When Kuyper returned home for good in the spring of 1877, he had reason to feel anxious about the future. He was nearly forty years old, the father of six children, and unemployed: a former pastor, an about-to-be-former member of Parliament, a journalist on hiatus, and a once-promising scholar whose project lay ten years in the past. Moreover, the times seemed to be in the hands of forces that boded ill for the future, at least any future he wanted. Germany, the power to the east, was surging ahead on a military-industrialist model run by an authoritarian government, while France, to the south, was a new republican regime intent on pursuing an aggressive course of secularization. Britain, to the west, contemplated its next moves against the small Dutch-founded republics at the tip of Africa. At home, Dutch agriculture was about to fall into a twenty-year depression that would drive small farmers out of business and pose fundamental questions for the Dutch economy. Most immediately, the hour of reckoning on educational policy was at hand. The Higher Education bill that had so concerned Kuyper a year before as he was bundled off to recuperate had indeed been passed, effectively secularizing Dutch universities. That had happened at the hands of a moderate coalition cabinet. Now, the upcoming elections augured victory for the Liberals, who were promising a thorough modernization of elementary education. One of their prime targets was religious “obscurantism.”
Given his recent trauma, Kuyper could understandably have chosen an altogether new course. Instead, he determined to pursue the old one, but in a different way. He turned down all the calls that prominent churches extended to him, including the old post in Amsterdam that Hovy urged upon him. Nor did he want to return to Parliament. Instead of formal offices he settled into journalism, where he took up his new vocation as a movement organizer. At this he showed real genius: within three years he founded a university, instituted a formal political party, and helped build a nationwide network of Christian elementary schools. The first two were not only the first of their type in the Netherlands — indeed, pioneering efforts in all of Europe — but represented something of a social revolution as well, steps toward a genuinely democratic social order. The king who pointedly refused to invite him to court, the leaders of the opposition who battled him at every turn, and the members of his own group who were discomfited by his innovations all recognized this. So did the many commoners who were galvanized by his vision — and his charisma.
Kuyper’s initiatives were accompanied by two other rising movements on the Dutch scene. In 1879, the climactic year of his organizational drive, the Progressive Liberals added to educational reform a campaign for radical franchise extension to fully democratize the country. And in September of the same year, Lutheran pastor Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis quit his post to begin a crusade (and he meant the term literally) on behalf of the growing ranks of industrial labor and the broadening masses of the rural poor. He founded the first major Dutch socialist organization, the Social-Democratic Union, served by his own newspaper with a Kuyper-like title: Justice for All!
The three movements obviously had sharply different goals and rationales, but they reflected a common condition. The quarter-century of economic expansion that began at mid-century had bred optimistic expectations but also eroded many customary social relations, creating a more aggressive, self-seeking public ambience. The economic downturn in the mid-1870s thus mixed together material woes, disappointed hopes, and aggravated uncertainty. The old order had died without a new one being fully born. The rising Calvinists, Progressive Liberals, and Socialists each offered a new model for that purpose and promoted it by sustained campaigns of persuasion, identity-building, and morale-boosting. In chronology and effectiveness, Kuyper’s movement led the way.
Much of Kuyper’s long-term influence came from the base that his new institutions gave his ideas; at the same time, he insisted that it was the ideas which made the institutions matter. The conjunction itself was his strongest suit. Visionaries of a new society were plentiful among European intellectuals of the day, and commanders of social movements were to be found in every country, but few combined the two roles as well as Kuyper. It helped that he faced a situation made for his temperament and his worldview. He returned from exile onto a scene of stark polarities, where the ungodly seemed ascendant over the baffled disciples of the Lord.
Renewed in courage and energy as he had been by God on the mountaintops, Kuyper was ready to fight. Yet the fight would also take some unexpected turns. His theological target shifted for good from Modernists to people much closer to his own beliefs, while in politics he was aided by a callow opposition that overplayed its hand. The lower-education bill galvanized a counterforce that would not lead just to the Liberals’ defeat but to the creation of a whole new political system — one that was forged in significant part by Kuyper’s own hand.
Founding a Party
He pursued reform in both church and state simultaneously. First up was politics, for he arrived back in The Hague during the 1877 election season, more determined than ever to create a complete party apparatus. In fact, he had broken his long silence from Nice already in February to enjoin formal organization as “an urgent confessional necessity.” Other leaders in the group still demurred, but when the June elections gave the Liberal ticket a 60 percent majority in the Lower House of the States General, Kuyper’s case seemed proven. He quickly circulated an eighteen-point party platform for comment, amended it per suggestions, and then sent it around again in the fall. Finally approved by a provisional coordinating committee, the document went out on New Year’s Day 1878 to potential local chapters for discussion — until Kuyper published it in De Standaard a week later as the officially approved platform which local members were to endorse. To some committee members the announcement came as “a thunderclap out of a clear sky,” leaving them permanently distrustful of Kuyper. It was their introduction to a modern political operator.
