Kuyper Contra Christian Nationalism

by on October 1, 2024 | 14 Comments

It teaches that in a Christian nation, that is, in a nation not without God, government as a servant of God is duty-bound to glorify his name and accordingly ought to (a) remove from administration and legislation anything that impedes the free influence of the gospel on the nation; (b) abstain from all direct meddling with the spiritual formation of the nation, being absolutely incompetent thereto (c) treat all denominations or religious communities, and more over all citizens, regardless of their views about things eternal, on an equal footing of equality; and (d) acknowledge in peoples conscience, provided it does not lack the presumption of respect ability, a limit to its power. Article 4

THREE SYSTEMS

Ignoring Religion

We have seen what government is: a servant of God. Now we come to the question: what should government do and not do to be found faithful in the service of God?

Following the tenor of our Program, we answer: Government has both direct and indirect duties toward God. The direct duties are either of a negative or a positive nature. Negatively, government is bound to allow unrestricted freedom for (1) the gospel’s influence; (2) people’s spiritual formation; (3) the manner in which people choose to worship; and (4) peoples conscience. Positively, government is duty-bound to (1) maintain law and order; (2) honor the oath; and (3) dedicate one day a week to God.

We are well aware that these brief indications throw into sharp relief the differences between the kind of state the liberals want to establish and the kind we antirevolutionaries aspire to.

This is best seeing if you take the trouble to think for a moment about what the liberals want. Their state is a state without God; it is an atheist state.1 this does not mean that each and every liberal wants to be irreverent and disrespectful toward God. It only means that in their opinion religion belongs to the realm of the inner life and that the state as a political power must avoid as much as possible all contact with this inner life. They feel that the situation will not be ideal until the point is reached where the where in government circles no mention is ever made of God, religion, or church. Whatever traces might remain of that sort would gradually need to be eliminated. Kingship by the grace of God would have to go. So prayer for God’s guidance in the Speech from the Throne. So would a prayer for God’s blessing when tabling legislative bills. Sunday observance would have to go. Every connection with the church would have to go. So with the oath. And so on.

This is true of our liberals as well as our conservatives. Not if you look at what they say, but at what their principles prescribe. Those principles leave no room for serving God. At most, as a result of inconsistency or for the sake of party interest or the theory of Hobbs, they allow for God almighty to serve as “the invisible police that casts fear into the multitude.”2

The basic error of this political system is the claim that one cannot really know if there is a God, hence that nothing objective can be established in regard to religion, and that this whole feature of the inner life of human beings belongs to the subjective, personal, at most domestic and ecclesiastical domain.

Modern subjectivism—the false theory that religious sentiment is a separate capacity which, like musical talent, is stronger in some than others—and in connection with that theory the false notion that we are able to ascertain what the human person thinks of God but not whether he exists or who he is—this way of thinking could not lead with logical necessity to this God-less political system. It is a system that no longer has any room for prayer in the council chambers nor for national days of prayer. It is a system which prescribes that everything that is state must, qua state, ignore the living God.

A State Church

In opposition to such a system, the antirevolutionary party asserts that religion is not solely subjective but in fact is first of all objective. It contains that the knowledge that there is a God and that we have to do with that living God is firmly established and must be acknowledged, independently of our feelings. It holds that this state, too, as “the moral organization of the people as a whole,” is obliged to reckon with this foundation and fountainhead of all moral life.

The party bases this claim not on revelation but on natural theology—on the knowledge of God that can be gathered from what is seen of God in creation, particularly in the human person, and not least in the national organism as well.

In this, it consciously follows the tradition of our Reformed theologians, who held fast to this natural theology precisely for the sake of that which falls outside the kingdom of heaven. At the same time, to add one more note, the party was completely vindicated in this view by Max Müller’s recent lecture series on religion.3

This natural knowledge of God, not the knowledge from revelation, has compelling force for every person. Certainty about the first kind of knowledge does not require what the second requires, namely, supernatural illumination.

For this reason the non-Confessional government has the absolute indirect legal competence as well as the obligation to take as its official rule of conduct the first (natural) knowledge of God, but not the second (revealed) kind.

This would only be possible if there were an extraordinary, supernatural organ that could decide with absolute certainty what the revealed knowledge of God demanded in a given case. Such an organ, however, is lacking. And had to be lacking, otherwise either the state would become spiritual or religion would become profane.

Accordingly, any attempt to call such an organ into existence regardless, as was done by Rome, has founded miserably and corrupted state and church alike. Things of a different nature just cannot be mixed. The state is not the kingdom of God, and the kingdom of God cannot be pressed into the confines of political life. We resolutely reject every attempt at reviving a “Christian state” in this sense, just as we resolutely turn against men like Rothe whose theory lacks all boundary lines and has the church flow into the state and then the state into the kingdom of God.4 Such unsound confusion of ideas must not be tolerated. It obscures clear thinking and causes the worn-out minds to sink back into the mysteries of the “unconscious” life and unsteady “feelings.” And that must not be. We have to use our understanding, our thinking, our reason in what we do, and the laws for our thinking do not allow such a chaotic muddle.

State and Church Interrelate: Each Rooted In Its Own Principle

The state is intended for the present dispensation and has at most preparatory significance for the eternal household of humankind. The kingdom of God, on the other hand, derives its purpose and character from the coming dispensation and at most uses earthly things for the things eternal.

This gives rise to two different sets of ideas that increasingly follow their separate ways and therefore ought not to be confused in our minds.

