Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Why Are There No Christian Democrats in America?
The other day I happened upon the Wikipedia article about Christian Democrats. I clicked through to the list of parties, and was surprised by the complete absence of American parties from the list, not even some minor third party outfit. (The closest we get might be the more-or-less defunct New York State Right to Life Party, the Jefferson Republican Party and the amorphous Working Families Party.)
Why is this? Why are there no Christian Democrats in the US?
Admittedly, Christian Democracy is not a monolithic concept. Using the Wikipedia article as a rough guide, we see that it can draw on Catholic social teaching or Calvinist ideas. It can be organized around Christian corporatism, subsidiarity, sphere sovereignty, communitarianism, the stewardship of the Christian believer or the dignity of the human person. (Or lots of those!) Its economics can be of the simple market variety, a social market economy or distributist.
Perhaps it is a bit much to ask that such a diverse - if interrelated - group of ideas spawn a single party in the US. Perhaps there are political, cultural or historical reasons why Christian Democracy lacks a following here. But it strikes me as odd that such a body of ideas have little play in the American arena, where Christians are generally assumed to belong to the hawkish semi-libertarian Republican Party, or are seen as hippie lefties opposed to war, industry and any kind of authority. What a pathetically shallow representation of the political implications of Christianity. Yet that is all we seem to find.
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3 comments:
One possible reason is that America does not really have a conservative tradition.
Another possible reason has to do with European history. The Christian Democratic parties are basically a result of World War II, when conservative Catholics and Protestants, skeptical of both unlimited government and unfettered capitalism, decided to put aside their differences and joint together to support a moderate democracy rather than risk returning to the political conflicts that came to a bloody end in World War II.
There were some parties before the war who favored some version of Christian Democratic politics, such as the Catholic Center Party in the Weimar Republic, but these groups only really took after World War II. After the war, though, these parties became more interdenominational (the German CDU includes both Rhineland Catholics and Swabian Protestants) and more explicitly democratic (French Catholics for the most part abandoned any lingering affection for the long-lost Bourbon monarchy).
Yeah, there is the problem that America mostly lacks traditional conservatism. Traditional Christians mistrusted laissez-faire capitalism.
That said, I'm not sure what you are asking with your question. Like most Americans, most Democrats are Christian. Around half of Democrats go to church at least weekly. Democrats include the highest percentage of minorities who are probably the most religious demographic in the US.
America has had a two-party system for a long time. It's very unlikely that a separate party would start simply based on a religion. The two-party system is rather open-ended to include everyone, more or less. And the two parties switch who they represent. The Republican party, for example, began as a radical left-wing movement that included abolitionists, agrarian reformers and Marxists/socialists.
Marmalade,
When we speak about "Christian Democrats" we are not referring to members of the Democratic Party (in the US) who are also Christians. We are referring to a group of political parties found in certain European countries (e.g., Italy and Germany) that have political parties that call themselves "Christian Democratics."
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