Kuyper’s political career would last so long and become so absorbing that it might seem to have been destined from the start. Already before friends told him that politics was his true métier, his talent as an organizer and orator was evident in his church work. These were not necessarily relevant in the Netherlands’ pre-democratic situation of 1870, however, nor did his conservative Orangist heritage seem to offer much promise for a more progressive future. The Calvinist line he had recently joined featured some outright reactionary strains. Kuyper had no formal political education to speak of, nor any in economics or social theory. Theology, his passion to this point, seemed an unlikely portal into statecraft. His future lay in turning these very limitations to his advantage.
Kuyper’s reason for turning to politics in the first place can be understood in the same light as his conversion to Calvinism at Beesd. If Europe stood at the edge of a precipice ending in rank materialism, and if that materialism, like its Christian alternative, was ultimately a matter of conviction, then the realm of ideas was decisive, and culture-forming institutions were the key sites of struggle. Kuyper had come to Utrecht focused on the church as the first of those institutions. But the school was just as important, and the explosion he set off in 1869 at an Utrecht convention on public education marked his entrée into an issue that would be the most decisive in Dutch national politics for the rest of the century. Nothing was more instrumental than Kuyper’s agitation in making “the school question” so significant, nor any issue more instrumental in triggering the democratization of Dutch political life. In the process all sides of the man would be on full display: the organizational genius, which created the Netherlands’ first mass-circulation newspaper and first popular political party; the quick mind, which acquired political theory with startling facility; the charisma by which, in observers’ eyes and his own, his person became identical with the cause; and the nervous exhaustion which loomed as this phase of his crusade came to a crisis in 1875.
Liberal Capitalism, at Home and Abroad
Kuyper’s politics would matter well beyond the exertions of a strong personality in a small country because the European — indeed, the global — stage was being reset precisely as he made his political debut. In the 1860s the Netherlands was seeing significant population growth for the first time in generations. It was also at the start of an economic boom triggered by a quarter-century of capital investment in infrastructure. The railroad reached obscure villages like Beesd during Kuyper’s tenure there, and by the mid-1870s every decent-sized city was within a day’s travel of any other. The Dutch telegraph network was completed at the same time, and postal rates fell as volume increased. In short, the political Kuyper was made possible by the country’s first fully integrated communications and transportation system. The economy soared with the completion of signal projects like the North Sea Canal to Amsterdam in 1866 and with the linkup of Dutch transport with the German system; volumes in the Rhine trade would increase some 6,000 percent from 1870 to 1914.
The first signs of modern industrialism, already two generations old in neighboring Belgium, were finally appearing in the Netherlands, too, but these were not nearly as significant for the economy as was deregulation of the colonial trade. As the mercantilist “cultivation system” gave way to free markets, huge capital investment flowed to the East Indies, and huge private profits returned. The shift brought less benefit to the native peoples than promised, however, and Dutch free traders were soon demanding massive military intervention in Aceh province, where Dutch hegemony had never been sealed. The ensuing war, launched in 1873, would drag on for thirty years, putting colonial policy next to education on the national agenda.
Expanded markets at home and abroad were the fairest fruit of Liberal hegemony in Dutch politics since 1848. This was classic, nineteenth-century Liberalism, of course, similar to much of what would pass as “conservatism” a century later in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. Its Dutch acolytes were called “doctrinaires” because of their appeal to such thinkers as John Stuart Mill, but in fact they were quite pragmatic and adaptive. They did hold consistently, even religiously, to the “sanctity” of private property and the policies of free markets and free trade. They cherished civil liberties and asserted parliamentary over against monarchical prerogatives. They pushed the extension of a simple, uniform set of laws to every corner of the kingdom, erasing local exceptions and special privileges. In short, they stood for the standardization and rationalization of society and economy that are hallmarks of “modernization.”
Two additional Latinate labels came along in the process. Though not uniformly free-thinkers, Liberals in Kuyper’s era promoted secularization: socially, because the church was the ultimate in privileged corporations; intellectually, because the rationality behind economics should also erase the superstition and obscurantism endemic to religion. From their position atop business and the professions, the Liberals also promoted the centralization that integrated the nation into a coherent whole, promoted the efficiency of uniform standards, and (not incidentally) extended their own authority. Thus, while Liberalism had been born out of resistance to state power, and while the mid-nineteenth-century version of Liberalism continued to voice that suspicion, Liberals on the ground were rarely — and the mid-century Dutch version least of all — averse to using government to promote their interests: to improve infrastructure (see railroads and canals), extend and integrate markets (see the East Indies), and otherwise accelerate economic growth. By 1870 investment in human capital — especially education — stood as the next frontier. That called forth a “Progressive” wing in Dutch Liberalism, dedicated to carrying out the secularist agenda as part of “improving” the school system.
All these were Dutch currents in a continent-wide tide that was now cresting. The third quarter of the nineteenth century was a golden age of industrial expansion across Europe, beginning in the north and radiating east and south. From the end of the revolutions of 1848 to the crash of 1873, the European economy experienced a rarely equaled boom signified by the same icons of steam, iron, telegraph, and rail that were spreading across the Netherlands. Dutch population increases were about average for the continent; their Liberal economic policy was par for the course; their increases in foreign trade, both next door and around the world, were typical of an era in which the global economy became truly integrated for the first time. Concludes historian E. J. Hobsbawm: “Never did Europeans dominate the world more completely and unquestionably than in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.” The dominion was that of industrial capitalism, and its values were those of the “victorious bourgeois order”: reason, science, technology, and progress. The engine, the dominion, and the value system would last a very long time. Kuyper’s work commenced at the peak of its first triumphs.
