G-d, Government and Butter

Imperial Germany's Reichstag was never a place for serious work. Deputies either rubber- stamped the Chancellor's proposals, or else they shouted each other down. That does not mean that their verbal sparring was unproductive. Hermann von Mallinckrodt, who represented the disenchanted of Münster and was a leader of the Catholic Zentrumspartei, pressed relentlessly for parity: the administration and bureaucracy of Germany and its states should reflect their confessional make-up. The officials in the states and provinces were overwhelmingly Protestant, and generally unsympathetic to the Catholic populations they administered. The elimination of the Catholic section of the ministry of religious affairs made the imbalance glaring. Instead, the number of Catholics in the administration should be proportional to the population.

For Bismarck, this was material for good humor. In a speech in January 1872, Bismarck joked that the same mathematical parity would have to be granted to all religious minorities, including Jews. The chamber laughed with derision. Mallinckrodt and Ludwig von Windthorst slunk away, but their response was"yes!" They had been provoked into becoming defenders of the rights of religious minorities; something they probably once found odious became a defining characteristic of the movement.

The moment had none of the heroism of Galileo's encounter with the Pope, but it was typical of how Catholic conservatives in Germany came to embrace"liberal" concepts. Prepared at first to defend narrow interests, they were forced take more principled positions. Here, their defense of Catholic representation became a broad promotion of constitutional representation. This meant that rather than being anti-liberal, Catholic politics became an alternative to liberalism. Correspondingly, the Church's desire to stem the tide of socialism while ministering to the growing Catholic working class brought it to elucidate its own social policy, one that rivaled the Socialists’. By the 1920s, social questions became a common ground for the Zentrum and SPD such that they were able to collaborate at various levels of government.

I bring this up because of two books, whose authors are making the rounds of the talk shows: Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul and David Kuo's Tempting Faith. On the surface, both books explore how the current administration has drifted from its core values. Although the message of duplicity on the part of the White House is popular, both book offer little to the left in terms of message or strategy. Each author, however, defines those values differently, and the triangles of conservatism-faith-politics could not be less congruent. Where Kuo sees a deficit in Christian charity caused by the turn to politics, Sullivan sees (in David Brooks’ words) religious fundamentalism:

Sullivan argues: “Its core is not the individual conscience, but God himself, and the decision of the individual to surrender himself to God entirely as the premise of every action he commits and every decision he makes.”

The fundamentalist, Sullivan continues, is hostile to pluralism, feels alienated from society, surrenders to authority and is untroubled by doubt. “The fundamentalist does not tolerate a diversity of views. There is one truth; and all other pretenders are threats to it, or contradict it.”

Brooks, quite rightly, takes Sullivan to task for simplifying religious fundamentalism and for ignoring the activism of religiously-minded Americans.

But Sullivan’s outlook on conservatism is broader than American politics, including European luminaries, and it is here that the example of Germany’s Catholic party, the Zentrum, reveals the problems of a conservatism that is a straight line from Burke to Sullivan’s 1980s heroes. They were not all resolutely dedicated to small government; they were religiously inspired, socially conscious, and concerned for the individual. What tended to differentiate them from Liberals and Socialists was that they did not abstract their policies; they defined them from experience. Moreover, it was on questions of representation and community that they made their mark. Hopefully Mr. Sullivan will remember this part of the Conservative tradition, one that could embrace (what we might call today) progressive policies, but come to them from an entirely different outlook, and give religiously-inspired Conservatives, like Kuo, their due.