Quote

In which Marilynne Robinson sounds exactly like Alexis de Tocqueville:

(On the women of Fingerbone:)

"They had been made to enact the gestures and attitudes of Christian benevolence from young girlhood, until these gesture and attitudes became habit, and the habit became so strongly ingrained as to seem to be impulse or instinct. ... There were, in fact, several churches whose visions of sin and salvation were so ecstatic, and so nearly identical, that the superiority of one church over another could be argued only in terms of good works. And the obligation to perform these works rested squarely with the women, since salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men."

--Housekeeping