He could also witness its political portents firsthand. His research sortie down the Rhine in 1866 was thwarted by the mobilization of German troops on their way to the Austrian front. He saw the same thing in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. This was national unification German-style, a model being duplicated simultaneously in Italy. In the United States it came not by foreign but by civil war; in Japan by an elite coup in the Meiji “restoration”; in Russia by tsarist fiat.
Typically, the political integration of the 1860s led on to coercive cultural integration in the 1870s, with a particularly hard edge in education. It did not surprise Kuyper’s fellow Calvinists when the newly declared French republic took vengeance upon the church along with its other conservative opponents in an anticlerical offensive that would culminate in 1905, when the public schools were fully secularized. More complicated was the kulturkampf upon Roman Catholic institutions in the new German Empire launched by its “Iron,” but also seemingly pious, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. This was a “culture war” indeed, conducted by conservatives for purpose of unity and good order. It began with the expulsion of the Jesuits and the dissolution of most religious orders, and it hoped ultimately to usurp church authority over marriage and parish appointments. In between it attempted state censorship of sermons and church publications. The attack upon Catholic schools — or public schools as de facto Catholic institutions — was especially pointed and provoked the stoutest resistance, a resistance that eventually caused Bismarck to drop his offensive and come to an understanding with the Vatican. The Dutch school struggle unfolded at exactly the same time.
The Dutch case was a Liberal offensive that suffered from excess confidence and ideological contradictions; in the end it inadvertently created possibilities for a wholesale political realignment. Ever since the 1848 Constitution ordained religious equality, Dutch Catholics had allied with the document’s Liberal authors, an alliance reinforced by Conservatives’ support of the 1853 anti-papist April Movement. The alignment held so long as the Liberal regime stuck to its economic agenda. But when Pope Pius IX denounced all things Liberal in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, and when Dutch Catholics turned out enthusiastically to defend the papal territories during the wars of Italian unification, the coalition started to dissolve. The school wars finished the job. The pope singled out secular education as a particular danger; the Progressive Liberals pressed secularization nonetheless, then added symbolic insult to substantive injury by dropping diplomatic recognition of the Vatican in 1870. Suddenly, Dutch Catholics were political free agents.
But again, as after the crisis of 1853, the Conservative opposition bungled the opportunity. Theirs had to be a normatively Protestant nation, so they could not appeal to the Catholics. Theirs was also a generic Protestantism, however, with no taste for confessional strictures, little clue about the knots of the school question, and an outright aversion to religious activism in politics. Like many of the name before and since, Dutch Conservatives could value religion less for themselves than for other people, particularly for the lesser sorts who needed its social discipline. Well-born, such Conservatives did not need to be born again, but they did need some warrant to remain in what they took to be their rightful place atop the social pyramid that nature (or God, or history) had ordained. Yet “progress,” which the genuinely religious elements among them were supporting with mass literacy campaigns and moral education, was undoing “nature,” and the new economy held little promise for their customary base of royal administrators, old rentiers, and big barons in the countryside. Thus, Conservatives had no interest in mass politics but also, absent some mass support, no way to challenge the Liberal elite of the new order. Kuyper’s project was to organize just such a movement on the basis of religion instead of class and to make it the chief rival to Liberalism in Dutch politics.
It was into this matrix that Kuyper made his dramatic debut in civil politics. In May 1869 the Union for Christian National Education held its annual convention at Utrecht and assigned the keynote address to the new local star of pulpit and press. Since Kuyper was known by now for his polemics in church politics, there could not have been much surprise when he used the occasion to pry open the fault-line in the Union’s vision and purpose.
In doing so he exposed a tension that went back to the mixed mandate for education set by the 1848 Constitution. That text had kept the standing provision that public schools train youth in all the “Christian and social virtues” but added that this be done without offense to the conscience of any pupil or parent. The Réveil political wing led by Groen van Prinsterer had argued from the start that the formula was not viable, waffling as it did between a watered-down moralism too weak for committed believers and an implicitly established religion that oppressed dissenters. His solution was to split the system along Protestant and Catholic lines, permitting each side to educate on the basis of their own convictions. Liberals wanted to continue secularizing education, however, while the Réveil’s traditionalist wing did not want to give up the residual Protestant hegemony of the unitary public school. Over Groen’s objections a compromise was proposed in 1857 for the state to fund a “neutral” system with subsidies for private religious schools. The States General passed the bill — but dropped the subsidies. Groen resigned from Parliament in disgust and turned instead to building a national network that might eventually force a change in the law and meanwhile would assist privately funded Christian schools. The Union attracted parties sympathetic to one or the other of these two purposes, but not necessarily both. Groen’s intention to force the political agenda accounted for Kuyper’s being awarded the opening speech at the 1869 convention.
He started by carefully working both sides of the room. Calvinism had sounded the “tonic note” of the chord of the nation in the wars of independence, he declared, and it had preserved ever since the ethic that lay at the bedrock of Dutch national character. But the Reformed now had to recognize, he continued, that “our old Holland” is no longer “the Netherlands of our day.” The recent “flowering of Catholic life” and the emergence of a “mixed” population (meaning liberal Protestants and free-thinkers) required a frank acknowledgement that “we are a minority.” How to resolve the tension? By recognizing that it was Calvinism that had stamped upon “our folk-character” the principle of “rights for all and freedom for each.” That is, Calvinism was not an erstwhile establishment, but a philosophy of diversity. Accordingly, the Union ought to work for a full and fair pluralization of the public schools, even beyond Groen’s proposal of 1857. Unfortunately, that would require the Reformed to demand state subsidies for their own schools and so appear to be driven by self-interest. All the more reason, then, that they keep God, country, and the poor foremost in their minds. God, because believers were obliged to educate their children in the faith. Country, because a withering of the “core of the nation” would erode the character upon which Holland’s liberty and prosperity depended. The poor, because such could not afford private religious schools and so were forced to choose between their conscience and their children’s education.
