Can Commonwealth values be grounded in religion? Resources from the Christian tradition

ABSTRACT

Although religion has played a significant historical role in forming the political culture of most Commonwealth members, the Commonwealth has mostly refrained from engaging with religious thought and practice. This article proposes that the core values embodied in the Commonwealth Charter could offer a promising focus for a new engagement between the Commonwealth and the diverse religious traditions represented among its members. It offers a case study of modern Christian political thought to show how one religious tradition might go about constructing a foundation for a constitutional democracy consonant with Christian values, identifying five central themes in Christian political thought that speak to Charter values. It calls for Christian individuals and denominational bodies to signal strong support for the Charter and together with other religious and secular traditions to engage in exploration, critique and dialogue.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• Commonwealth values
• Commonwealth Charter
• Christian tradition

Introduction

While religion has played a significant historical role in forming the political culture of most Commonwealth members, and remains influential in many, the Commonwealth itself has typically refrained from engaging directly with religious thought and practice, still less intentionally enlisted it to support its own purposes. It seems not yet to have found a consistent and coherent approach to relating to these religiously-formed political cultures in its midst. Already in 1997, Donald Simpson offered this critical judgement regarding the Observance of Commonwealth Day: ‘The search for a formula which offends no faith and represents all strands of Commonwealth culture has left the Observance a memorable and impressive occasion marred by woolly details and the creeping influence of political correctness’ (Simpson, 1997). In 2009, Owen Willis (Willis, 2009) observed the same ambivalence in the contrasting attitudes towards religion in two official Commonwealth reports appearing around the same time: Civil Paths to Peace, and Engaging with Faith (Commonwealth Secretariat, 2007; Commonwealth Foundation, 2007).

The Commonwealth Charter’s Preamble (2012)¹ acknowledges a ‘shared inheritance in language [and] culture’, but makes no explicit mention of religion (although, for some, religion is implied in ‘culture’). This article proposes that core values embedded in the Charter could offer a promising focus for a new engagement between the Commonwealth and the diverse religious traditions represented among its 56 members. Trusted representatives of such traditions in member countries could be invited to articulate religious justifications of – and propose critical revisions to – core Charter values as a basis for inter-religious, and religious-secular, dialogues around the Commonwealth’s central purposes. It is true that there are longstanding historically-rooted obstacles in many religious traditions to the emergence of commitments to Charter values such as democracy, human rights or the rule of law. Yet in most of them today there are powerful reform movements actively searching for religious foundations for such commitments where they do not already exist (Diamond et al., 2005; Shah et al., 2012). These commitments do not all point in the same direction but I suggest that many amount to distinctive versions of what I will call ‘constitutional democracy’. I adopt this term instead of ‘liberal democracy’ because some religious (and secular) traditions within the Commonwealth might be averse to having their fundamental political values described as ‘liberal’. They might regard such a term as connoting forms of western individualism, consumerism or capitalism they wish to repudiate.² Also in western democracies, a growing chorus of voices, religious and secular, argues that we need not just a reheated liberalism but some version of ‘post-liberalism’.³ But it is the substance of the values that matter, not the name we attach to them.

This article offers a case study of modern Christian political thought to show how one religious tradition might go about constructing a foundation for a constitutional democracy consonant with Charter values.⁴ Given the formative significance of Christianity in many Commonwealth countries, both historically and today, this is hardly a marginal or eccentric proposal.⁵ A proposal from Christian political thought would serve as one of many possible sources of support for such values available to the Commonwealth’s extremely diverse citizenry. The Commonwealth could thus serve as a site for a constructive, constrained and pluralistic dialogue among many religious and secular political visions.

I acknowledge that any attempt to connect Charter values explicitly with religion faces an uphill struggle. This is for reasons both internal and external to the Commonwealth. An internal factor is that, as documented searchingly by Philip Murphy in The Empire’s New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth (Murphy 2021, ch. 6), there is already considerable cynicism regarding the unseemly political processes whereby current Charter values came to be endorsed in 2012. An external factor is that most international bureaucracies, like many national ones, have been largely shaped by secularised processes of intellectual and professional formation (whatever the personal beliefs of their officials). Such processes, while not necessarily overtly hostile to religion, will likely have foreclosed any encounter with intellectually rigorous strands of religious political thought. Officials so formed will be very cautious about religious voices or organisations getting too close to the exercise of institutional political power. Yet in spite of the challenges facing the enterprise, I will propose that a more sustained and informed engagement by the Commonwealth with religion could boost its cohesion and effectiveness. Specifically, I will argue that Charter values might elicit greater legitimacy if they could be shown to be grounded in diverse strands of religious thought, alongside a variety of secular groundings.⁶

Working through the sixteen Charter values one by one would make for a disjointed narrative, not least because the ordering and formulation of the values themselves do not display a high degree of coherence. Instead I set out a broad political vision, organised around recurring emphases in Christian thought, indicating how they support, or at times modify, specific Charter values.

