From Adenauer to Spahn: Germany’s Christian Democrats Unravel
The resignation of German CDU politician Jens Spahn over using a surrogate has exposed how the Christian Democratic Union has abandoned its religious foundations for political expediency.
Jens Spahn, who until recently served as parliamentary leader of the center-right CDU in the Bundestag and was widely viewed as a potential future chancellor, stepped down after it became public that he and his same-sex partner had used an American surrogate mother to have a child. The revelation proved particularly damaging given that his party has historically opposed the commodification of motherhood and surrogacy arrangements.
According to The European Conservative, while many observers dismissed the incident as simple political hypocrisy, and others exploited it to push for liberalizing Germany’s assisted reproduction laws, the true significance runs far deeper. The Spahn affair exposes a Christian Democratic tradition that has abandoned its spiritual foundations in favor of cautious bourgeois respectability focused primarily on acquiring and maintaining political power.
The party founded by Konrad Adenauer sought to rebuild Germany on the moral and spiritual bedrock of Christian civilization following the catastrophic rupture of National Socialism. Over subsequent decades, however, the CDU has gradually surrendered this inheritance. At its worst, the party now risks becoming defined not by resistance to secular relativism but by accommodation to it—what amounts to a Vichy-like capitulation to the forces Pope Benedict XVI, a proud Bavarian, warned against as the dictatorship of relativism.
The Adenauer Vision
The genius of postwar Christian Democracy was distinctly Teutonic, and its architect was the towering figure of Konrad Adenauer. Initially regarded with suspicion by British military authorities as a parochial Catholic Rhinelander with separatist leanings from the Weimar era, Adenauer proved remarkably adaptable. He emerged as an elder statesman capable of restoring Germany to the community of civilized nations, beginning with the CDU’s creation in the British-occupied zone in 1946.
Adenauer anticipated the synthesis later articulated by Pope John Paul II in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, which defended private property and free economic initiative while insisting upon genuine commitment to social justice. He sought to ground Germany’s economic reconstruction in Catholic social teaching, rejecting both socialist collectivism and purely materialistic capitalism, recognizing that both become reductive when detached from the proper understanding of the human person.
While acknowledging that man requires his daily bread, Adenauer understood that bread alone cannot satisfy the deeper spiritual longings that animate human existence. The CDU’s enduring appeal rested on a fundamentally anthropological claim: that human dignity is rooted in man’s creation in the image of God and that the moral order precedes politics rather than being created by it.
A Party Adrift
As Adenauer wrote in his memoirs, the struggle of the age is essentially a conflict between Christianity and materialism—a conflict that exists even within democracies. He warned that the modern technical world, with its mass media, favors development toward a mass society, and this “man of the masses” will always incline toward materialism. To counterbalance this threat, Adenauer argued, all countries need Christian parties that not only permeate political, social, and economic life with a Christian spirit, but aim at creating the essential conditions for a Christian existence of the individual.
One could be forgiven for doubting whether the contemporary CDU remains animated by an authentically Christian spirit, as The European Conservative reports. Particularly in the post-Merkel era, the party finds itself marooned in postmodern ideological androgyny. The contrast with its 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 abortion legalization, which the Constitutional Court rejected in its 1975 decision—were incompatible with fundamental principles of the Basic Law.
That moral clarity has now evaporated, replaced by accommodation to secular progressive demands and a politics of managerial competence divorced from transcendent purpose.
With information from The European Conservative