Two mixed pairs in this his maiden voyage into national politics would echo for the rest of Kuyper’s career: a tension regarding whether Calvinism should be a privileged “core” or pluralistic part of society, and a double helix of conscience and social justice in his warrant for reform. For now, the speech set off two days of discussion that devolved into open rancor. Utrecht had been the capital of the anti-Catholic April Movement, and some ultra-Calvinists in the crowd, along with those for whom Protestantism and patriotism were synonymous, denounced the idea of subsidizing Catholic schools. Harsher yet was an exchange between Kuyper and Nicolaas Beets, dean of the Utrecht pulpit. Beets opined that a “neutral” school teaching traditional ethics from generally theistic principles could render a valuable service. Kuyper replied, in what would become a lasting slogan, that the supposedly “neutral” school was in fact a “sect school of Modernism,” with a Christian veneer as dishonorable as it was thin. Even worse, its underlying premises — naturalism in the curriculum and state monopoly over children — made the whole system “satanic.” If the state insisted on one school for all, he thundered, it would have to multiply its jails to accommodate all the parents who would be prisoners of conscience. Beets responded that such rhetoric was “demonic.” For his part, Groen made his support of Kuyper clear. With that the Réveil really did come to an end, and the Ethicals and Confessionals parted ways.
By this time strong personal as well as policy bonds linked Kuyper and Groen. Despite their disparity in social class (Groen’s inherited wealth allowed him to fund his own newspaper and buy a townhouse at the heart of The Hague, overlooking the prime minister’s residence and the halls of Parliament), Kuyper struck Groen as the talent able to pick up his flagging cause and take it into an age of mass movements. Kuyper had originally written Groen from Beesd for help with his à Lasco research, but the relationship quickened in April 1867, when Groen sent him a note of thanks for his first pamphlet on church reform. Kuyper’s neediness was manifest in the long letter he sent off the very next day detailing his conversion, theological development, and sense of spiritual isolation. A burst of correspondence ensued, including an exchange of portraits. Kuyper quickly brought things to an intimate emotional plane. “The warm interest in my person and lot in life” that your letter so “unexpectedly shared,” he wrote Groen, “gives my heart promise enough of love . . . to make it feel quickened and refreshed.” Your spiritual kinship “has fulfilled a wish that I had almost given up out of the many disappointments with which I had to struggle.” Those disappointments included potential friends lost to his ecclesiastical polemics — also his father, with whom a parishioner remembers Kuyper arguing politics in the Beesd parlor.
If Groen was heartened by finding so promising an acolyte as Kuyper, Kuyper clearly found in Groen, who was born the same year as Jan Frederik, a paternal model he could admire. After all, Groen could show a career of conviction, not compromise; of reform, not routine; of full Calvinism, not vague piety. The fellowship he had never experienced at home Kuyper found in the frequent visits he made to Groen in The Hague and in a correspondence that would run to 500 letters in little over eight years.
In Praise of Diversity
Groen was also instrumental in Kuyper’s education in political theory — instrumental but not, as sometimes argued, in control. Already a month before the tumultuous Union meeting in Utrecht, Kuyper had laid out the baseline of his sociopolitical thought in the first of what turned out to be a lifelong series of “state-of-the-culture” addresses. This one was titled “Uniformity: The Curse of Modern Life,” and it sounded a full-throated cry against the culture of globalization, homogenization, and centralization that was emerging under the new political economy. Against that, it celebrated “multiform diversity . . . [as the] deepest principle of natural life.” Rhetorically, the speech was a catalogue of Romantic values, celebrating the wild over the tamed, the free-forming over the calculated, the unique individual over the standardized type, and above all the organic over the mechanical. To witness the design of God, urged the new-born Calvinist, go to the “wild forest” and see
the crooked trunks, the twisted branches, the mingling colors, the endless variety of shades, and note how it is precisely in the whimsical interplay of colors and lines that unity is revealed in its finest expression. But what is our age doing? On the model of [an] iron fence, it trims frolicsome shrubbery into a smooth hedge and prunes those wild trunks to the very top. . . . The average is the standard to which it artificially elevates the one and forcibly flattens others, which explains the mediocrity of modern life.
Kuyper could have been quoting the manifestos of the insurgent Impressionist painters gathering at the same time (1869) in Paris when he continued: as “the flourishing of the arts is the true measure of the vitality of an era,” the age stands condemned for being “almost totally devoid of artistic talent of any kind, poverty-stricken in aesthetic vitality, and totally destitute of great artistic creations.”
He applied the same critique to city architecture, bewailing Amsterdam’s urban sprawl and Baron Haussman’s modernization of Paris. He bemoaned the passing of folk costume to the cult of fashion, the standardization of manners across age and sex, the mongrelization of language brought by increased international contact. Even the heroism of war was blighted: “No longer an intrepid mind and a chivalrous heart but the reliability of a gun and the caliber of the weapon decide the battle.” All this portends “the disappearance of the human personality. It is finally machines, not people, that you see in motion . . . machines all put together in the same way, operating by the same drill.” Bourgeois society, though premised on liberty and the individual, was destroying both.
