Anti-Materialism
Christian Democracy's Philosophy of HistoryThis chapter reconstructs the philosophy of history on which the Christian Democratic ideology is predicated through a discussion of the role this ideological tradition has assigned to the critique of materialism and other related concepts such as naturalism, immanentism, gnosticism and atheism. Reference to these concepts is pervasive in Christian Democratic discourse. In the opening speech he gave as Secretary of the Italian PPI, at its first national congress in 1919, for instance, Luigi Sturzo asserted that the newly founded organization's purpose was to "participate in the public life of the nation . . . in order to contrast the materialism and laicism in which contemporary society has become soaked, and of which it has already experienced the consequences in the catastrophic war that just ended" (Sturzo 1919b, 83).Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in a programmatic speech he gave at the University of Cologne on March 24, 1946, the founder and first secretary of the German CDU, Konrad Adenauer, stated that: "Nazism was nothing more than an exaggerated consequence of the materialistic worship of power and defiance, and its contempt for the value of the individual" (Adenauer 1946, 3). "This conception of the supremacy and omnipotence of the State," he added, "contradicts the Christian natural law" (ibid., 4). The practical consequences of this were soon drawn explicitly by another founding member of the same party, Hans Schlange-Schoningen, at the first political convention of the German CDU in October 1946, where he asserted that: "What we understand as Christian [today] is a great declaration of war against materialism" (cited by Mitchell 2012, 87).