Kuyper’s model for a political party had five requirements: that it be defined by a common set of principles and policy goals (the “program” or platform); that it be composed of formally organized chapters in as many localities as possible; that delegates from these chapters gather at national conventions to nominate candidates for Parliament; that endorsed candidates and sitting MPs, like the local chapters themselves, be bound by the party platform; and that party operations be coordinated by a central committee. These might seem to be the obvious building blocks of modern political organization, but until this moment they still waited to be discovered. As historian E. J. Hobsbawm notes, workers’ movements across Europe had accumulated plenty of grievances in the previous decades of liberal capitalist hegemony but had failed to gain ground precisely because they lacked “organization, ideology, and leadership.” Real potential for concerted opposition lay instead with the “little people” of the middling sort who had a national (not class) identity, yearned for respectability, sensed what a party mechanism offered them, and possessed the aptitude to exploit it. Kuyper was offering just that mechanism to just that audience, and for just that reason political incumbents — more accurately, the whole Dutch political class — objected, regardless of how they regarded his political philosophy. Dutch politics to this point had remained the preserve of elites who assumed deference from those of lower standing. Election campaigns and parliamentary sessions tended to be gentlemanly discussions in self-selected clubs, purged of frank questions of interest or fundamental philosophy. Politics was a game in which the quest for personal advantage was accepted, while ideology, divisiveness, and passion — especially popular passion — were not. Kuyper detested this system, and his proposals were well calculated to upset it.
At the same time Kuyper wanted passion to be disciplined by knowledge. Local elites were not to be replaced by “the people” themselves (as the socialists urged) but with a national leadership network defined by ideology and closely linked to the grassroots. Characteristically, Kuyper saw these two last elements as mutually dependent, so in March 1878 he began a yearlong series of commentary on the party platform in De Standaard. Upon completion, the seventy-three installments were published in book form as Ons Program, a two-volume, 1,300-page open-university course in applied Calvinistic political philosophy, meant to be kept close at hand by the party faithful. Not incidentally, the work put Kuyper’s personal imprint on the party’s creed, just as his editorship of De Standaard, which brought his voice directly to the rank and file, lent him enormous advantage in intra-party quarrels.
At the same moment that Kuyper began his commentary, the Liberal cabinet headed by Joannes Kappeyne van de Coppello introduced its lower-education reforms. The purpose of the bill was to make Dutch schools fit for the demands of modern times; its political significance was to bring a new generation of Liberals upon the national stage. Liberal legislation to date had focused on economic development by building communication and transportation infrastructure, enhancing material capital. Kappeyne’s Progressive Liberals recognized that, having been integrated into a global economy premised upon technological innovation, the Netherlands now had to develop its human capital. To that task they brought a loud, dogmatic version of the earlier Liberals’ quiet secularism. Religion, they insisted, especially religious education among young children, bred ignorance, superstition, and backwardness. It stunted the full development of the individual and of the nation.
Accordingly, it was with two barrels — philosophical and practical — that Kappeyne shot his education bill across the bow of the faithful. All schools would have to meet costly new mandates of smaller class sizes, healthier facilities, broader and more rigorous curriculum, higher teacher salaries, and stricter teacher qualifications. To help with the expense, the national government was ready to supplement local funding (heretofore the source of school budgets) up to thirty percent of the total bill, but not a penny would go to religious schools. This meant that if these schools survived, it would be as havens for the wealthy — but the wealthy were precisely the social class not interested in religious schooling. Regarding education, Kuyper did not have to invoke “mortal threat” as a mere figure of speech.
The School Petition
Kappeyne’s bill galvanized the opposition as nothing else could, and Kuyper improvised to make the most of it. In scores of towns, villages, and city precincts across the country, committees sprang into action to petition their legislators against the measure. Usually these were not the new political clubs Kuyper had been planting, but entire church councils along with veterans of the old Anti-School-Law League, which to this point had variously contested and cooperated with Kuyper’s budding organization.
