Christian democracy

Christian democracy is a political ideology inspired by Christian social teaching, developed to respond to the challenges of contemporary society and politics. It has drawn mainly from Catholic social teaching and neo-scholasticism and from the Neo-Calvinist tradition, and later gained ground among Lutherans, Pentecostals and other Christian traditions in various parts of the world. In the nineteenth century its principal concerns were to reconcile Catholicism with democracy, to answer the social question surrounding capitalism and the working class, and to resolve tensions between church and state. In the twentieth century Christian democrats led postwar Western and Southern Europe in building modern welfare states and in constructing the European Union. On the left-right spectrum it has been hard to place, since adherents have rejected liberal economics and individualism while also defending private property, and it is now usually positioned as centre-right, favouring a slightly regulated social market economy.