Kuyper prefaced these ruminations with ideological analysis he was learning from Groen. It was “the Revolution” that lay at the bottom of the blight, Kuyper proclaimed; it was the Revolutionary spirit that, by insinuating itself into the human heart, aimed to realize the age-old dream of world empire more effectively than had the crude old method of military conquest. Ironically, this part of his speech reads today as abstractly as the Revolutionary ideologues whom Groen faulted, and is redeemed only by Kuyper’s color tour of the current scene. Yet the logic Kuyper saw at work is endorsed by the neo-Marxian Eric Hobsbawm’s observation that by 1870, under the convergence of two Revolutions — French and Industrial — a Liberal capitalist system was beginning to standardize the world so that, for all the era’s movements of national unification, there were diminishing prospects of genuine national distinctiveness.
That specter troubled Kuyper the most as he moved to the applicatory part of his oration. If the railroads of international commerce “do not facilitate the lively exchange of our own thoughts but have to serve the monotonous exchange of standardized ideas, then the soul of a people is lost.” Prussia and France (“The uniformity of Caesarism . . . [and] the uniformity of Cosmopolitanism”) continued to be the worst threats from outside, but spiritual lassitude posed the gravest problem within. Thus, the “national will” had to be “anchored” in God’s will, and “godliness,” not armaments, had to be the “primary weapon in the struggle for independence.” To revitalize that godliness Kuyper invoked his two current initiatives. For the church question, “I know of no other solution than to accept — freely and candidly, without any reservations — a free multiformity” of religious organization in public life. As to schools, he called his audience “not to oppose the mixed [secular] form of education for those who want it, but to challenge the supremacy, the monopoly, of the mixed school and to demand alongside of it equal and generous legal space for every life-expression [worldview or fundamental conviction] that desires its own form of education.” “Indeed,” he continued, “our unremitting intent should be to demand justice for all, to do justice to every life-expression.” Likewise, just as the Dutch themselves ought to guard against “Anglomania” in applying their own constitution, so they ought “to oppose with vigor the attempts to structure our colonies by [Dutch] standards” and seek rather to enable the “Javanese” to protect their own way of life.
Political Theory
To qualify as Groen’s heir, Kuyper needed better command of antirevolutionary theory proper; to take that theory into a democratic future, he had to redeem it from its reactionary strains. Back of both the tradition and the problem stood the ferociously counter-revolutionary poet, William Bilderdijk (1756-1831). During the Restoration, Bilderdijk had written Romantic paeans to Dutch heritage and the House of Orange, but before that, during the French occupation, he had inscribed odes to Louis Bonaparte and even to Napoleon for restoring law and order. Bilderdijk despised constitutions as such, squabbling parliaments, the solvents of rationalism, the specter of democracy, the tide of progress, the nightmare of technology — really, anything tied to the Enlightenment — and took shelter in history, nostalgia, fantasy, feeling, and faith. He endorsed Calvinism because it was old, Orangist, and authoritarian. This vision he had inculcated in a circle of young alienated aristocrats who gathered for his private seminars on the “history of the fatherland.” Some of them produced tracts in the same vein, notably Protest against the Spirit of the Age (1823) by Isaac da Costa. Kuyper never tired of quoting Da Costa’s poetry or celebrating Bilderdijk’s scorched-earth spirit, as well as his contempt for compromise and his holistic vision of a radically different world. The challenge was to make these usable for progressive ends.
Da Costa had begun the adaptation after Bilderdijk’s death, coincident with the humiliation of the Belgian Revolution. His biblical millenarianism led him to look for portents of the end times, which made the birth of the Evangelical Alliance in the early 1840s appear especially promising. He began to measure European developments in the Alliance’s anti-Catholic light — England and Prussia were good, France and the papacy bad — and even welcomed the revolutionary spring of 1848 for discomfiting “papist” Paris and Vienna. Groen took a more skeptical path. Having been introduced by Merle d’Aubigné to Edmund Burke as well as to Reformation history, his policies were less progressive than Da Costa’s, but his theoretical weight was more substantial and of greater salience for the long run. Thus, Groen was just as suspicious of “Protestant” Prussia’s ambitions as of “papist” France’s, and pondered not only the immediate goals but the logical trajectory of “democratic progress” as it unfolded (to cite 1848) from the springtime of the peoples to the summer of the radicals to the winter of reaction.
Kuyper got his reading list in political theory from Groen. In September 1869, five months after delivering “Uniformity,” Kuyper wrote that he was digging into Burke. Groen recommended next the German Lutheran Friedrich Julius Stahl and French Protestant François Guizot. A few years later Kuyper wrote that he was absorbing the French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville and Catholic Félicité Lamennais. But these were all supplementary to Groen’s own Lectures on Unbelief and Revolution, published in 1847. Like other signal works that had appeared at that outburst of revolutionary zeal — The Communist Manifesto and Thoreau’s “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” to cite the most famous — Groen’s series attempted to set out a fundamental critique of the liberal order and a brief outline of its proper antidote. Along with Bilderdijk’s spirit, Groen’s method would endow Kuyper’s approach to his own times.
