Just three years after the publication of the second volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville turned his theoretical and political eye to the subject of education. The occasion for this study was a fractious debate in France over education policy, or what they called the liberté de l’enseignement. Education policy itself was only of minor interest to Tocqueville, but he recognized – like many – that the matter at hand went beyond education. In a series of letters and speeches Tocqueville argued that the real matter at stake was the role of the Catholic Church in the French polis, and he recognized education policy as an important piece of this bigger puzzle.

To make Tocqueville's insight useful to contemporary political science, I connect my Jansenist interpretation of Tocqueville's political thought to Alfred Stepan's seminal article ‘Religion, Democracy, and the “Twin Tolerations.”’ Although seemingly from different worlds, Tocqueville and Stepan do not come from times so different as to be incomparable. Rather, I show that they are not only highly complementary in approach, but also that Tocqueville's sociology can be used to extend Stepan's insights in interesting ways. Stepan himself singles out education policy as an important arena for crafting the twin tolerations, and an edited volume that contains his essay concludes with a look at Tocqueville's sociology of religion. This chapter bridges this gap by using Tocqueville's participation in these debates on education policy as a case study of Stepan's argument.

In his article Stepan argues that liberal ideas of the ‘strict separation of church and state’ and ‘wall of separation’ should be replaced with what he calls the ‘democratic bargaining’ approach to constructing the ‘twin tolerations.’ He argues that these liberal theories both fail to describe how actual existing democratic polities interact with religious institutions and do a poor job of explaining how and why questions of the role of religion come to actually be ‘taken off the political agenda.’ In the vast majority of cases this has only happened after ‘long periods of democratic bargaining’ that resulted in ‘friendly’ but not ‘too-friendly’ relationships between churches and states. He argues that these are ‘democratic – but not liberal – consociational agreements.’ Within these boundaries, however, Stepan demonstrates that the mutual accommodations between democratic polities and religious institutions take a multitude of forms.