Back in October, Udi Greenberg reviewed Carlo Invernizzi Accetti's What Is Christian Democracy?  It's a good but not uncritical review, and I recommend it to you. 

Invernizzi Accetti seems to be proposing this model as a way to think about a new politics, and contrasting it with a fairly libertarian "liberalism" as well.  But Greenberg thinks he has it wrong, and I think I agree with him:

…chiding Christian conservatives for abandoning their “real” values is a futile undertaking. This is because the cooperation between populists and Christian conservatives is not a fragile marriage of convenience, as Invernizzi Accetti would have it, but a product of a more substantial ideological overlap. Indeed, despite the ubiquity of the never-ending comparisons to fascism, some (though certainly not all) of populism’s content could in fact be traced to Christian Democrats.

(As an aside: Invernizzi Accetti has got another piece on how the alliance between Trump and white Christians is "unholy" and "deeply anti-Christian."  I agree, but I wonder if he has grappled as deeply as some of us have over here (which is, truth be told, not that deeply at all) with the reality of this alliance--the way that, once we have said "this is wrong," we must then ask why is it still happening and why is it so durable?)

But let's go on with Greenberg:

Perhaps the most obvious overlap is in the field of sexuality, a topic which What Is Christian Democracy? mentions only in passing. Christian Democrats spent tremendous energy promoting what they understood as “proper” Christian sexuality. They tirelessly labored to enshrine the heterosexual family as the basic social unit (especially through marriage and inheritance laws) and harshly opposed same-sex relationships. Adenaeur, in contrast with the government of East Germany, kept a law criminalizing homosexuality that Hitler had used to secure 50,000 convictions—a number Adenauer’s government would equal. This is a tradition that many of their heirs today continue to preserve, even if in softer form. Merkel, for example, voted against marriage equality in 2017. It is also a priority that populists often pursue with a deep sense of urgency. While they embrace some tenets of feminism and often have women figureheads (Le Pen in France or Pia Kjærsgaard in Denmark), they are usually vocal opponents of sexual nonconformity: Trump—the epitome of patriarchy and rape culture—rushed to ban transgender people from the military, while his Hungarian counterpart Orbán unilaterally disaccredited university gender studies programs. The two camps’ sexual visions, of course, are not always identical, and there are variations inside each group. But the similarities are not cosmetic either, and they sometimes outweigh the differences.

The same is true for the treatment of minorities, whose marginalization is at the center of the populist revolt. With a few notable exceptions (such as French philosopher Jacques Maritain), most Christian Democratic figures were hardly the paragon of deep tolerance. Under Adenauer, the CDU depicted communism and the Soviet Union as an invasion of Asian rapists and his government in 1956 outlawed the German communist party. Christian Democrat leaders also rarely took a firm stance on anti-Semitism. Scrambling for voters who previously aligned with the Nazis, Christian Democrats mostly avoided the topic altogether. And as Invernizzi Accetti himself notes, Christian Democrats more recently have often been at the forefront of articulating anxieties about Muslims’ “alien” cultural commitments, which allegedly undermined the continent’s character. Few exemplified this logic better than Wilfried Mertens, the Belgian former chairman of the Christian Democratic alliance in the European parliament, when he explained in 2003 his opposition to Turkey’s bid to become an EU member. “The European project is a civilizational project,” he thundered, so the inclusion of a large Muslim-majority country “is unacceptable.” This rigid equation of Europe with Christianity has always been an important component of the movement’s vision. Its difference from contemporary populism is a matter of degree and intensity, not substance.

As an aside, this is interesting: it seems to me that European thinkers seem to have a significantly harder time dealing with racial and sexual differences than do many thinkers in the United States.  This is not to compliment us, just to note that other thinkers don't seem in a significantly better situation.

In contrast to Invernizzi Accetti, the strategy Greenberg proposes is interesting and possibly right, or at least tempting to me:

…it is probably more productive to try and remake the social order that led to populism’s rise in the first place. This will entail imposing economic redistribution, doubling down on feminism and anti-racism, and a bold challenge to entrenched social hierarchies. It will, in short, adopt the very policies and projects that Christian Democrats successfully thwarted decades ago and continue to resist today, namely, anti-statist subsidiarity, inequality, and anti-“materialism.”

The success of this effort will depend on the participation of Christians, who have often been central to struggles for egalitarianism. Churches, after all, have been at the forefront of the sanctuary movement, and provide crucial infrastructure for social mobilization. As What Is Christian Democracy? rightly points out, this means that some ardent secularists may need to overcome ingrained anti-clerical suspicion. The project of upending inequalities and securing democracy is far more important than debates over the limits of public funding to religious schools or charities. 

This seems right to me, and meshes with a piece I read this morning in the New York Times, by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn:

In the 1970s and ’80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African-American communities were rooted in “black culture.” The idea was that “deadbeat dads,” self-destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show “personal responsibility.”

A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there. Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable. Family structure collapsed.

It would be easy but too simplistic to blame just automation and lost jobs: The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years. The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did. As other countries embraced universal health care, we did not; several counties in the United States have life expectancies shorter than those in Cambodia or Bangladesh.

One consequence is that the bottom end of America’s labor force is not very productive, in ways that reduce our country’s competitiveness. A low-end worker may not have a high school diploma and is often barely literate or numerate while also struggling with a dependency; more than seven million Americans also have suspended driver’s licenses for failing to pay child support or court-related debt, meaning that they may not reliably show up at work.

Americans also bought into a misconceived “personal responsibility” narrative that blamed people for being poor. It’s true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self-destructive behaviors. But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making. If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility.

This language of "social responsibility" could be deepened and thickened.   Can religious communities help? I suspect they can.