Groen’s argument was based on the premise that all political rule derives from divine right, which is delegated via revelation and history. The modern age sought to displace that authority with Reason, manifest politically in republicanism, social-contract theory, and notions of popular sovereignty. As the cult of Reason gathered momentum across the eighteenth century, its radical logic became evident: mild English deism gave way to Voltaire’s radical sort, then to Diderot’s atheism; Montesquieu’s analysis of national character bred Rousseau’s espousal of civil religion; all of it culminated in Helvetius and LaMettrie’s bald philosophical materialism. The corrosion of French thought inevitably destabilized French politics, Groen continued, and the ensuing revolution followed its radical logic from the calling of the Estates General to the Reign of Terror, until a despairing reaction brought in the law-and-order regime of the Directory. But the latter were simply revolutionaries of the Right, lacking any basis in divine authority and thus giving way to further revolution from the Left. The cycle culminated finally in the tyranny of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose power, rooted in violence and conquest, was forced to pursue endless warfare to sustain its luster. Those wars at once spread the taint of revolution across Europe and proved to be its undoing. Yet the Restoration had not settled the matter, Groen concluded, for its monarchies proved to be variations of human devising. Only the firm foundations of God and history could dispel what threatened to become a chronic cycle of upheaval and repression.
To put it mildly, there was not much potential for democracy or any other modern notion here. All social-contract thinking was suspect, John Locke’s as well as Jean Jacques Rousseau’s. All republics were dubious and liable to degradation, including the American and those of classical antiquity. The pre-1795 Dutch Republic really had not been a republic at all but a monarchy — with a sometimes absent monarch! The state, Groen repeated after German Restoration theorist Ludwig von Haller, belonged to the monarch as his private property; notions of compacts, commonwealths, and written constitutions as well as republics and popular sovereignty were perforce illegitimate and in defiance of divine ordination.
The roots of Groen’s “Revolution” extended very far back in time as well. If events in France post-1789 were its purest fruit, its “principles” went back behind the Enlightenment through the Renaissance and into the late Middle Ages. Just how (for so the theory implied) seventeenth- and eighteenth-century absolute monarchs qualified as “revolutionaries,” and how the papacy and Counter-Reformation propounded “unbelief,” was not transparently clear, nor did lumping all these together with nineteenth-century radicals and socialists yield much analytical help. The antirevolutionary habit of abstraction started with Groen, along with the elevation of ideas to the virtual exclusion of material forces in explaining historical causation.
Yet Groen was too good a historian and too practical a statesman to stay in pure ideology. Before he had learned about revolution from Burke, he had learned about the organic development of society from F. Karl von Savigny, founder of the German historical school of political thought. Savigny championed the importance of local variation for jurisprudence over against uniform prescriptions, which he blamed on abstract, deductive modes of thought. If Groen instinctively preferred standing institutions, no matter what violence had gone into their making, over insurgencies, no matter what grievances they bore, he was also sensitive to nuance and exceptions. The type of monarchy he championed was Holland’s prior to 1795, “tempered” as it had been by the wide dispersal of privileges, rights, and powers among the nation’s many layers. That arrangement amounted to a constitution he could defend for having evolved through history as a bulwark of the people’s liberties. Groen further granted that culture and circumstance could (in historical fact, almost always did) restrain the outworking of pure revolutionary spirit. If history was God’s agent, then current developments needed a discerning eye to tell true from false progress.
Groen was also willing to make use of changes he originally opposed. Once the 1848 Constitution had been ratified, he pushed in Parliament for its fair and exact enforcement. He appreciated the spread of various humanitarian ideals as commensurate with the gospel, becoming a leader in the Dutch anti-slavery movement. Finally, if Dutch history made clear that the true people of God were more often commoners than patricians, then this patrician could serve as a “tribune” for “the people behind the voters” — the masses unrepresented under the Netherlands’ exclusive franchise.
Groen had precedent for going even further down the progressive road. The French Catholic theorist Félicité Lamennais, who first taught him the link between unbelief and revolution, exemplified how a counter-revolutionary could turn into a democrat. Theocratic norms, seemingly so prone toward reaction, could actually loosen the spell of the status quo. Without breaking with the Dutch Reformed Church, Groen persistently criticized its operations. Disgusted with the pallid religion of the public schools, he demanded that they be secularized. Resolute for his own convictions in public life, he could more easily than many Conservatives countenance the same in Catholics. By the time he met Kuyper — in fact, already after the fiasco of the Education Act of 1857 — Groen had reluctantly concluded that the Netherlands was no longer a normatively Christian nation; its divine calling to be a beacon of pure religion and liberty to the nations had passed to its Calvinist remnant. At the same time, however, these constituted the nation’s saving remnant and were bound to proclaim a Christian witness, even in a neutralized public space, by appealing to transcendent sources in hopes of bringing the nation back to its holy mission.
Calvinism as a Revolutionary Tradition
There was little of this that Kuyper did not espouse. He simply did so in bolder style, unhindered by the stately manners that bound a person of Groen’s time and class. Kuyper started from, rather than coming to, a pluralist posture. He was more forthrightly and consistently democratic. When it came time to set forth his own principles, therefore, he chose a theme that Groen would endorse — his speech was entitled “Calvinism, the Source and Stronghold of Our Constitutional Liberties” — but argued it by precedents that the younger Groen would have found troubling at best.
In part, this was determined by the occasion. Kuyper gave the speech on the Dutch university lecture circuit in 1873, hoping to recruit leaders for the political party he had in mind. That required some fireworks. It being the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Dutch Constitution of 1848, however, he had to make something out of a moment his party did not relish. His solution was to virtually ignore the Constitution in pursuit of the source of constitutionalism, which he found in Reformed theology, and to bypass the Netherlands for the annals of international Calvinism. The result was an argument for stability and order from a narrative of resistance, rebellion, and revolution — good, Christian revolution.