A Christian grounding of Charter values

The following account draws on diverse historical and modern sources in Catholicism and Protestantism, but is offered as one layman’s contemporary restatement of such a grounding.⁷ It makes no claim that such Christian sources offer a unique or superior grounding of such values, still less that a Christian grounding should be afforded any privileged official standing in member states or in the Commonwealth itself. Such privilege is present only in a handful of member states, such as the UK, which maintains an established church, albeit one wielding little political power.⁸ Nor does it claim that Charter values are in fact universally endorsed by those who profess Christianity. It is fair to say, however, that much of the following account would be broadly endorsed by most representative intellectuals and official organs of global Christianity.⁹ The article makes the more modest claim that it is possible to construe Charter values as consonant with central strands of contemporary Christian political thought. I identity five central themes in Christian political thought that can speak to Charter values.

The office of political authority is legitimate

It has been a longstanding Christian conviction that political authority is an office that is, in some sense, ‘established’ by God. What ‘established’ means has been much contested. Some have held it to mean that the office arises from divinely ‘created’ inclinations operating through human social nature. Others have seen it rather as a corrective remedy against the pervasive ‘fallen’ human tendency to greed, violence and domination. But however its origins are construed, the majority position has been that the office of political authority is, in principle, morally legitimate because it has been divinely given for the good of human society (even if, in practice, actual authorities often fail to promote that good). This lends to the office a moral dignity and purpose: political authority does not exist only to maintain ‘order’, but has a vital contribution to make towards the larger ethical purpose of advancing human flourishing.

This conception of political authority has over the centuries been extended to all types and tiers of political authority, from town councils to feudal estates to national states and international authorities such the UN, the World Court and the EU. By implication, I suggest, it also applies to voluntary associations of states such as the Commonwealth (albeit that these lack access to coercive sanction).¹⁰ Thus, while Christian insights were originally forged mainly out of reflection on medieval kingdoms or modern nation-states, they can, I suggest, fruitfully be extended to bodies like the Commonwealth.

Of course, in the middle ages and until the early modern period, it was widely held that, while political authorities could never mediate salvation – that was the exclusive task of the church – they were obliged openly to confess their divine authorisation and empowered to criminalise ‘false’ religions, even to persecute ‘heretics’. This Christendom view was progressively abandoned from the 17th century when it was first explicitly challenged by Protestant Dissenters; it is now redundant.¹¹ Christian political thinkers today do not justify anything like ‘theocracy’ or any trace of religious coercion. They recognise that the structures of Christendom cannot and should not be restored. Equally, they would argue that no other religion should seek such a coercive, corrupting alliance between religion and political institutions.

The idea of a divine establishment of the office of government has often been misinterpreted historically as supporting an authoritarian view of government in which political authority is self-validating and legally unbound. Today, however, three fundamental limits to the scope of political authority, at any level, are generally acknowledged by Christian political thinkers: such authority extends only so far as its divinely assigned purpose; political authorities are to be held legally, not just morally, accountable for the discharge of their authority; and such authorities stand within an array of social authorities each of which limits the others. Let me elaborate on each of these points, noting how each serves to underwrite key Charter values.

Political authority extends only so far as its divinely assigned purpose

In Christian thought there is a recurring claim that all human authority in society exists for specific purposes and must advance the benefit of those under it. It is not a reward for the powerful or the virtuous (even the saintly). Human authority, of any kind, is always conditional on office-holders pursuing purposes that advance some aspect of the human good. Thus, for example, parental authority extends only so far as parents’ duty to nurture children into independent adulthood, and when they reach that stage children may be bound to honour their parents, but no longer to obey them. The authority of business extends only as far as the proper purpose of business, so that where employees sacrifice their family life out of exaggerated corporate loyalty, a moral limit has been breached.

