an autodidact meets a dilettante…

haven’t heard this one before

I’ve written a fair bit about the rise of the ‘no religion’ sector of society, in Australia and elsewhere, which has obvious implications for the role of Christianity in politics in the western world. In Australia some generations ago, Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix, and later his protege B A Santamaria, were hugely influential political figures. The formation of the Catholic DLP (Democratic Labour Party) by Sanatamaria, with the support of Mannix, effectively split the left, handing the conservatives political power for decades before Whitlam’s 1972 election victory. Since then, however, there hasn’t been much overt influence on politics from religion, though of course we’ve had religious PMs, including the current mad monk. Nor have we had any major political parties, that I know of, in which Christianity, or any denomination thereof, is part of its name.

Not so in other western countries. So-called Christian Democracy parties are quite common in Western Europe, usually on the centre-right. Belgium has the Christian Democratic and Flemish Party, formerly the Christian People’s Party; Switzerland has the Christian Democratic People’s Party as well as the Evangelical People’s Party; the Netherlands has the Christian Democratic Appeal Party, and Italy has the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats (though better known by its more secular title, the Union of the Centre, UDC).

Probably the most successful and powerful Christian political party in Europe, though, is Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, whose leader, Angela Merkel, has been Germany’s Chancellor for the past nine years. The party has been in power more often than not, though often in coalition, since 1945. In recent times, the CDU has formed a more or less permanent partnership with the Bavarian CSU (Christian Social Union), which is generally more Catholic and conservative.

According to Germany’s 2011 census, their percentage of Christians is almost identical to Australia’s, at a little over 60%, pretty well evenly divided between Catholics and (essentially Lutheran) Protestants. However, as with Australia, the numbers are falling rapidly, and churches are closing and being converted to other uses throughout the country. The ‘no religion’ category has won more votes recently than either the Papists or the Heretics. Interestingly, the eastern part of the country, which was under communist rule for 40 years, is much more atheist than the rest. So for how much longer will Germany’s CDU retain its Christian moniker?

According to its party platform, the CDU derives its policies from both ‘political Catholicism’ and ‘political Protestantism’, whatever that means. The vapidity of such claims, together with the obviously rising secularism of the populace, might explain why Angela Merkel played down any Christian elements in her and her party’s thinking during the 2005 elections. Merkel herself is the daughter of a Lutheran minister but was brought up in the atheist East and is a physicist by training. Recently, though (just prior to last year’s elections) she ‘came out’ for the first time as a Christian, possibly for complex political reasons (the rise of Islam is a much more significant factor in German domestic politics than in Australian). She even claimed, quite nonsensically, that Christianity was ‘the world’s most persecuted religion’. (Actually this is a common view, according to Pew Research, in the USA. It seems many Christians believe that the waning of Christianity’s popularity is a form of persecution). Merkel was elected for another 4-year term in 2013, and her more emphatic public identification with Christianity in recent times means that her party will be stuck with its name as long as she’s at the helm. My guess is she’ll be ripe for retirement in 2017.

Of course, as with most western states, religion in Germany has in recent decades, if not centuries, become a more ‘internal’ matter, and less political, with much ‘encouragement’ from the state.  For more detail on that, check out the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 and its newly-defined principle, Cuius regio, eius religio, and also the concept of forum internum. This is definitely a good thing, given the Thirty Years War and all, but it seems that, as a quid pro quo for religious non-interference in politics, Germany’s Grundgesetz (its Basic Law, or Constitution) has been very generous in its delineation of religious freedom, and this may cause problems if Germany continues to play host to more challenging, and less ‘internalised’, religious beliefs. The Grundgesetz came into being in 1949, but many of its statutes pertaining to religion date back to the 1919 Weimar constitution. Unsurprisingly, no religions other than an increasingly emasculated (if that’s not too sexist a term) Christianity would have been considered relevant in those days.

Much of what follows, and some of the preceding, is taken from the article ‘Religion and the secular state in Germany’, by Stefan Korioth and Ino Augsberg. The constitution guarantees freedom of individual religion and philosophical creed (Weltanschauung) – thus also guaranteeing freedom not to have a religion. In article 3 of the constitution it’s stated that ‘no person shall be favored or disfavored because of his or her personal religious opinions’, and in article 33, ‘neither the enjoyment of civil and political rights, nor eligibility for public offices, nor rights acquired in the public service shall be dependent upon religious affiliations’. Other articles guarantee that there shall be no state church, and create a separation of church and state. In fact the German constitution is unusually detailed in its coverage of the status of religious entities vis-a-vis the state. It is above all concerned to emphasise the principle of state neutrality, but this has caused some difficulties in that the state has withdrawn even so far as to be reluctant to define religion for legal purposes. There is, as Korioth and Augsberg point out, no numerus clausus, or fixed number, of religious confessions, and it has been left to religious communities themselves to define their religiosity. Not surprisingly this has led to ongoing issues with regard to the legal status of religious groups. With the inevitable continuing decline in Christianity, and the rise of more challenging religions, and the disaffected youth who choose to identify with a more intolerant version of those religions, this will be a problem in the future. Hopefully, however painful, it will remain a fringe problem for the ongoing secularisation of Germany.

Just to round things off, Merkel’s newly-found public Christianity is a reminder that often changes have to wait until people die off, if that doesn’t sound too morbid or callous. Of course they don’t have to die physically, they may just have to die in terms of power or influence. Merkel’s position reminds me of others, such as Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court, and the late Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church (not that I place these people on the same moral or intellectual plane). The movement towards secularism isn’t so much about changing people’s minds, though that’s always a worthy pursuit. It’s about a changing zeitgeist that feeds those who are brought up within it. Older people die, younger people come to prominence, bringing the newly transformed zeitgeist to the fore. That’s how the flat-earthers, who once filled provincial town halls with their lectures, finally faded from view; they weren’t out-argued or persuaded from their views, they simply died, and their descendants imbibed the new zeitgeist. Not an excuse for complacency, but a reason for hope, and a reason for contributing to that zeitgeist in a positive way.