Kuyper now organized a committee that would coordinate all these local efforts into one great national campaign, the “People’s Petition.” A surviving forty-seven-page register of local correspondence committees testifies to the detail with which he attended to recruitment and maintenance, while his daily columns in De Standaard comprise a model of movement-promotion. The entire effort culminated in a one-week drive in July 1878 to gather signatures. The results were unprecedented: 305,596 signed (including some illiterates who “made their mark”) on the Protestant side, and over 164,000 more in a parallel Catholic campaign. The signatures were delivered to the king, who by this time had the duly-passed Kappeyne bill on his desk awaiting his signature. William indicated that among the delegation presenting the petition “that agitator” would not be welcome, but Kuyper knew how to handle the situation. When the king signed the bill, as he was constitutionally obliged to do, Kuyper mourned that “Orange has broken with the past” and forsaken the people. Meanwhile, he had a precious data base upon which to build a party. The Standaard and Heraut subscription rolls (about 5,000 each) constituted a likely list of leaders, and the petition listed the recruits. He also could see public sentiment finally coming around to his sense that history was nearing a crisis, demanding a choice between stark alternatives.
Some opponents would criticize Kuyper’s as a single-issue party — that, despite the weekly commentary running in De Standaard before, during, and after the petition campaign, treating every facet of national politics from colonies to waterways. It is more accurate to see education as the party’s catalyst and heart. So it was in many countries at the time, for secular and religious parties alike: thus the recently fought kulturkampf in the German Empire on the right, the pending campaign for laïcité in the French Republic on the left, the perennial endeavor in the United States to establish a “Christianity above creeds” (i.e., a generic Unitarianism) in public schools against Roman Catholicism. In the freshly consolidated nation-states of the 1870s, public education served as the first place to cultivate collective identity with the nation, and no regime countenanced dual loyalties. Kuyper did not exactly either; he thought a good Calvinist could be a good — in fact would be the best — Hollander. But as we will detail further in the next chapter, his political philosophy made freedom of conscience the heart of national culture, made education a function of conscience — that is, of religion — and of the family, and made the family the first counterpoise to the engrossing state. Simply put, Kuyper, with many others of all convictions on both sides of the Atlantic, thought the future rested on the education question.
Kuyper was blessed not only with a perfect issue but with an odd mirror-image in the person of Kappeyne. Both men came from outside the traditional Dutch political class and disdained its genteel clubbiness. Both thought the world was ruled by ideas and wanted parties to set theirs forth in comprehensive form. Both favored ideological polarization and radical innovations to build a democratic future. Kappeyne’s party even pioneered a critical demolition of classic Liberal assumptions that Kuyper happily repeated for years to come. The “universal laws” that supposedly governed the operation of society and that were supposedly discovered by neutral reason amounted to an expression of group interests, the Progressives declared; witness the rather embarrassing prosperity that the Liberals’ social base had enjoyed under their party’s hegemony. Thus, shibboleths like free trade and the minimal state could only be defended prudentially, not from “eternal principle,” and only if those policies demonstrated clear utilitarian advantage over other options.
At the same time Kappeyne posed the perfect opposite to Kuyper as a person. A witty lawyer and bohemian dandy, he seemed even to neutral observers to treat life as a game, and politics simply as the most interesting sport in town. In fact, the Progressive Liberals as a whole tended to see themselves as an intermediate generation called to clear out the old for the sake of the new without sharing any firm conviction as to what that new would, or should, entail. Actually, they held two convictions: that public life be purged of any residue of religion, the oldest and most seductive body of universalist illusions; and that law be understood as the register of competing social interests, aiming to keep a rough equilibrium as these interests evolved under no apparent guide but their own internal momentum. Thus combining the style of Oscar Wilde with the convictions of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Kappeyne had to be the bête noire to one as absolutely earnest, and earnest for absolutes, as Kuyper. To top it all off, Kappeyne, reared in a Christian home, had not simply lost his faith but thrown it away. He raised the specter of a future civilization bereft not only of faith but of hope and love as well — cynical, remorseless, rudderless, and hollow.
Just as Kuyper’s new career debuted in politics, the new cadre of leaders he called for emerged first in the church, and through an opening created by the very Higher Education law that the faithful had decried as the crack of doom. The 1876 Act was a modernizing measure on several fronts. By turning the theology faculties at state universities into departments for the “neutral” or “scientific” study of religion as a human phenomenon, the Dutch government pioneered the discipline of religious studies around the world. Simultaneously, it authorized the national Reformed church to fill (and fund) collateral chairs at the universities to train clergy. It upgraded the Amsterdam gymnasium to university status to expand access to higher education. Finally, it authorized any private party to found its own institution so long as it provided at least three faculties and an endowment of 100,000 guilders ($40,000 US). Thus, soon after the City University of Amsterdam opened in October 1877, Kuyper joined a small group at the home of William Hovy to strategize. They first mulled over the new theological chairs. Perhaps if they provided the funding, the group thought, the authorities would fill the positions with professors of orthodox sentiment. That possibility evaporated — to the outrage of the Calvinist rank and file around the country — when the nominations filed by the church appointments board included no such names. Why not exercise the other provision of 1876, Hovy ventured at the next meeting, and found a university of their own?