The Calvinist particulars with which Kuyper began were the absolute sovereignty of God and the pervasiveness of human sin. Far from warranting monarchy, as Catholic and Lutheran Restoration theorists had argued, these tenets pointed toward a republic, Kuyper declared. On the first point, divine majesty brooked no human imitation; republicanism was the political counterpart of iconoclasm, both being rooted in the Calvinist horror of idolatry. On the second point, while depravity seemed to exert a special magnetic pull upon monarchs, as Kuyper cheekily argued after Calvin, “he [Calvin] also knows that the same sin pervades the masses and that, as a result, there will be no end to resistance and rebellion, mutiny and troubles, except for a just constitution that restrains abuse of authority, sets limits, and offers the people a natural protection against lust for power and arbitrariness.” Quite contrary to Groen, who deemed Calvin a monarchist that had reluctantly accommodated to Geneva’s republicanism, Kuyper insisted that, “given a free choice, Calvin certainly prefers the republic.” He then took a quick two-step even further from his mentor. The doctrine of election, which Groen avoided for the wrangling it caused, Kuyper invoked as a charter for a “democratic form of church government.” The implication for civil government was clear. With its leveling effect upon all human pretensions, election made democracy safe for Calvinism; with the selfless dedication it bred in the believer, it made Calvinists safe for democracy.
As Kuyper made historical narrative do most of the work in his speech, the case studies he chose were telling. One derived directly from Geneva: the Huguenot justification of armed resistance set forth by Calvin’s successor, Théodore Béza, and amplified by François Hotman and Philippe du Plessis-Mornay. Theirs was a constitutional resistance to tyrants, Kuyper underscored, which required authorization by proper officials, the “lesser magistrates.” Yet as deployed during the French wars of religion, it entailed a violent defiance that Groen could never endorse. Central though their work was to the development of modern political theory, he responded to Kuyper’s request to say that he did not have these authors in his library to lend him. Huguenot resistance amounted to a rebellion persistent, systematic, bloody, and radicalizing enough to count as a revolution, save for its lack of success. The seventeenth-century English Puritan rising was not thus limited. It drew Kuyper’s unmitigated praise, even though it involved violent insurrection, regicide, destruction of church properties, terror in the (Irish) countryside, instability eventuating in military dictatorship, and any number of other features resembling the French Revolution. This was a permissible, even commendable, revolution because it was a godly one, as manifested by its formal declarations of purpose and the good discipline of Cromwell’s New Model army.
In both the French and English cases Kuyper gave most attention to church rather than to civil politics, reflecting the priority of religious freedom among the “constitutional liberties” in his title and also his current polemics on the consistory of Amsterdam. Kuyper traced the bane of synodical hierarchy back to the Huguenots’ adaptation to military (not churchly) necessity. English Presbyterians had then tried to import these French ways on the assumption that “Calvinism was a petrifaction, bound to the form it had assumed, take it or leave it.” Kuyper lauded the English Independents instead, who had properly adapted “the Calvinist principle” to their own time and place. In this they had the clearer claim on Calvin himself, who “unambiguously rejected the idea that one should be bound to an established form.” Thus Kuyper’s ideal of a “circle of free, autonomous congregations” bound in a “voluntary, not coerced, relationship with the synod” had the imprimatur of the Genevan reformer, whatever the actualities of Genevan practice. So also the “separation of church and state,” which Puritans in old England and New saw following “necessarily” from “Calvinistic principle.”
The bridge to New England allowed Kuyper to return to civil politics and make the rosiest case for his thesis. No one could deny that “modern liberties flourish in America without restriction,” he began, or that “the people of the Union bear a clear-cut Christian stamp more than any other nation on earth.” This was not a coincidental but a causal relationship, rooted in the nation’s Puritan origins. Kuyper had plenty of sources for this casual conflation of “New England” and “America,” since the standard histories of the time exercised the same assumption. His organic sociology was at work too. Whatever the cultural complexity and numbers on the ground in 1873, New England represented “the core of the nation”; and whatever the developments over the two-and-a-half centuries since Plymouth Rock, the original Puritan stamp still held on America’s contemporary character. By this point Kuyper’s definition of “Calvinism” had left behind any confessional particulars (the Wesleyans were included!) to become broadly cultural, connoting moral earnestness, healthy enterprise, middle-class discipline, and public respect for religion. So taken, he could hammer home his point: the best of modern liberties were not the fruit of the French Revolution but of Calvinism.
He put it to the students before him with a flourish:
We are Antirevolutionaries not because we reject the fruits of the revolutionary era but because, history book in hand, we dare contest the paternity of these good things. With much evil the revolution also brought Europe much good, but this was stolen fruit, ripened on the stem of Calvinism under the nurturing warmth of our martyrs’ faith, first in our own land, then in England, and [now dropping the French Huguenots] subsequently in America.
Kuyper had to acknowledge ruefully that in Europe “what had been refused from the hand of Calvinism was eagerly accepted from the hands of the French heroes of freedom.” Yet it would not do to accept that surrogate, for along with “Calvinistic liberties . . . [the Revolution] introduced a system, a catechism, a doctrine; and this system, running counter to God and his righteousness, destroys the bonds of law and order, undermines the foundations of society, gives free play to passion, and gives the lower material realm rule over the spirit.” Put positively, only Calvinism supplies “the moral element,” “the heroic faith,” and the mediating institutions which serve as the modern version of the “lesser magistrates.” All of these, and only these, together gave order to liberty and so assured its perpetuation.