This principle is especially important when applied to political authority. Authority is conferred on political authorities only as far as the pursuit of that purpose permits: there is no ‘divine blank cheque’ granted to those in office. Christian thinkers have defined the purpose of political authority differently over the centuries, but today the most frequent terms used to capture it are ‘justice’ and the ‘common good’. These are presented as powerful normative aspirations. This is why the mere maintenance of ‘order’ is not a demanding enough criterion, and, equally, why something like ‘promoting the national interest’ is too vague and wide open to abuse. In the Christian tradition justice and the common good bear substantive content that limits the range of possible interpretations that can be put upon them, and thus limit the legitimate scope that political authorities may rightly claim. Let me offer a few hints as to what this content might consist of.

Christian political thought asserts that justice is (to adapt the famous claim of John Rawls) ‘the first virtue of political institutions’. Negatively, this means that political authorities must refrain from treating people unjustly. Often this is asserted in terms of the duty to honour every person’s ‘dignity’. Thus they may not harass their people, deny them their fundamental rights or discriminate against them arbitrarily, marginalise them, silence them, humiliate them, or divide them. This is a robust basis for affirming much of article II (‘Human Rights’), article IV (‘Tolerance, Respect and Understanding’), article V (‘Freedom of Expression’) and article XI (‘Gender Equality’). Positively, ‘justice’ means promoting a just ordering of society as a whole, so that no social institutions, centres of economic power, or locations of cultural or traditional authority are allowed to acquire positions of dominance that can threaten others, including government itself. In some accounts, all of the above is already included in the duty to promote the common good.¹² But in every account it also includes more, namely the protection of what Nicholas Townsend calls the ‘social infrastructure’ on which all persons and institutions depend for their successful functioning. While everyone and every institution should contribute to the common good in their own way, political authority is uniquely charged with sustaining such an infrastructure for the whole society, the goal of which is ‘to secure the social conditions necessary for the possibility of the common good’ (Townsend, 2009, p. 121).

These interlinked ideas of justice and the common good have proven able to justify a wide range of governmental actions. They could legitimate much of what is affirmed under, for example, article IX (‘Sustainable Development’), article X ‘(Protecting the Environment’) and article XI (‘Access to Health, Education, Food and Shelter’). The Charter itself does not prescribe exactly how such a ‘social infrastructure’ is to be realised; nor do most Christian accounts.¹³ They are compatible with a determinate range of political models by which flesh is put on these generalised goals. But when taken together with the other principles outlined in this article, a Christian account of justice and the common good seems in significant tension with state socialist, state capitalist, neo-liberal, developmentalist, colonialist and authoritarian nationalist models.¹⁴

So far I have had in mind mainly the duties of national governments to justice and the common good. But the internationalist commitments listed under the Charter are also underwritten by Christian accounts. Christian political thought has long espoused a strong commitment to international comity, peace and justice. The first articulations of what we now recognise as international law emerged from early modern theologians such as Suarez and Grotius.¹⁵ In time principles of international justice embedded in this legal tradition worked to deflate pretensions to absolute sovereignty that emerged in early modern thinkers such as Bodin and Hobbes. While Christianity has all too often been enlisted in support of hubristic forms of nationalism, and the imperialisms to which these often give rise, today its better representatives insist on the priority of imperatives of international justice and the demands of the global common good over self-interested claims of national sovereignty. To regard a nation, nation-state or empire, as human beings’ highest moral horizon is viewed theologically as a form of ‘idolatry’. Christian political thought champions international cooperation, negotiation and legal arbitration over any resort to force, even though it recognises that force may be an instrument of last resort in certain cases.

Charter values of human rights, sustainable development and protecting the environment already have obvious international applications. Article III (‘International Peace and Security’) spells the international implications out more explicitly, affirming an ‘effective multilateral system based on inclusiveness, equity, justice and international law as the best foundation for achieving consensus and progress on major global challenges … ’ This includes those already mentioned, plus security, disarmament and terrorism. Understood in Christian terms, political authorities are to be particularly solicitous of those most vulnerable to injustice. Already in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the ‘Old Testament’), rulers are repeatedly enjoined to shield ‘the poor’ from oppressors and to vindicate their rights. This injunction is a key motivation behind Latin American Liberation Theology’s signature affirmation that Christian faith demands a ‘preferential option for the poor’, namely those least able to defend their own rights. This emphasis powerfully underwrites the Preamble’s affirmation that the Commonwealth is a ‘recognised intergovernmental champion of small states, advocating for their special needs’, and of the commitments in articles XIV and XV to recognising the needs of ‘small’ and ‘vulnerable’ states.