Kuyper welcomed the idea nearly as much as that of a political party. He had mused about the virtues of a “free university” — free from the controls of church or state — already as a pastor in 1870, and he had never forgotten his old dream of being a professor. But the notion was sure to trigger opposition among national-church loyalists, not least from the church’s moderate wing. For a university to offer theological education on its own was to them not only a legal anomaly but a direct threat to the Dutch Reformed Church’s normative position in the nation. A divided Protestantism, after all, could open the way to greater Catholic influence. That had been the objection ten years before to Kuyper’s proposals for pluralizing public elementary and secondary education; now he was broaching the same for pastoral training. Kuyper recognized how deep this fear ran in all segments of the national church, including the orthodox, so his newspaper columns had to emphasize how forlorn were the circumstances in the church, and particularly how hopeless were the prospects for orthodox instruction in the revamped university system.
His university initiative therefore took the opposite strategy of the school campaign. That first campaign had been as ecumenically Christian as possible; the university would be as strictly Calvinistic as he could make it. First, he had to warrant a separate institution at all, and a university at that. Some Reformed moderates proposed renewed efforts to win orthodox slots in the new university system — alternatively, to fund private tutors whom orthodox students could seek out for supplementary instruction. This had been a common practice in Réveil days, but Kuyper declared it wholly inadequate for the new era. The “methodistic” and “evangelical” approach of the Réveil might suffice for “the care of souls and preaching, evangelism and missions, philanthropy and dilettantism,” he allowed, but when it came to matters of “scholarship, politics, and law,” then “Calvinism,” with its formal institutions, comprehensive system, and tight organization, was required.
Moreover, the problem in the church’s educational program had spread so deep and wide that the suggested palliatives were worse than useless. For six consecutive weeks Kuyper opened his column in De Heraut with the same plaint:
Our future preachers shall henceforth be taught the core of theology, namely dogmatics . . . by men whose mindset for years already has deliberately sought to eradicate and ridicule the confession of the divine authority of Holy Scripture, of God’s Triune Being, of the divinity of the Son, of the personality of the Holy Spirit, and of atonement through the blood of the Lamb. . . . May this be passively indulged?
But why a whole university if theological education was the problem? The question was put most tellingly by Groen’s widow, whom Kuyper approached for a substantial donation. Why not join in with the seceded Christian Reformed Church’s seminary at Kampen, she probed. Kuyper replied that the crisis in culture went well beyond the capabilities of a mere “pastor-factory” to redress.
Kuyper and his allies kept on the initiative until October 31, 1878, the symbolic anniversary of Luther’s Reformation, when they convened a meeting at Utrecht to establish a “Union for Higher Education on a Reformed Basis.” That basis was specified as the three doctrinal standards established by the Synod of Dort in 1618-19: the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the synod’s own Canons against the Arminian Remonstrants. The announcement drew the fire of eminent pastors of conservative stripe, some of whom had just helped with the school campaign. The Rev. J. J. van Toorenenbergen, a longtime critic of Groen’s confessionalist approach in Réveil circles, scotched the new university’s constitution as educationally sterile and historically ill-informed. He argued that the formulas upon which Kuyper would build a university had been given a loose construction already in 1620, lest scholarship become mere catechesis; Kuyper was extrapolating his own perceived embattlement in the present back to a more tolerant age. Kuyper thundered back that if anyone had presumed a climate of conflict and danger, it had been the august assembly at Dort and the theologians it supervised. Then and now, “enemies from without . . . and enemies from within” assailed the church, necessitating the strictest confessional line in defense. Fueling Kuyper’s enmity was Van Toorenenbergen’s successful counsel to Elisabeth Groen van Prinsterer that she withhold her money from the cause. To Kuyper’s chagrin, she donated not the quarter of the 100,000-guilder endowment he had hoped for, but a nominal 1,000 guilders.
