Christian democracy sits left on economics and right on morals
Christian democrats helped build Europe's postwar welfare states and the European Union, yet they are hard to place on a left–right line. Historically they distrusted free-market individualism and backed unions and regulation, while holding conservative views on marriage, abortion and drugs, and defending private property against an overbearing state.
The movement drew first on Catholic social teaching and Neo-Calvinism, later reaching Lutherans and Pentecostals. In the nineteenth century it tried to reconcile Catholicism with democracy, answer the social question raised by industrial capitalism and the working class, and settle quarrels between church and state. After the Second World War its parties led much of Western and Southern Europe, and after communism fell it won support in former Eastern Bloc states weary of corruption and stagnation.
Its philosophical roots go back to Thomas Aquinas, who grounded rights in natural law as whatever humans need to function, and saw human dignity and equality flowing from people being made in the divine image. Those ideas fed subsidiarity, the view that decisions belong at the lowest workable level. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain, the closest thing the movement has to a founding thinker, argued that democracy needs Christianity to succeed. Unlike liberalism with Locke or socialism with Marx, though, it has no single towering author; Pope Leo XIII, Emmanuel Mounier and Luigi Sturzo also shaped it.
The Dutch Calvinist tradition added sphere sovereignty: family, school, economy and state each have their own domain, and none should dictate to another. Mounier's personalism, meanwhile, treats each person as free and dignified but fulfilled only within a community, rejecting both individualism and collectivism. In practice this has meant opposition to abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment, strong support for families, a welfare system often run through churches and other intermediary bodies, and co-determination between workers and employers rather than class struggle.
Today most European Christian democratic parties call themselves centre-right and back a social market economy, a lightly regulated market with solid social security. Germany's Christian Democratic Union and Austria's People's Party are examples. In Latin America the label stretches further: Chile's Christian Democrats lean left, while Mexico's National Action Party leans right. The tradition also stresses stewardship of the planet for future generations.
Source: Christian democracy