Government is directly rooted in the natural life and Sage has no other than a natural knowledge of God. The kingdom of God is a supernatural realm wears supernatural knowledge of God shines undimmed.

Thanks to its natural knowledge of God, government knows (1) that there is a God; (2) that this living God governs the fate of everything created, hence also of the state; (3) that this all governing providence desires justice and is therefore an avenger of injustice; and (4) that sin is operative among human beings, from which higher intervention alone can save.

Now it is on the basis of this purely natural knowledge of God that the state comes to honor God in its public actions; to invoke God’s holy name in state documents; to respect the oath; to dedicate a day of rest to him; to proclaim national days of prayer during disasters; to practice justice even with the sword; into allow free course to the gospel.

Three systems therefore:

(1) There is the god-less state of the liberals, who reject both the natural and the revealed knowledge of God and whose motto is “leave God out of it.” (2) There is the theocratic state of Roman Catholics and inconsistent Protestants, who base the state qua state directly on both the natural and the revealed knowledge of God and consequently make the state function as the active promoter of the kingdom of God, as for example in the middle ages and still partly in Prussia.

And finally (3) there is the political and God honoring state of the Reformed or Puritan nations, who based the state directly on the natural knowledge of God and accordingly have government proceeded actively as a servant of God in the sphere of the natural knowledge of God but passively in the fear of the revealed knowledge of God. An example here is the United States of America, where on the one hand praise, proclaims days of prayer, and honors the seventh day, while on the other hand it conducts itself in a more neutral fashion vis à vis the churches and any country in Europe.5

Abraham Kuyper, Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto, trans. and ed. Harry Van Dyke in Abraham Kuyper: Collected Works in Political Philosophy (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press/Acton Institute, 2015), 57–61.

notes

1. HB editor’s note: The translation we are quoting includes a footnote which gives the Dutch original and the French adjective for atheistic: “Hun Staat is los van God, een état athée.” The translator uses, in the text above, the word secular for “atheist.” We have substituted what is essentially a transliteration of the French.

2. The editor cites Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.14.96.

3. The editor cites Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Religion (New York: Charles Scribner, 1872).

4. “Εdward Rothe (1799–1867), a German theologian, taught that history was gradually replacing piety by morality and the church by the Christian state, ending in a universal absolute theocracy.”

5. “Note by the author: the conception, held by some Reformed theologians, of government as a servant of God within the church can be left out out of consideration here, since it holds only for countries of unmixed populations and for nations who really want to be simply a church, with a police force to maintain law and order.”

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14 comments

  1. Dr. Clark, these are helpful quotes from Kuyper. Thank you for posting them.

    Side point: I’m pleased to see that Bahnsen’s son has been severely critical of what is currently being promoted as “Christian Nationalism” with an emphasis more on the “ethnos” or “nation” than on older views that used Christian nationalist terminology. I’m well aware that some of Kuyper’s comments with regard to South Africa and even with regard to European ethnic issues could be fodder for ethnic-based “Christian Nationalism.” Yes, he believed in a “Dutch national character” and as his swipe at the Prussians points out, he certainly did NOT share a “Teutonic” or “Northern European Protestant” concept of ethnic unity, but believed the Dutch had a specific calling unique to them and their history. And yes, that led to some bad places such as his attitudes toward Africa, but that also kept Kuyper out of bad places such as the Prussian Union concept of centralized state power and centralized ecclesiastical unity as positive goods rather than pernicious dangers.

    Getting this section of Kuyper’s political philosophy of opposition to a state church or “ecclesiastical-political union” out onto the internet, where Googling will find it, may help in making clear that Kuyper’s theology and political philosophy can’t easily be pegged into some of the current theological and political debates.

    Kuyper was a European whose work was mostly in the context of the late 1800s and early 1900s. His fight — as the Anti-Revolutionary Party name makes clear — was against the malign influence of the French Revolution before the rise of the Russian Soviet state as the main threat that caused people who advocated personal liberty as a primary value and people who advocated older political philosophies to unite against Communism and its influence in the West.

    He was responding to arguments we aren’t having today, but he also was making statements in his context that can be used by people making arguments we **ARE** having today that Kuyper probably never considered, and could not have known how his words would be used.

    Some of his words can be misused to brand him as an ethnocentrist when that simply isn’t the case, at least in comparison to most of his European colleagues of the day. But more important, he opposed the amalgamation of the ecclesial and magisterial spheres which, as Kuyper points out, wasn’t only a problem of the medieval Catholic Church but also of some of the Protestant polities of his own day.

  2. The thread got involved on the NoFace question so I’m trying out a comment that’s stand-alone.

    Being the Hayao Miyazaki fan that I am No-Face is the English language name for a character in the 2002 anime (film) Spirited Away. Western takes on the character lean toward the idea that it/he is a distillation of mimetic desire/imitative behavior. He can be malevolent when near pushy service workers in a giant bath house but becomes more benign when accompanied by the film’s protagonist Chihiro/Sen, who is on a quest to transform her parents back into humans after they turned themselves into pigs by eating spirit food early in the film. So … it would be tough to know off the top of my head what a NoFace Army is supposed to mean in a US setting. It might be some riff on surveillance culture rather than have anything to do with MIyazaki’s film.

  3. Speaking of these issues, while walking the dog in the park behind my house today I noticed small white stickers pasted on various bollards, surveillance cameras, etc. with black letters and symbols stating, “N (and a cross symbol) force”. Anyone have an idea what those are all about?

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