As history, Kuyper’s lecture is open to critique at many points. To maintain the United States’ “Calvinist” political foundation, he chose a strategic moment in the 1790s, venturing neither backward to 1776 nor ahead to the “revolutionary” Jefferson’s triumph in 1800. To warrant his model of church and state, he had to ignore (arguably, he had the facts wrong) that his beloved New England Congregationalists maintained an established church longer than anyone else in the new nation, and that the group who did most closely approximate his churchly ideal — the Baptists — were Jefferson’s most enthusiastic supporters. His segue from the Puritan to the Glorious Revolution in seventeenth-century England ignored the latter’s fear of precisely the religious zeal Kuyper praised in the former. His critique of the French Reformation opens the interesting possibility that national character, not revolutionary principles, accounted for much that went wrong after 1789, for the Huguenots also come off as unitary, hierarchical, centralizing, and given to passion — that is, as quintessentially French. His acknowledgement but then steamrolling of material factors beneath the force of ideas shows some but not enough conceptual progress past the example of Groen, especially in light of the dramatic technological and economic transformations underway as he was writing. Most seriously, some of the hardest questions of political theory — as to forms of government or the criteria and means of legitimate resistance — got passed over quickly by appeal to first principles. “The question is not whether the people rule or a king but whether both, when they rule, do so in recognition of Him.” By extension, violence or non-violence, rebellion or obedience, could be justified or reprobated depending on whether the actor called on the name of the Lord.
Still, Kuyper hit his main target. The Puritan stamp on the American ethos would be confirmed by a fleet of twentieth-century historians, atheists and theological liberals chief among them. The Calvinist contribution to modern constitutional freedom, both in theory and in practice, would be likewise upheld. Kuyper’s insight that, in France, the Revolution became necessary owing to the stifling of the Reformation and effected many of its results, has been borne out as well. More broadly, the rediscovery of Calvinism as an activist, culture-forming faith, not in spite but exactly in consequence of its theological convictions, would proceed from Max Weber’s work thirty years after Kuyper’s speech to Michael Walzer’s study of English Puritanism, The Revolution of the Saints, a century later. Kuyper’s speech concluded on that note: “I hope . . . that at least the young people of the Netherlands will not echo the old libel . . . that we, Dutch Calvinists, are a party of reaction!”
Organizing
If Dutch Calvinists were to be political players in the future, they would need more than updated theory. They needed new methods, new organization, and a new operational identity. This was the burden of most of Kuyper’s correspondence with Groen and of his day-to-day political labors. The antirevolutionary movement had to become a full-fledged party, independent of the Conservatives. It had to have a national network penetrating down to the local level, a comprehensive program of action, a parliamentary delegation held accountable to that program, and a mass-circulation newspaper to reach the rank and file. Opposition to such a plan arose from all over the map. Liberal opinion across Europe worshipped the rational autonomous individual in politics as in philosophy, and Dutch Liberal voices like Robert Fruin, Kuyper’s old teacher at Leiden, thought political parties to be inherently wrong in a parliamentary system. Members of the Dutch States-General from all persuasions objected to any prior constraint upon their independent judgment. Leaders as well as many ordinary clergy in the Dutch Reformed Church feared too close a connection between church and politics; the Ethical descendants of the Réveil, with their goal of leavening society with general spiritual influence, were especially “politicophobic,” in Kuyper’s epithet. Remarkably, Kuyper’s vision would prevail nonetheless, and within ten years. But in the near term, the painful reality was persistent conflict and false starts.
His initiative began in earnest immediately after the Utrecht school convention. He started compiling lists of likely leaders in regional capitals and publishing articles in De Heraut. He was deeply enmeshed in the parliamentary elections of 1871, well beyond his own candidacy. He consulted on candidates and tactics in other districts and gathered the editors of five friendly newspapers from around the country to coordinate publicity and mobilize voters. He insisted on a broader, more democratic platform than Groen wanted — including planks on church and franchise reform as well as school equity — even though Groen rejected the very idea of a comprehensive platform as “unnecessary and dangerous.” The first measures of party discipline appeared when Groen endorsed just three candidates in the campaign, dropping everyone — including some of his longstanding associates — who might deviate from the platform come voting time. The inclusion of his own name among the three discomfited Kuyper, but the results of the election, despite his own defeat, did not. The “unbelievable spike” in the independent Roman Catholic vote, he wrote Groen, spelled the dismantling of a “once-fixed” political structure and revealed “uncommonly serious” portents to anyone “with an eye on the future.” For now, the 5,000 voters who had supported the independent “antirevolutionary” slate formed a hard core around which to build.
The most crucial instrument for that project had to be a newspaper. Groen had published an elite journal off and on over the years but saw the need for a regular, popular sheet and had adopted Kuyper not least for his potential in this vein. Kuyper wanted to get started already in 1869, but Groen cautioned him to slow down until adequate preparations were in place. While Groen assembled the necessary capital, Kuyper started promoting a new paper to antirevolutionary voter lists and at summer mission festivals, the favored holiday of pious folks. For the inaugural issue Kuyper chose April 1, 1872, the 300th anniversary of the insurgent “Sea Beggars’” raid on Brielle, which had marked the beginning of concerted hostilities in the Dutch war for independence. That momentous achievement, said Kuyper’s opening editorial, could be matched today if people paused amid their patriotic hoopla to remember God and recommit themselves to the sacred mission for which their nation had been raised up. Happily, a band of the faithful, though small and scorned like the Beggars, was ready at hand; the new paper was designed to instruct and inspire them to their destiny.
For editor and reader alike, the April date in 1872 would have lasting significance. The Standaard editorship was the one post Kuyper would hold for the rest of his career, and the role where he could combine all the others through which he passed in the meantime — preacher, teacher, and politician. The paper was the only place where most of his followers ever heard him, but there they heard him to great effect. For many it provided a post-elementary school education, a sustained induction into politics, culture, and social affairs. In the process Kuyper not only promoted a party but organized a movement and shaped a people. The personal loyalties and the deep affection thus bred proved the power of mass journalism; on that Kuyper instructed the whole country.
