“Above these [citizens] rises an immense and tutelary power, which alone takes upon itself the task of securing their welfare and watching over their fate. It is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild… it does not break the will, but it softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins to act, but it constantly opposes itself to action… and reduces every nation at last to nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840)

It is nearly two centuries since the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville set this down after his visit to the young American democracy.

Does he not describe, with almost unbearable precision, the world in which we live today?

Every Sunday I hear the prayer of the faithful for our rulers. I pray along, for St. Paul charges us to do so. But more and more it gnaws at my conscience. Are we praying for the servants of God, or for the perpetuation of a system that, with its gentle hand, suffocates our soul?

The Leviathan against which Thomas Hobbes warned, a state with absolute power to subdue the chaos, has come. But it does not wear the monstrous face Hobbes envisioned. It wears the friendly, caring face Tocqueville foretold. And its power is so total, so all-encompassing, that we, like the fish that does not know the water, no longer recognize the nature of our own captivity.

The Normalization

The greatest obstacle to understanding our situation is normalization. We are born into this system. We know nothing else. When a modern Catholic hears the words of Christ — “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” — he instinctively thinks of present-day arrangements. The state asks for taxes, and we pay them. In return we get roads, healthcare, and security. That sounds like a reasonable deal.

But I think we have lost all perspective. The poll tax about which the Pharisees questioned Jesus was one denarius per year. A day’s wage. About 0.3% of an annual income. A hated, but limited, claim. The modern ‘Caesar’ claims, through an invisible web of payroll taxes and indirect levies, more than half of everything we produce.

This claim has not only become quantitatively disproportionate; the surrender has also been rendered psychologically painless. We no longer hand a sack of coins to a hated tax collector. The money disappears before we have ever felt it as our own. The state is the Pharaoh who governs his slaves not with the whip, but with an efficient and automated system. The cage is so comfortable and so omnipresent that we no longer see the bars.

God as Personal Hobby

The most diabolical victory of the soft tyranny is not the persecution of the faith, but its reduction. In our modern order, ‘freedom of religion’ is not the right to recognize God publicly as the Creator and Lord of all that is. No, it is the right to treat God as a personal hobby.

God is no longer the objective Reality, the source of all life, the Creator who has bestowed existence on you and me. He has become a subjective preference, something you ‘experience’ or ‘live out,’ comparable with a passion for stamp-collecting or mountaineering. It is permitted, so long as you do not bother others with it in the public square.

The modern, secularized human being, including many Catholics, has internalized this demotion. We think it normal. We defend a system that reduces the God who gave us life to an optional extra in that life. But this is the heart of idolatry. It is not the setting up of a golden calf, but the placing of Almighty God in a small, state-approved box, labeled ‘private spirituality.’ The state says: “You may have your God, but I am the reality. I define what is true, what is good, what is life.”

The Crossing of the Sacred Boundaries

This idolatry is no abstract idea; it is a daily, institutional reality. The soft tyranny upholds its power by continually crossing three sacred, God-given boundaries.

1. The Boundary of God: The state appropriates sovereignty to itself. It judges over life and death, for example through laws on abortion and euthanasia. It redefines morality by replacing the sacrament of marriage with a state contract. It claims the ultimate authority that belongs to God alone.
2. The Boundary of the Church: Christ founded His Church to continue His work on earth: to teach, to heal, to sanctify. The state has systematically annexed these tasks. It took over education, the care of the sick, the shelter of the poor. It robbed the Church of her public, serving body and left only a whispering voice, locked away in buildings that often can be maintained only with state subsidies.
3. The Boundary of Man: Man, created in God’s image, is meant for freedom and responsibility, rooted in the family and the community. The state stifles this. It treats us as dependent children. Through its immense tax burden and bureaucratic control it deprives us of the means and the room to care for ourselves and one another, and turns us into clients who must be grateful for its ‘caring’ shepherding.

The Shepherd and His Propaganda

How can this system, so fundamentally at odds with a Christian vision of reality, be so widely accepted? Because the caring shepherd is also the master of propaganda. The state has the monopoly not only on violence, but also on the story.

Through the educational system every generation is indoctrinated with belief in the goodness and self-evidence of the secular, all-powerful state. Through the media this worldview is daily reaffirmed. The demos, the people, is no sovereign entity, but a mass that, as we know from history, is very easily steered by those who control the propaganda.

There are no real ‘checks and balances’ left. The state, in its various forms, controls itself. The parties debate the color of the cage, but never the existence of the cage itself. And the Church, which ought to be the only true counterweight, is often too weak, too intimidated, or too much a part of the system itself to make a prophetic voice still heard.

The Call to a Spiritual Exodus

Where does this leave us? In a deep, but not a hopeless, darkness. The soft tyranny of the Pharaoh with the friendly face is alluring. He promises us security and comfort, the fleshpots of Egypt. And many of us accept this, without realizing what we surrender: our God-given dignity, our calling to freedom and to holiness.

The solution, I think, is not a political uprising. It is a spiritual Exodus. It is an inner act of resistance that begins with seeing. Seeing that our comfortable world is a beautifully decorated prison. Seeing that God is not our hobby, but the ground of our being — He who has given us life.

It means that we must draw the boundaries again. In our own lives, in our families, in our communities. We must learn to be less dependent on the state and more on God and on one another. We must pierce through the propaganda and teach our children the truth. We must build communities that are oases of real care and freedom, in which we again recognize God for Who He is.

It is the way of the wilderness. It is uncomfortable. It is uncertain. But it is the only road to the Promised Land. The way out of Egypt back to the freedom of the children of God, who bow only before their heavenly Father.