Christian Democrat

In a couple of weeks I will chair the Sioux County Democratic Party Convention.  That news will not impress anybody who knows anything about the Democrat Party in Sioux County, for we probably represent less than 5 % of the voting population. Furthermore, I am not even president of the Sioux County Democrats—merely vice-president.

If I could choose my identity as a Democrat, I would prefer to call myself a Christian Democrat, but that phrase, which has some significance in Europe, has virtually no cachet and conveys no real meaning in the United States.  But I have been thinking that it might be time to organize a wing of the Democratic Party called the Christian Democrats.  Let me explain.

In the last weeks I have been reading James Bratt’s biography, Abraham Kuyper, Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat.  Yes. There it is.  The great Neo-Calvinist political leader of the Netherlands between 1870 and 1920 (and patron saint of Dordt College), when he visited the United States at the height of his power, described himself to a Grand Rapids Democrat (newspaper) reporter as a Christian Democrat, and that occasioned an amusing exchange:  “He’s a Democrat!” screamed the headline in the Democrat.  The local Republican newspaper, the Herald, responded with a headline asserting that was not true.  After that, Kuyper had to explain that he could not support the Democratic Party in the U. S. because of its commitment to the Jeffersonian principles of the French Revolution which with their individualism and atheism were abhorrent to him.  (Kuyper’s party in the Netherlands was called the Anti-Revolutionary Party.)
But Kuyper had a great deal of sympathy for socialism.  He said that the “Social Democrats in the Netherlands were right” to blame the evils of the Dutch circumstances on the “entire structure of our social system.” Where he disagreed with them adamantly was in the fact that they had no true foundation, namely God’s eternal ordinances.

So while he denounces laissez-faire capitalism as “inimical to human well-being, material or physical, out of  tune with Scripture and contrary to the will of God,” his objection to (Marxist) socialism was that though they honored the second part of Jesus great commandment to love neighbor as self, they ignored the more basic first part to love the Lord your God with all your mind and strength. 

The laissez-faire capitalism of the Conservative party not only brought about injustice to the poor but was fundamentally unchristian in its promotion of greed.  The philosophical materialism of the socialists denied the very existence of God.  But Kuyper, like Calvin before him and like the socialists, believed government should play a significant role in changing social structures to bring economic justice to the poor. 

And so he called himself a Christian Democrat. 

And so I call myself a Christian Democrat.


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