Such loyalty required a sense of distinct identity, and in cultivating it Kuyper offered the counterpoint to the principled pluralism of his political theory. The issue came up already in selecting the paper’s name. Kuyper wanted to call it De Geus, “The Beggar,” after the motley heroes of 1572, and acceded only reluctantly to warnings of how grossly this would offend Catholics. In his early columns and in speeches on special occasions, he rallied his troops (and military terminology was his typical idiom) with the assurance that they were the “conscience” of the nation, guardians of its calling. “[T]here still remain people who, in keeping with the demand of history, carry this precious legacy in their heart,” his Standaard inaugural declared.
It is my prayer that they will not lose heart, though their number is small and their strength is little. ‘Small, too, was the fleet of the Beggars!’ . . . Their calling is so beautiful! To fight not just for themselves and their children but for their fellow citizens, for the peoples of Europe, for all of humanity, so that justice remain justice, that freedom of conscience not be smothered.
At a convention of Christian school teachers Kuyper likened them to the old “hedge-preachers” of the Dutch Reformation, the vanguard then, as the teachers ought to be now, of “the spiritual liberation of the nation.” Of course, non-Calvinists might wonder what promise that “liberation” held for them.
As educational policy continued to roil national politics, Kuyper used the emerging Christian school movement to build a political organization. It featured a Central Committee (Kuyper as chair) that helped organize local chapters (“voter clubs”), usually out of the ranks of the local Christian school association. The Central Committee coordinated the locals via a direct communications hierarchy. A whole class of “new men” thus entered the political arena, people of modest middle-class background but empowered by the party apparatus to challenge or circumvent local elites. This generated some tension with another new network, the Anti-School-Law League (ASWV), which operated on a classic-liberal premise of local notables exerting their “influence” upon “intelligent” opinion. (In fact, the ASWV was modeled on the great success of British Liberalism, the Anti-Corn Law League.) For the next elections, in 1873, the two organizations coordinated their efforts, occasioning along the way some correspondence between Kuyper and P. C. Mondriaan, secretary of the ASWV’s Amersfoort chapter and father of an infant son, Piet. The antirevolutionary slate more than doubled its support over 1871, to 12,000 votes, but the limits of dual organization became apparent over the next few years. In the 1875 elections Kuyper’s voter clubs did better work than the ASWV chapters, but the returns were disappointing. Kuyper blamed those who had opposed his push for thorough organization: single-issue voters who did not want a comprehensive program, members of Parliament who did not want a binding program, Reformed church members who disliked his appeal to Christian Reformed seceders, and traditional leaders of anti-democratic hue.
Stress and Strain
The conflict took a toll on Kuyper, but he stoked it all the same. He baited the Ethicals with a speech at a church gathering in 1872. He kept up a running battle with Conservatives for command of anti-Liberal ground. He preferred to battle with Liberals, he repeated, because they held to principle; Conservatives’ private talk was so at odds with their public votes that one had to wonder about their integrity. He even scolded Groen in De Standaard for endorsing a Liberal proposal to erect statues in the capital in honor of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and Johan de Witt — this, within a month of his election to the States General and without advance word to his mentor.
Groen doubtless understood what was going on. Already in 1869 he had admonished Kuyper: “Don’t try too much, dear friend! Your [latest] letter makes me uneasy.” Now again, he repeated: “I worry about your health. You do too much.” True enough; that Christmas Kuyper could not get out of bed, prostrated by “tic and rheumatism.” “Tic” meant “tic douloureux” or trigeminal neuralgia — short, successive bursts of extremely intense facial pain. “Rheumatism” described painful inflammation of the joints, in Kuyper’s case particularly of the neck and shoulders. Sometimes asthma was added to the mix. Kuyper was sick in the summer of 1870, again the following February, then again in January and August of 1873. Kuyper routinely ascribed it all to overwork, a sad necessity of his calling, curable by a week’s rest here, a month abroad there. But gradually the light shone through. “My throat distemper,” he wrote Groen in 1873, “seems to be nerve-related. A heated debate, and those come every day, does me harm.” Perhaps that explains Kuyper’s mood upon being elected to Parliament. He professed anxiety about the “unholy atmosphere” of politics, but the problem lay within as much as without. If conflict aggravated his “nerves,” and if defense of the cause spurred him to “overwork,” then politics posed a most unhealthy ambience for his soul.
The strain became acute when he had to move his family from their spacious home on the Amsterdam harbor to a flat in The Hague. There, somehow, Jo and the four children had to stay out of his way while he prepared for the next day’s debates in the Second Chamber, composed copy for the next day’s Standaard, wrote a meditation and Bible study for the next Sunday’s Heraut, and kept up his correspondence with voter clubs, Christian school leaders, and church councils around the country. That left out of the question composing the next big lecture to follow up “Uniformity” or “Modernism.” Yet “our people,” God’s people, needed leadership in times of such momentous change, and had been so grateful on previous occasions when he had risen to the challenge. Perhaps in his study in 1874 Kuyper detected beneath these lyrics a tune he had heard before — once when he had exhausted himself on the prize essay, once when he had despaired over his career prospects. He had just recounted these crises the previous year in Confidentie. Soon he would turn again toward the same solution he had found in The Heir of Redclyffe, a religious renewal back in England. This time it would come under the auspices of American evangelicals, who were burdened neither with Calvinism nor with any notion of “the Revolution.”