Kuyper’s second polemic went on against a onetime pastor acquaintance at Utrecht, Andries Bronsveld. Also an able journalist, Bronsveld personified the passion to maintain national-church unity against Roman Catholic incursions. He regarded Kuyper’s proposed university as certain to ruin the first and facilitate the second. Since that combination spelled the worst possible calamity for the nation, he declaimed, there could be no moral right, just as there was little scholarly warrant, for such an institution. The only plausible end it might serve, he suspected, was to feed Kuyper’s threefold ambition to be professor, politician, and pope. To such charges Kuyper replied at book-length, addressing the issues but also asking his readers to judge who in the situation was sounding like a demagogue. Neither combatant prevailed outside his own constituency, but that did not keep them from carrying on a war of words far into the future.
Beyond personal animosities, these quarrels were the Dutch version of a tension that flared everywhere the Christian-Democratic movement spread. For all the anti-clericalism that provoked the movement, the cause drew more opposition than support from national church leaders, especially at its formative stages. The ecclesiatics — typically Roman Catholic bishops, but in the Dutch case, Reformed synodical boards and their clerical apologists like Van Toorenenbergen and Bronsveld — worried about the lay initiative that Christian Democracy aroused. They were also concerned that its agenda would enmesh the faithful too deep in worldly affairs, but they worried most about control. As Kuyper was demonstrating, there could be no university or political party such as he envisioned without mass mobilization, and mass mobilization, according to the leading student of European Christian Democracy, “carried important costs that the church was a priori unwilling to undertake” — principally, “the weakening of hierarchical control.” Here Bronsveld was prescient: within five years of the founding of the Free University, Kuyper would be inciting the faithful to “throw off the yoke of the synodical hierarchy” and reform — or leave — the national church.
Even some friends wondered about Kuyper’s readiness to alienate potential allies. His closest collaborator was Alexander F. de Savornin Lohman, a jurist of significant pedigree, a future professor at the university, and Groen’s successor in Parliament as Kuyper was in the press. Lohman liked straight lines in law but less so in theology. He worried that the Dortian formula afforded too narrow a base for academic research and proposed that the Apostles’ Creed be used instead. Failing that, he suggested that anyone who could sign Dort’s Three Forms in good faith, including the parties Kuyper had been battling, ought to be invited in. Kuyper replied with a formula at once mystical, historical, and dogmatic. Trust not what Ethical theologians professed with their pens, he wrote Lohman, but intuit what they mean in their hearts. Know that the stricter formula simply anticipated the inevitable future: “Protestantism in the Netherlands will eventually be Calvinist or nothing at all.” Leave it to the future to remodel or refurbish the university, he advised; as a mistake in the foundations could never be fixed, it was best to cast them without the slightest ambiguity.
Support for his strategy came in telling rhetoric from his old professor, J. H. Scholten. Most of the people calling themselves orthodox in these quarrels were really liberal or half-baked in their theology, he wrote Kuyper at Christmas 1879. From “the historical standpoint” they were less Calvinist than the Modernists, while their ecclesiology was unworthy of the name of Reformed. They were semi-Arian in Christology, had “no genuine trinitarians” in their ranks, and were uniformly captive to “the dualism” and “mechanistic worldview of our time.” Personally, said the old Modernist, he found Kuyper’s attempt at theological “repristination” to be “scientifically impossible,” but it was certainly better than the “half-Lutheran indeterminism and synergism” that characterized his opponents. Scholten signed off “with high regard and also with the wish that from your work something might grow for the Kingdom of God.” The following year, a month before the Free University opened, he added a valedictory postcard. “If our paths from here on out diverge, the feelings from the past do not die.” The reference “1 Cor[inthians] 13:13b” followed: the greatest of these is love.
Building a Movement
With the foundations set, the institutions themselves opened in quick succession. In January 1879 a national Union for the School with the Bible was formalized at a meeting in Utrecht. In April the first delegate assembly of the Antirevolutionary Party met in the same building and quickly ratified the proposed platform, central committee, and formal party structure. In August the Free University was announced with its requisite faculties and endowment. Kuyper would be professor of theology at the university, chairman of the central committee of the party, and perennial propagandist for the Christian schools in his newspapers. (He left formal involvement in school governance to Lohman.) His greatest contribution, however, was melding these ventures into a cause, building a movement that would take them from their exceedingly modest beginnings to long-term prosperity and shape the future of the country in the process. The elementary and secondary schools mattered most immediately to people, and they were the most readily built. The university and party were more novel and required more calculated support. Kuyper built that support with parallel populist structures.
