Although Alexis de Tocqueville was both a Christian and a jurist, the literature on his life and work has paid relatively little attention to his religious beliefs or his legal formation. This chapter shows that his ability to see deeply into the roots and trajectories of the political transformations of his time owed a great deal to a keen legal mind and a profoundly Christian sensibility. Tocqueville received his legal education at a transformative moment in French legal history, just after the Napoleonic Codes had replaced a diverse welter of local and regional laws with a unified national legal system. That experience not only shaped his later views concerning political centralization but was also the basis for his penetrating analyses of the role of law and lawyers in the new American republic. Although Tocqueville struggled with religious doubts, he always considered himself a Christian. He unwaverngly believed that religion’s role in a nation’s seedbeds of civic virtue, and religious bodies as buffers between the individual and the state, were fundamental for the maintenance of free political institutions.