Justice (negative and positive) and the common good thus imply a suite of substantive obligations and objectives for political authorities, which then need specification through concrete policy outcomes. Where they clearly advance such ends, their authority is in principle justified, while any acts that violate or frustrate these ends exceed their proper authority. Christian political thought thus yields support for a limited state but not a minimal state.

Holders of political authority are accountable for the exercise of their authority

This principle is already implied in the first two claims but invites further elaboration. It is one thing to assert that holders of political authority are ‘accountable to God’. But that declaration is a dead letter if unjust office-holders either ignore the injunction or insist in the face of widespread resistance that they are in fact acting rightly. In the tradition, ‘accountability’ almost always meant accountability both to God and to some human agent. Already in the Hebrew Bible it meant the accountability of rulers to prophets, some of whom levelled trenchant criticisms against rulers. But the prophets had no enforcement mechanism. ‘Prophetic’ denunciations have little effect unless rulers voluntarily change their ways in response – a rare occurrence, even in the biblical accounts.

Over time, however, the notion of the accountability of government to God underwent two far-reaching transformations. First, it came to imply accountability to a universal moral framework – ‘natural law’ – which, while derived from God, was not dependent for its validity on a shared faith or on the authority of the church. Appeal could thus be made to all ‘rational’ human beings in any religious or cultural tradition. Second, it came to imply accountability to a formal constitutional framework which was legally binding on political office-holders. This is the central thrust of what we have come to describes as ‘the rule of law’. It is the foundation for both the legal limitation of government and for holding government accountable for its acts. Its most vital implication is that political office-holders, and not only citizens, can be effectively made subject to the law. As article VII of the Charter puts it: ‘We believe in the rule of law as an essential protection for the people of the Commonwealth and as an assurance of limited and accountable government’. The modern principle of the rule of law emerged from a variety of sources, including secular liberal accounts of ‘natural rights’, ‘popular sovereignty’ and the ‘separation of powers’. Yet historically its origins lie in a political culture permeated by the belief that human political authority is a ‘servant’ of God rather than a master of society (Moltmann, 1994; Tierney, 1982).

The indispensability of the rule of law to a just and stable democracy cannot be over-estimated. It is the first target of authoritarian rulers (such as former President Mugabe), who routinely circumvent, bend, rewrite or simply flout legal constraints on their power in order to pursue their self-interested objectives. It merits promotion to the Charter’s first article. Inseparably linked to it is an independent judiciary, which the Charter robustly defends, affirming ‘an independent, impartial, honest and competent judiciary’ and recognising that ‘an independent, effective and competent legal system is integral to upholding the rule of law, engendering public confidence and dispensing justice’. Other ways in which political authority must be limited and accountable are noted below. Article I (‘Democracy’) affirms the ‘role of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group [CMAG] to address promptly and effectively all instances of serious or persistent violations of Commonwealth values without any fear or favour’.¹⁶ But it is, arguably, to the rule of law that the Charter’s own correction mechanism should first of all apply.

In the divine ordering of society many other centres of legitimate authority exist which circumscribe that of government

While too often Christian rulers or movements have seemed to defend, or at least acquiesce in, an undue concentration of authority in some supposedly divinely-appointed ruler, the logic of Christian political thought argues rather for a wide diffusion of political authority. The remote origin of this idea lies in the claim of the earliest Christian communities that – as St. Peter is reported to have asserted when arrested for preaching the gospel – ‘we must obey God rather than any human authority’ (Acts 5: 29 NRSV). The overriding loyalty of Christians was to Jesus Christ as the ‘Lord’ of the whole world. Thus St. Paul in a classic (and much-debated) New Testament passage, Romans 13, held that the emperor might be given ‘honour’ as ‘servant’ of God, but, as a mere human being, never ‘worship’. Jesuit philosopher John Courtney Murray writes:

[T]he essential political effect of Christianity was to destroy the classical view of society as a single homogenous structure, within which the political power stood forth as the representative of society both in its religious and in its political aspects. Augustus was both Summus Imperator and Pontifex Maximum; the ius divinum was simply part of the ius civile; and outside the empire there was no civil society, but only barbarism. The new Christian view was based on a radical distinction between the order of the sacred and the order of the secular: ‘Two there are, august Emperor, by which this world is ruled on title of original and sovereign right – the consecrated authority of the priesthood and the royal power’. In this celebrated sentence of Gelasius I, written to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I in 494 A.D., the emphasis laid on the word ‘two’ bespoke the revolutionary character of the Christian dispensation (Murray, 1960, p. 202).