The pomp and circumstance with which the Free University opened on October 20, 1880, could hardly hide the meagerness of its resources. Kuyper acknowledged as much near the end of his inaugural address: “And so our little School comes on the scene, blushing with embarrassment at the name university, poor in money, most frugally endowed with scholarly might, more lacking than receiving human favor.” In hard fact, its three faculties numbered but five professors: three in theology, one in law, one in letters. They taught a grand total of eight students. They had no library to speak of, an annual budget of 50,000 guilders ($20,000 US), and met for the first two years in the Scottish Mission Church on the edge of Amsterdam’s red-light district. Most of the students turned out to be interested in theology, just as Elisabeth Groen van Prinsterer had predicted. Even so, they had to take their qualifying exams twice, because the school’s degrees were not recognized by the government. By 1885, however, the student body had grown to fifty, and by 1896 to over one hundred. If they still mostly enrolled in the theology department, they made it one of the largest in the Netherlands.
More novel in the Netherlands was the institution’s success as a private undertaking, thanks to Kuyper’s cultivation of a cross-class constituency. Half of the initial endowment came from two donors — Hovy and Amsterdam stockbroker T. Sanders, who contributed 25,000 guilders each. Another 10,000 came from Rotterdam businessman P. van Ordt; six more individuals put up 10,000 together. That left 30,000 guilders, not to mention annual gifts and future endowment growth, to come from a national rank-and-file of modest means. In short order the “VU busje,” a tin box for spare change, became a staple item on Calvinist kitchen counters around the country. News of the Union became a staple genre in Kuyper’s papers. Faculty pamphlets and study guides became staple materials for church discussion groups. Topping it off was the annual meeting of the Union membership, held mid-summer in quasi-holiday circumstances. After the dispatch of formal business, attendees would hear lectures by university worthies, followed by discussion sessions with the shopkeepers, clerks, grade-school teachers, and farmers who had come to view this as their school.
Among all the other institutions he built, Kuyper’s choice of a university was notable. In part he was anticipating the massive expansion of higher education just underway around the North Atlantic world in 1880. Most of the new universities, public or private, aimed to promote national or technological “progress,” however, not to supply leaders for a religious movement. In this respect Kuyper was copying a venerable design in both Western history and Christian missions, which saw the road of advance to be paved with books and study. He paid an enormous compliment to the value of higher learning: “To possess wisdom is a divine trait in our being,” he intoned at the university’s inaugural ceremonies, and to develop that wisdom ranked among the finest of human pursuits. Scholarship sought to plumb the very bounds of being, celestial and terrestrial: “Thinking after God what He has thought before and about and in us”; grasping “the being- and life-consciousness not of a single person but of humanity through all the ages!” Moreover, down on earth “scholarship often stands at the forefront . . . [of those] means that God has granted nobler peoples to defend their liberties,” both civil and religious. Mindful “that every State power tends to look upon all liberty with a suspicious eye,” a vital bulwark for freedom could be built only with a well-grounded and systematic knowledge of law and history that thorough study could provide. In religion it was notable that, of all New Testament authors, “the man of Tarsus was the [one who had been] academically trained, and it was from that Pauline treasure chest, not from the mystical John nor from the practical James, that Luther drew the freedom of the Reformation.”
Thus engaged, ordinary people could enter into the process of redeeming higher learning even as they were elevated by it. Their participation might save learning from pedantry: “Is this not a practical solution to the problem of connecting learning to life? Must not scholars who are supported by the people’s money grow closer to the people and more averse to all that is dry and abstract?” In turn, was it not inspiring in a flat and jaded land like the Netherlands to see (spitting back the elite’s epithet for his followers) “the least respected of the ‘non-thinking’ part of the nation come running from the plow and the feed-trough to collect money to build a university”? It might be the Calvinists and not the Progressives who did the most to enhance the country’s human capital. But this demanded even greater sacrifice from his followers:
. . . is not giving itself a power and the ability to part with money a moral asset? Who then can assess the moral capital that will accrue to our people precisely through this costly institution? . . . For with us precisely the “struggle for life” [here invoking Kappeyne’s Darwinian shibboleth] generates the power of glorious devotion. In the money entrusted to us lies something more, something higher than the intrinsic worth of the metal. In the gold that flows into our coffers there is prayer, there is love, and the sweat of the brow.
It would take a cynic of Kappeyne’s proportions to withstand that rhetoric.
