A new political way for SA?

What do people mean when they say they are Christian Democrats, or that they want to create a Christian Democratic party? Is that a party that espouses a political philosophy of Christian democracy? And where does the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) feature in this?

What would political programmes infused with Christian doctrinal values look like in a South African situation?  Would they uphold democratic structures and respect the separation of state and church? Has the ACDP failed to achieve this? If so why? Is it because they attempt to impose rather than infuse Christian values on our political economy? How can any Christian party succeed?

Political scientists tell us that modern politics are ideologically flexible, because they seek to attract a diverse group of voters. Radical ideas, religious or secular, matter less compared to how to fix concrete problems. They say institutional structures are what matters, not political ideas or programmes.

But are not ideas and doctrinal development the bedrock of what we desperately need in the country? Do we not desperately need a mindset evolution, as opposed to a revolution? After all, ideas are indispensable to the process of thought evolution and social progress, and so I cannot completely agree with the fundis.

The movement of Christian Democracy, in occidental countries, was nourished by the intellectual fodder of the likes of Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), the French philosopher who converted to Catholicism and neo-Thomism in particular.

Maritain developed what eventually became known as the philosophy of Personalism based on the idea that reason and faith need not be in conflict.

Maritain was among the founders of what today is known as neo-Thomism, which played a major role in the Church’s attempt to offer a distinctly Catholic solution to the social question, building on Pope Leo XII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum. The philosophy’s bedrock, Personalism, holds that the person flourishes only within community and when open to God. This derives from Thomist natural law. Personalism believes families and associations in civil society—not the state—should alleviate social problems so that all members of society could attain their proper ends.

Unlike the individualism of liberalism, Personalism sees the person as always embedded in the community, or, as La Pira put it: “The human personal unfolds through organic belonging to the successive social communities in which it is contained and via which it steadily develops and perfects itself.”

For an African and Universalist this view is very attractive.

Maritain worked out a philosophical rapprochement between Catholicism and modern conceptions of human rights and democracy that culminated in 1938 in a published book called Integral Humanism.  The book, with its clear endorsement of pluralism in the temporal sphere, became an early touchstone in Christian Democratic political theory.

Maritain sought communitarian alternatives to liberal parliamentarianism. In 1942 he authored “Christianity and Democracy”, a pamphlet dropped by Allied planes over France. In it he affirms that “democracy is linked to Christianity and that the democratic impulse has arisen in human history as a temporal manifestation of the inspiration of the Gospel”.

This influenced many Catholic thinkers later on, including the current pope. In 1951’s Man and the State, Maritain declares: “Democracy is the only way of bringing about a moral rationalisation of politics.”

The essence of Christian Democracy is what Maritain wrote to the founder of Democrazia Cristiana in Italy, De Gasperi, that “Christianity should be the ‘yeast’ of political life, making the liberation from pagan fascism the first step to a new political culture based on moral and, to some degree, religious argument”.

After the war, Christian Democratic parties across Western Europe—with Germany, Austria, and Italy in the lead—turned themselves into mass political movements, following the model of the Social Democrats. They incorporated existing Catholic associations such as trade unions, peasants, civil society, and farmers’ groups in broadening their electoral appeal into what political scientists came to describe as “catch-all parties” or “people’s parties”.

In my humble opinion, South Africa is ripe for a Personalist, labour-based “substantial democracy” that attracts all religious believers’ solidarity (Traditional, Judaeo-Christian, Islam, and so on).

To me this is how the party of our future politics will look, and speak in a strong personalist language of the Maritain Personalism: “It is the republic’s duty to remove obstacles of an economic or social order physically constricting the freedom and equality of citizens and thus impeding the full development of the human person.”