The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (38 page)

 
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The seizure of power in China by the Communist Party under
Mao
, which controlled the whole of the Chinese mainland by 1949. See also
Chinese political thought
;
great leap forward
;
cultural revolution
.

 
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Christian democracy has been a successful postwar political movement in Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, Latin America. Its sociological and ideological origins, however, lie in the mobilization of Catholics in response to the emergence of liberal capitalism in the nineteenth century. The explicit challenge to the position of the Church launched by the French Revolution forced Catholics to accept democratic political forms and defend Catholic interests through the promotion of Catholic secondary associations (particularly Catholic unions and schools). Traditional institutions central to Christian practice—in particular, the family and a harmonious social order—were considered to be facing a dual attack: first, from the corrosive effects of industrialization and
laissez-faire
liberalism, and secondly, from increasing state regulation of social life. From the 1850s onwards, Vatican-sponsored ‘Catholic Action Groups’ campaigned to limit the power of the emerging Italian state, and sizeable political Catholic groups emerged in the German-speaking areas of Europe.
Pope Leo XIII's
Rerum Novarum
(1891) liberated Catholicism from moral opposition to democracy, and stimulated further political mobilization. Electoral success came first to the Italian ‘Popular Party’ under the leadership of Luigi Sturzo in 1919, while the German ‘Centre’ Party was a coalition mainstay of the Weimar Republic. By this time, political Catholicism had developed an ambiguous stance towards the exertion of state power: while hostility to socialism and communist forms of ownership remained a dominant theme, the initial opposition to capitalism had by 1914 moderated into recommendations for social improvement through strong welfare legislation. This ambivalence towards the role of government is reflected in the work of the foremost theorist of Christian Democracy, Jacques Maritain , whose contempt for strong states is coupled with specific provisions for state intervention given the failure of industrial capitalism to serve ‘the common good’.
Fascism repressed and discredited most of these political groups—most offered weak resistance to right-wing extremism, some (e.g. the Austrian Christian-Social Party) gave it support. At war's end in 1945, however, the strains of mild conservatism and scepticism towards active government held formidable appeal. Promoted heavily by the victorious Allies as a bulwark against communism, newly constituted Christian Democratic parties in Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands won office, either as a single-party administrations or as important elements of ruling coalitions. The popularity of these postwar parties rests more on their inoffensive centrism than on any distinctive ideological platform. Consequently, and somewhat ironically given the ideological ancestry of Christian Democracy, electoral support derives from a largely middle-class and interdenominational suspicion of threats to the liberal capitalist order (particularly from ‘the left’). In the 1960s and 1970s, Christian Democracy suffered a relative demise as the threat of communism receded, and socialist opponents moderated their platforms. In Latin America, however, Christian Democratic parties, championing democratic stability through restraint of traditionally overactive states, achieved brief electoral success during this period (notably in Chile and Venezuela, and in the 1980s in Ecuador, Guatemala, and El Salvador). During the 1980s, Christian Democracy has enjoyed a resurgence as part of the general rightward swing of European electorates (with the partial exception of the spectacular collapse of the DC in Italy in 1993).
SW 

 
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A reaction by Protestants in Britain and the United States from the 1870s onwards to modernist readings of the Bible which challenged the literal truth of the supernatural and miraculous episodes of biblical history, and the status of Scripture as a direct and unchallengeable revelation of the word of God. In particular, fundamentalists resisted the teaching of Darwinian evolutionary science in American public schools (culminating in the famous Scopes ‘Monkey trial’ in Tennessee in 1925, in which a teacher was convicted under a state law which forbade the teaching of
Darwinism
).
The more overtly political incarnation of Christian fundamentalism stems from the alliance of religious and political conservatism in the American South. From the 1970s onwards, groups such as the ‘Moral Majority’ became powerful populist lobbies in state and national politics on issues ranging from family and welfare policy to defence and foreign affairs, particularly during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 heralded the rise of
‘Islamic fundamentalism’
, which has led to fundamentalism becoming a watchword for militancy, fanaticism, and intolerance for many in the Western world.
SW 

 
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This doctrine—which grows out of the adherents' Christianity, so that the term is more specific than merely indicating those socialists who also happen to be Christian—attempts to relate the teachings of Christ (as for instance as given in the Sermon on the Mount) with the political practice of socialism. In Britain Christian socialism was a mainly nineteenth-century movement, associated both with the High Church revival and its attempts to spread Christianity into the working classes and also with the growth of Nonconformism, especially Methodism, which placed importance on its social ministry. Many Labour politicians in Britain argued that their party owed more to Methodism than to Marx . Christian socialist thinking favoured alternatives to capitalism in such ideas as co-operatives, and stressed the importance of industrial reconciliation and justice between workers and owners, the moral responsibilities of the better-off towards the poor, and the importance of public education. The Christian socialist strand in the leadership of the Labour Party seemed to be strengthening in the 1990s.
Postwar
Christian Democratic
parties in Europe are not a variant of Christian socialism but do represent an attempt to develop a moderate version of conservatism which accommodates (mainly Catholic) social doctrine. The Christian Social Union in Bavaria is Christian Democrat, not Christian Socialist.
PBy