Since political parties lacked the lustrous precedents of a university, Kuyper’s initiatives there posed a greater challenge. For all the fervor roused by the People’s Petition just the summer before, and for all his networking prior to the meeting, the inaugural convention of the Antirevolutionary Party in April 1879 attracted only twenty-eight delegates. Just four years later, however, the party numbered ninety-five chapters, and four years after that, 154. In short, it was not in forming but in deepening and broadening commitment that Kuyper’s true success as a party organizer lay. His right arm in this effort was journalism. Projecting daily events on a screen of cosmic scale, he cast politics (just as his simultaneous publicity for the university did scholarship) as an arena where people faced basic choices over ultimate stakes. As the university traced the thoughts of God across nature and society, the party would try to get the “ordinances of the Lord” adopted by popular consent as the law of the land. Both would warn against the depredations sure to arise from the humanistic alternatives.
Kuyper’s organizational left arm was more mundane but also more innovative: the creation of an entire political culture among his following. Politics was not to be just an election-eve affair, but a year-round interest, and it was not to involve only eligible voters but the unenfranchised — the whole community — who shared the party’s concerns and for whom the voters had to speak. The party, like the university, would have its binding rituals, especially the delegates’ convention every election season, where the assembled faithful could personally grasp the national scale of their movement and cheer the oratory of their leaders. Kuyper unfailingly rose to these occasions. For Kuyper, politics, like higher education, was for everyone, not least because it was — or could be — an elevated pursuit. That “could be” depended upon nothing so much as activating, educating, and sustaining enthusiasm among ordinary people. If traditionalists in his party deeply suspected democracy, Kuyper saw that here too a redemptive cycle might emerge, this time between people and politics. His cultivation of a consciousness that sustained, even as it was sustained by, an activated community represented a breakthrough that other Dutch parties had to match, or face oblivion.
In effecting this structure, however, Kuyper the operator crossed Kuyper the theorist. On paper the Antirevolutionary Party was an affiliation of local chapters built from the bottom up to the national level. In fact, its Central Committee — especially with Kuyper as chairman — went out and planted, cultivated, directed, and disciplined those chapters. It encouraged affiliates in a region to start their own news sheets, linked those subscription lists to De Standaard’s, and prodded local chairmen for updated reports on past and potential voting patterns. Some leaders tired of the drill; it was one reason that Amersfoort chairman P. C. Mondriaan quit and moved to Winterswijk near the German border, where he started an arts school. His most famous pupil would be his son, Piet; the more immediate product was the stock of cartoons that Mondriaan Sr. continued to supply to the Antirevolutionary press. Kuyper’s command in all these initiatives, along with his fixation upon national at the expense of provincial and local affairs, not only contradicted the party’s credo but prompted suspicions that he aspired to dictatorial powers. The loudest charges came from the outside, but a number of insiders echoed them. Sometimes these were rival journalists, looking for more clout; sometimes they were members of Parliament or local leaders, resisting central control; sometimes they were national-church loyalists suspicious of Kuyper’s ecclesiastical designs; sometimes they were “aristocratic” traditionalists wary of Kuyper’s “democratic” reforms. Often enough, these circles overlapped. For now, the various elements in the party held together, but there was plenty of potential for splintering once it gained power.
Tribe and Family
Kuyper’s initiatives built a thick sociology that — just as conservatives warned — replaced traditional local hierarchies with a national network as the locus of identity and social control. The arrangement worked by overlapping roles and interlocking directorates. A village baker, for instance, might be a member of the local church council, an officer in the Antirevolutionary local, brother to a member of the Christian school board, and husband to an earnest volunteer for the provincial Bible and missions societies. The latest Standaard and Heraut would lie in the parlor behind the shop to keep the family informed about the latest developments in the struggle. If some of the children moved to the city for work, they would find the same organizations and reading there. In fact, their first jobs might well have been arranged along the movement network, and at the right church the newcomers could find a number of potential mates whose families had the same loyalties. The pattern even stretched across the oceans to Dutch immigrant communities in the United States and South Africa.
This network was still more pronounced at the elite level. The roster of the boards supervising the party, the university, and — eventually — the separate denomination that Kuyper would lead out of the national church featured the same family names for generations. The inner ring closest to Kuyper was especially prominent either in their own persons, their relatives, or their acolytes, three categories that tended to mesh in a thicket of intermarriages that is daunting to sort out. Thus Kuyper’s oldest son, Herman, would marry the daughter of one of his chief Amsterdam backers (and neighbor) and follow him onto the theological faculty at the Free University. A son of Lohman would marry a daughter of Hovy and join his father on the law faculty. One of Lohman’s daughters would marry Hovy’s business partner; one of his aunts married Groen’s brother-in-law; and his widowed sister-in-law married a powerful pastor and professor in the Christian Reformed Church, Lucas Lindeboom. Another of Hovy’s daughters would marry the son of Frederik L. Rutgers, Kuyper’s closest colleague on the university faculty, himself a graduate of Leiden just a year ahead of Kuyper — who in turn had had Rutgers’s father for a professor. Hovy himself, after his first wife died, married into the Esser clan, descendants of an old Amsterdam regent family whose heir had become so immersed in Réveil spirituality as to forsake his considerable secular interests to become a street preacher in The Hague. This Isaak Esser, who chose Hovy’s sister in his second marriage, produced one son who would marry a Rutgers daughter, another who would marry a Hovy sister, and third who would marry Herman Kuyper’s sister-in-law. A daughter of Isaak’s marriage to Hovy’s sister would wed Anthony Brummelkamp Jr., who helped Kuyper on De Standaard, on the party Central Committee, in Parliament, on the university board, and in merging his own native Christian Reformed Church (of which his father was a founder) to the denomination that Kuyper founded.