Eric Voegelin has described this assertion of the priority of divine over human authority as the ‘de-divinization of politics’, the rolling back of the ancient belief that the political community was the supreme horizon of human loyalty (Voegelin, 1952, 106). In time it also led to the idea that there was a new community, the church, that stood under an authority transcending that of any human institution. As Sheldon Wolin puts it, the arrival of the church as such a new community meant that ‘political society was to be challenged on its own grounds by a church-society which had become, in Newman’s phrase, a “counter-kingdom”’ (Wolin, 2004, p. 90). Murray argues that the basic duality established here between the political order and the church, however misconstrued under Christendom, was an important antecedent to the modern idea of ‘civil society’ – a realm of many free associations possessing original authority not derived from the state, to which the state must, in the first instance, defer, and which function as a bulwark to protect individual freedom against state intrusion.¹⁷ We find here a powerful foundation for article XVI’s affirmation of ‘The Role of Civil Society’. A free and vigorous civil society joins with the rights and freedoms of individual citizens to limit the abuse of state power. After an independent judiciary, the next target of authoritarian rulers is always the institutions of civil society, especially those like political parties, independent media outlets, NGOs, campaigning groups or religious organisations that seek to expose rulers’ abuses of power.

Political authorities must be representative of their citizens

A standard modern secular liberal view sees political authority as originating with the ‘sovereign’ people and created by collective acts of popular consent. Christian political thought affirms the right of the people to consent to their office-holders and, in unusual cases, to consent to the creation of an entirely new regime when one has broken down. But it construes ‘consent’ differently to the secular liberal view. It would first of all point out that this liberal view does not adequately convey the facts of actual constitutional democracies. I have already implied in the foregoing that in a constitutional democracy, there are some things that may not be justly willed by the people, however large the majority behind them: violating the human rights of black people, Roma, a rival tribe, LGBT+ people, religious believers, disabled people; abolishing an independent judiciary; repressing civil society. Christian political thinkers do not hold that the purpose of political authority is ‘sovereignly’ (in the sense of ‘arbitrarily’) determined by the will of the people. Rather it holds that popular will – expressed, for example, in elections or referenda – should serve the realisation of that purpose. People should vote with the intention of advancing (some conception of) that purpose, not first to protect their own or their tribes’ interests. That is, they should vote for justice and the common good, not their own private good. This purpose both guides and places a limit on popular will. This is a claim about the normative goals that citizens should promote via voting. It does not imply any legal limits on their freedom of conscience or speech.

Modern Christian political thought today strongly affirms the political rights of citizens: to vote, to associate, to campaign, to organise, to stand for office, and so forth. At this point it aligns closely with the democratic rights long defended by secular liberalism. After many centuries of indifference or opposition, Christian political thinkers gradually came to embrace the structures and process of modern democracy, often enthusiastically, even if not uncritically.¹⁸ This shift did not come out of the blue. It has its roots in organic theologies of ‘representation’ reaching back as far as the middle ages (Black, 1997). These were extended and radicalised in Protestant movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Witte, 2007). Political authorities, the tradition came to hold, were not only to represent God to the people, but also to be responsive to the people’s own convictions about what just government looked like. This served to favour an active, participatory notion of citizenship in which the formal consent of the people was deemed essential to the legitimacy of current office-holders. A central reason for the shift to a positive embrace of democracy was the discovery that Christianity’s longstanding belief in the ‘spiritual equality’ of all human beings also called for concrete political expression. One could not respect one’s fellow citizens’ equal spiritual dignity while denying them the practical means to realise it in society. Such a conviction had permeated most western Christian denominations by the 20th century, leading them explicitly to declare their support for the wide array of rights, freedom and institutions that today make up a constitutional democracy.¹⁹

There are, then, powerful reasons why Christians would be able to support article I of the Charter (‘Democracy’) which recognises ‘the inalienable right of individuals to participate in democratic processes, in particular through free and fair elections in shaping the society in which they live. Governments, political parties and civil society are responsible for upholding and promoting democratic culture and practices and are accountable to the public in this regard’. For Christians, democracy should not be seen as a mere technique for selecting governments or a bulwark against an overweening state (though it also functions as both). Rather, as Graham Maddox puts it, ‘For the democrat whose will has been fortified in the spiritual domain the need to pursue justice through political means comes as a divine imperative’ (Maddox, 1996, p. 12).

