From Adenauer to Spahn: The Unraveling of Germany’s Christian Democratic Tradition

The recent controversy surrounding German politician Jens Spahn, until recently the parliamentary leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the Bundestag and long regarded as a potential future chancellor, was revealing. Spahn resigned after it emerged that he and his same-sex partner had commissioned an American surrogate mother, despite belonging to a party that has long opposed the encroachment of the market into one of the most fundamental of human relationships: that between a mother and her unborn child. Most commentators treated the affair as a straightforward case of political hypocrisy, while other more opportunistic actors hoped to seize upon it as an opportunity to argue for the liberalization of Germany’s laws governing assisted reproduction. Yet the deeper significance of the episode lies elsewhere.

The Spahn affair is symptomatic of a Christian Democratic tradition that is now Christian largely in name alone. The party founded by Konrad Adenauer sought to rebuild Germany on the moral and spiritual foundations of Christian civilization after the catastrophic rupture that was National Socialism. Over time, however, the CDU has gradually surrendered that inheritance. It has exchanged a confident vision of redemption and renewal for the cautious respectability of a bourgeois party whose primary ambition is the acquisition and preservation of political power. At worst, it risks becoming defined not by resistance but by accommodation—a Vichy-like surrender to the very forces that Pope Benedict XVI, a proud son of Bavaria, warned against as the “dictatorship of relativism.” 

In channeling our inner La Bouche and invoking the question posed by the band’s 1995 Eurodance hit “Where Do You Go,” we must first examine the genius of postwar Christian Democracy. This was a distinctly Teutonic project, and its architect was a single towering figure: Konrad Adenauer — not unlike the way Frank Farian stood behind La Bouche’s success. At first, Adenauer was regarded with deep suspicion by the British military government. He appeared to them as a parochial Catholic Rhinelander whose earlier flirtations with regional separatism belonged to the fractured politics of the Weimar era. But Adenauer proved remarkably adaptable. He emerged in Allied eyes as an elder statesman capable of carrying out the formidable task of restoring Germany to the community of civilized nations, beginning with the creation of the CDU in the British-occupied zone in 1946.

In many respects, Adenauer anticipated the synthesis later articulated by Pope John Paul II in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, which defended the legitimacy of private property and free economic initiative while insisting upon a genuine commitment to social justice. Adenauer sought to ground Germany’s economic reconstruction in the principles of Catholic social teaching. He rejected both socialist collectivism and a purely materialistic conception of capitalism, recognizing that both become reductive when detached from the proper telos of the human person. In other words, while recognizing that man requires his daily bread, bread alone cannot satisfy the deeper spiritual longings that animate human existence. Thus, the CDU’s enduring appeal rests on a fundamentally anthropological claim: that human dignity is rooted in man’s creation in the image of God and that the moral order is not made by politics but precedes it. As Adenauer later wrote in his memoirs: 

The struggle of our age is essentially a conflict between Christianity and materialism. That is what the struggle is about, and this conflict also exists within the democracies. The modern technical world in which we live, with its movies, radio, and television, favors development toward a mass society, and this “man of the masses” will always incline toward materialism. To counterbalance this we need, in all countries, Christian parties which not only permeate political, social, and economic life with a Christian spirit, but over and above that aim at creating the essential conditions for a Christian existence of the individual. 

Suffice it to say, one could be forgiven for adopting the posture of a doubting Thomas when questioning whether the contemporary CDU remains animated by an authentically “Christian spirit.” Particularly in the post-Merkel era, the party finds itself marooned on an island of postmodern ideological androgyny. The contrast with the party’s origins could scarcely be more striking.The contrast with the party’s origins could scarcely be more striking. The CDU once confidently heralded a new constitutional order rooted in the state’s explicit recognition of “its obligations before God and Man.” Its institutions possessed the moral confidence to declare that de facto repudiations of Christian morality—such as the legalization of abortion, which the Constitutional Court rejected in its 1975 decision—were incompatible with fundamental principles of the Basic Law, including respect for human dignity. Today, however, they are reduced to debating initiatives by party activists such as the historian Andreas Rödder over whether the “C” in the party’s name is a barrier that “excludes” non-Christians from membership. 

With that in mind, the CDU should not be blamed for any unique culpability but rather for its lack of courage, owing to its inherent “go with the flow” managerialism. In fairness, Christianity in Germany has been in a state of profound decline, a trend that intensified after reunification disrupted the country’s longstanding Catholic–Protestant balance. The absorption of East Germany brought millions of largely unaffiliated citizens into the Federal Republic, many of whom had been demoralized by nearly half a century of official state atheism. This development is critical to understanding how the CDU could move from another long-serving Catholic Rhinelander in the Chancellery, Helmut Kohl, with his jovial vision of a “spiritual and moral turning point,” to the famously stoic Angela Merkel, whose own ideological and religious convictions, beyond the CDU’s historic commitment to the imago Dei, have themselves become the subject of debate in the span of just two decades. 

Compounding this growing disenchantment in the western Länder, the CDU — much like Germany’s Catholic hierarchy in its embrace of the so-called “Synodal Way” — has committed the fundamental error of seeking relevance through accommodation to secular values. It is a futile endeavor, no less absurd than attempting to make sauerkraut out of turnips. Ultimately, this means conceding to Rödder’s vision of embracing the secular theology of “diversity and inclusion,” perhaps best symbolized by the ubiquitous display of the Pride flag. In a certain sense, one is reminded of the conclusion of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission: a desperate search for palpable meaning in the face of an indifferent world, at least from the perspective of a Bible-believing Christian living under Habermasian secularism. 

Perhaps the most fitting epilogue to this story came not from Jens Spahn, but from Bavarian minister-president Markus Söder, who back in 2018 promulgated the Kreuzpflicht, requiring crucifixes to be displayed in the entrance halls of all Bavarian state buildings. While the restoration of the cross to public view might appear, at first glance, to represent a reaffirmation of Christian heritage, Söder’s rationale revealed a deeper problem. His defense of the policy remained rooted not in the cross’s explicitly religious meaning, but primarily in its role as a marker of Bavarian cultural identity and historical heritage.In other words, the Cross was hollowed out of meaning, becoming a symbol of folklore instead of that of a living faith. 

If Jens Spahn represents the future of a Christian Democracy untethered from its Christian anthropology, Markus Söder’s Kreuzpflicht reveals the fate of its patrimonial inheritance. The cross endures, but increasingly as an emblem of identity shrouded in vague notions of ‘cultural Christianity’ rather than as the sign of a moral order to which both ruler and citizen are accountable. At best, the cross becomes a political instrument wielded to reclaim cultural ground from the insurgent AfD, a party that now threatens to eclipse the CDU as the principal force on the right side of Germany’s political spectrum. Yet this instrumentalization of Christian heritage—preserving its symbols while severing them from their theological foundations—is not only unprincipled but strategically shortsighted. One can only imagine that Konrad Adenauer, devout Catholic and astute statesman in equal measure, would find little comfort in the trajectory of his party.