If Brummelkamp exemplified the principle of interlocking directorates, Hovy perfected it. Between marriages, parenthood, and raising his brewery to the Netherlands’ top echelon (where it successfully competed with the upstart Heineken firm), Hovy served as Kuyper’s most faithful financier, as co-founder (in 1876) and perpetual board member of the Antirevolutionary labor association, Patrimonium, for seventeen years as president of the university’s board of directors, for the same duration as Antirevolutionary representative on the Amsterdam city council, for ten years as a member of the provincial legislature, for fourteen as member of the national Upper House, for decades on the boards of the national Christian school union and the Amsterdam Christian nursing home, besides being in season and out a member of the Amsterdam church council on which he had helped engineer Kuyper’s initial call to the city in 1870 and in whose orthodox caucus he thereafter collaborated to plot local and national church reforms. With a few other figures replicating one arc or another of this circle, and with the children of the founders extending the regime beyond the Netherlands into the administration of the East Indies early in the twentieth century, it can be said that Kuyper’s movement fulfilled not only the dynamics of democratization but also Robert Michel’s theory of the circulation of elites to which he believed democratization was prone. That is, while democracy might give “the people” some sense of power, it certainly afforded ambitious figures of the second rank a mechanism by which to move up.
The nodal point of the Calvinist network remained the home, and Kuyper proved equally methodical there. In June 1878, amidst the school-petition campaign, his family had expanded to seven children with the birth of Guillaume, named after Groen. When the Free University opened in 1880, he moved them back from The Hague to Amsterdam, into a townhouse at Prins Hendrikkade 173, one block away from their old place. The house was owned by Hovy, near his brewery and the accommodations he had built for his workers. It still looked out over the old East Dock of the Dutch West Indies Company, but it would also be within view of Amsterdam’s Central Station when that was completed in 1889. Kuyper could view the old and the new in the Dutch economy from his upstairs window. In the home Kuyper supervised a regimen familiar to his followers. He kept close knowledge of each child’s conduct and concerns. The main meal of the day featured Bible reading and prayer, kneeling, for the entire household including staff. In the same posture did the household observe New Year’s Eve as a “watch night,” shorn of revelry.
On the other hand, the Kuyper home showed a diversity at some odds with his movement’s sociology. He tended to attract sons from the opposition as his students, probably because they found in him what he had loved in Scholten: cosmic sweep, logical system, and vital passion, unlike the compromises and technicalities of their fathers. Moreover, just as his own closest friend from university days was the Remonstrant pastor Isaac Hooykaas, Kuyper’s children cultivated associates outside strict Calvinistic circles.
One of the most detailed, and respectful, accounts of Kuyper family life comes from a student of Ethical slant, Christian Hunnigher, who spent a lot of time at the house as a schoolmate of the oldest sons. To his testimony we owe the remarkable revelation that at some time in this period Kuyper stopped attending church on a regular basis. When he did go, there had to be a non-Calvinist in the pulpit, for “sermons from likeminded ministers would — in his [Kuyper’s] words — ‘thump his head like hammers.’” More often, he stayed at home Sundays, using the worship hour to write a meditation for the next issue of De Heraut. His desk had become his pulpit, a national readership his congregation, his study a populist version of the “sanctuary” where, in his graduate-school reveries, he dreamed of spending his days writing great thoughts in communion with great men. In the throes of the battles that lay ahead, Kuyper would invoke that dream now and then, professing to desire nothing more than to set aside all polemics, withdraw from public view, and devote himself to scholarship. That he had the talent to do so was never in doubt, but the genius he showed at organizing a movement kept that dream from ever coming to pass. Instead, Kuyper himself became a great man to his followers, and for the next forty years they would drink from the unending stream of prose that flowed from that study.