Christian Democracy in Europe — Faith That Quietly Took Root

In the previous episode, we watched how in independent India, a state founded as secular, the faith of the Hindu majority became entwined with national consciousness. It was a phenomenon in which religion was pushed to the very front of politics, often with great intensity.

Yet the ways in which religion and politics meet are not limited to collision. At times faith takes root quietly, deep within institutions, without raising its voice. What happened in postwar Europe was precisely such a gentle union.

The stage is the ruined Western Europe at the end of the Second World War. On a continent scorched by fascism and Nazism, people needed a new order. At the center of that reconstruction stood parties that held up Christian values — Christian Democracy.

A Party Born from the Rubble

In 1945, in Cologne and other German cities, a new party gave its first cry. It was the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

In a sense, this party was born out of a reckoning with history. In prewar Germany, Catholics and Protestants had been divided by denomination and split politically as well. That division, it has been argued, weakened the Weimar Republic and was one factor that allowed Nazism to rise. The founders of the CDU resolved not to repeat that mistake. To cross the barrier between Catholic and Protestant and gather everyone who shared Christian values into a single party — that was their vision.

At its center stood Konrad Adenauer. He led the CDU for many years from 1946 and became the first chancellor of West Germany, established in 1949. For a man who had been driven from public office by the Nazis, a democracy grounded in faith meant a bulwark against totalitarianism.

The same movement was under way in Italy. The Christian Democracy party (DC) led by Alcide De Gasperi became the center of postwar Italian politics and grew, it is said, into the largest Christian Democratic party in Western Europe. De Gasperi became prime minister in 1945 and held the post for a long time, laying the foundations of postwar Italian democracy.

The Fusion of Faith and Modern Politics

What makes Christian Democracy intriguing is that, while holding up religious values, it respected the framework of modern politics.

They did not aim at theocracy. Parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, human rights, the market economy — having accepted these achievements of modernity, they sought to breathe into them a view of humanity derived from Christianity. For instance, the idea of seeing the human being not as a merely economic individual but as one supported by family and local community, or the notion of rejecting both extreme capitalism and extreme socialism and placing a ‘social market economy’ in between.

And not to be overlooked is that they were also promoters of European integration. Adenauer, De Gasperi, and France’s Robert Schuman — many of those called the fathers of European integration belonged to the lineage of Christian Democracy. When France and Germany, which had long bled one another, took a step from the joint management of coal and steel toward reconciliation, behind it, it is said, flowed the idea of forgiving even an enemy as a neighbor. Some see in the ideal of reconciliation and cooperation across borders the influence of a Christian universalism. There was, it is held, an aspect in which faith worked as a power to overcome narrow nationalism. Of course, European integration cannot be explained by faith alone; deep weariness with war, economic necessity, and the international environment of the Cold War all played large roles. Even so, it is hard to deny that an ideal of reconciliation derived from Christianity lived on deep in the hearts of the generation that bore the work of reconstruction.

A party born from denominational conflict crossed over denomination and eventually turned toward a cooperation that crossed nations — this was one story of postwar Western Europe.

Amid Secularization

Yet this gentle union was not eternal.

From the 1960s onward, Western European society secularized rapidly. The number of people attending church on Sundays declined, and faith gradually withdrew into the private sphere. At the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), the Catholic Church itself is said to have positively appraised the separation of church and state. The distance between church and state came to be accepted from the side of the faithful as well.

Amid this change, the Christian Democratic parties too transformed. They were no longer the spokesmen of Christians alone, and they came to restate religious values as ‘humanistic and universal values.’ The color of faith faded, and they drew closer to broader center-right parties.

Even so, what postwar Western Europe demonstrated was one precious model. Religion can be involved gently, as an ethic that serves as the foundation of modern politics — without ruling the state, and without being completely shut out of politics. Neither fierce conflict nor cold indifference: a third path. Western Europe’s Christian Democracy embodied it for more than half a century.

Faith and politics do not necessarily have to clash. There can also be a relationship in which the two, respecting each other’s domains, gently support one another — the experience of postwar Europe quietly teaches us this.

Then, when we shift our gaze east, across the sea to Japan, how did faith and politics come to meet there? In the next episode, let us look upon the wholly different story of religion and politics that modern Japan walked.