural forms, signals the enduring hunger for meaning that liberal modernity cannot satisfy. This failure is not accidental. It stems from the abandonment of a materialist science of history—without dialectical materialism, modern liberal societies can recognize moral decay but cannot understand, much less resolve, its structural causes. As we turn to the collapse of meaning in the digital age, the stakes of this struggle become even clearer.

Conclusion: From Nihilism to Revolutionary Memory

In the closing pages of Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics, Elle Reeve recounts a haunting exchange with Fred Brennan, the founder of 8chan. Once an enthusiastic defender of radical free speech, Brennan reflects on how the platform he created became a breeding ground for extremism, conspiracy, and real-world violence. Now disillusioned, he admits, “I could just start believing in Jesus” [80] —not as a confession of faith, but as a collapse into longing, a final, desperate grasp for meaning in a world he helped further collapse.

It is Tocqueville’s warning made real: when freedom is severed from virtue, nihilism is never far behind. Brennan’s journey—from boundless liberty to spiritual exhaustion—embodies the very crisis Tocqueville feared: a moral desert disguised as democratic freedom.

8chan is not merely an anecdote; it is the logical endpoint of liberalism without moral formation. It is a modern parable of freedom turned in on itself. Created in the name of unregulated expression, 8chan evolved into a void where hatred, alienation, and violence thrived—a digital mirror of what Tocqueville foresaw: a society where the pursuit of freedom without ethical grounding leads not only to the loss of virtue, but of meaning itself. 8chan shows that when moral education, community bonds, and shared frameworks are stripped away, extremism fills the emptiness. And that void cannot be healed by censorship or authoritarian control. It must be filled by rebuilding the sacred—through struggle, care, memory, and collective conscience.

Modern liberalism, by separating politics from ethics and freedom from responsibility, abandons the deeper work of moral formation.

Without a rooted sense of purpose, democracies swing between apathy and unrest, circling the same unresolved questions without offering liberation or meaning. “A revolution that stands for nothing, does nothing but give birth to subsequent revolutions.”[81]

Yet Tocqueville failed to see where true moral formation endured. He saw the dangers of mass democracy, but he did not fully grasp that moral meaning was preserved not by elites or institutions, but by those at the margins. The enslaved taught resistance through ritual in Vodou. Martineau sharpened her conscience through witness and exclusion. Essombe showed that memory itself could be a method of healing and reconstruction. Fidel forged a revolutionary pedagogy rooted in responsibility, solidarity, and discipline. Freire transformed dialogue into a sacred act of awakening. These traditions kept faith alive—not as abstraction, but as living, embodied struggle. They showed that moral life is not inherited from authority, but recreated through relationship, memory, and collective action. The sacred was not lost. It was buried.

And it is rising.

We are living within the crisis Tocqueville feared—but not for the reasons he imagined. Liberalism is unraveling not simply because of the leveling forces of equality, but because it severed freedom from moral responsibility. The frameworks left behind—media narratives, political institutions, even secular norms—are hollow, incoherent, and often complicit in violence. In this vacuum, fundamentalism rises—Zionism sanctifying genocide, capitalism disciplining through illusion, and nihilism numbing everything in between. Tocqueville warned that the desire for equality could become so overwhelming that individuals might prefer “equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”[82] This insight is reflected in the rise of platforms like 8chan, where the absence of shared moral frameworks has led to a vacuum filled by radical ideologies.

This essay has contended that the path forward is not a return to antiquated moral orders, but a recognition of the sacred pedagogies that persist among us—rooted in struggle, shaped by community, and awaiting remembrance.

The survival of sacred traditions among the oppressed offers not a solution already completed, but a foundation from which the future must be built. In the absence of ethical inheritance from liberal institutions, the responsibility now falls elsewhere: on memory, on conscience, and on the willingness to forge new covenants of solidarity. Whether the next era descends into nihilism or rises toward renewal will depend not on the ruins left behind, but on how—and by whom—the sacred is unearthed, remembered, and made to live again through acts of moral reconstruction. The individuals and communities Tocqueville overlooked—the enslaved, the colonized, the rural, the marginalized—have continued the work of moral world-building. They preserve sacred traditions not yet broken, reconstruct ethics through ceremony, pedagogy, and witness. They demonstrate that revolution is not mere invention; it is remembrance. It occurs when the sacred resurfaces through the hands of those who never truly forgot it.

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