Conclusion

I have argued that central themes in Christian political thought can be construed as yielding powerful endorsement for many key Charter values. An organisation committed to such values ought to be able to elicit from Christians support for its claim that, as the Preamble puts it, ‘the potential of and need for the Commonwealth – as a compelling force for good and as an effective network for co-operation and for promoting development – has never been greater’. This is not to suggest that Christian political thought ought to endorse the current wording of the Charter uncritically; I have noted a couple of places at which it could be improved. It is to suggest that Christian political thinkers, and denominational bodies, should signal their strong support for the Charter, thereby contributing in one distinctive way to the strengthening of the Commonwealth.

I conclude, therefore, with an invitation to representatives of other traditions represented in the Commonwealth – religious and secular – to explore parallel groundings (or criticisms) of Charter values emerging from their own political convictions; and to the Commonwealth, to encourage and facilitate such dialogues and not to remain mute in the face of what are the deepest motivations of its many citizens. Given mounting threats in and beyond the Commonwealth to the values enshrined in the Charter, all democratic political institutions should seek to cultivate and harness renewed commitment to such values from whatever cultural, moral and spiritual sources may be available.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://thecommonwealth.org/about-us/charter, accessed 28/6/23.

2. A handful of prominent western theologians have questioned whether constitutional democracy is today the only legitimate system for Christians. Some have proposed ‘mixed systems’ in which democracy is tempered by more hierarchical elements. See, e.g., Kraynak (2001).

3. See, e.g., Pabst (2021).

4. For fuller accounts of Christian democratic thought, see Chaplin (2023); Chaplin (2021); Spencer and Chaplin (2009).

5. This influence has been present not only in the UK and the ‘Old Dominions’, but also in sub-Saharan Africa, the South Pacific, the Caribbean, and in South Asia, with significant Christian minorities in India and Sri Lanka.

6. See, for example, Chetty (2021) which offers a secular liberal Rawlsian grounding.

7. Eastern Orthodoxy is not well represented in Commonwealth states, but that is not at all to imply that it has nothing to say to a Christian reading of Charter values. See, for example, the powerful statement occasioned by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and issued under the auspices of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Fordham University: ‘A Declaration of the “Russian World” (Ruskii Mir) Teaching’ (March 13 2022), https://publicorthodoxy.org/2022/03/13/a-declaration-on-the-russian-world-russkii-mir-teaching/

8. The Maltese constitution recognises Catholicism as the state religion. Some member states ‘establish’ other religions, such as Malaysia and Pakistan (Islam) and Sri Lanka (Buddhism).

9. The leading exception today is the current leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, which openly justifies Putin’s authoritarianism and has supported his illegal invasion of Ukraine. In addition, some professing Christians supported and even participated in the violent assault on the US Congress building on 6 January 2021.

10. The Charter’s Preamble defines the Commonwealth as ‘a voluntary association of independent and equal sovereign states’.

11. The first of these claims, however, has been making a come-back in fundamentalist quarters such as sections of the American religious right.

12. See, e.g., Hollenbach (2002).

13. One important exception is the tradition of Christian Democracy first taking root in Western Europe and Latin America, and later appearing in other locations, sometimes in a more conservative guise, such as Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Christian Democratic parties had to go beyond the mere enunciation of principles and spelled out concrete policy programmes for government.

14. This is not to deny that some Christian have at times supported all such options, sometimes claiming robust theological support for them (falsely, in my view).

15. These built on ancient Greco-Roman foundations, such as Stoicism and Roman law.

16. This is not the place to list the occasions when the CMAG has failed to follow through on this commitment.

17. See, e.g., Heffernan Schindler (2008).

18. See, e.g., Maddox (1996); De Gruchy (1995).

19. Reflecting on the cumulative teaching of the Roman Catholic Church into the 20^th century, Grasso concludes that such teaching today expresses a ‘preferential option for constitutional democracy’ (Grasso, 1995, p. 30).