Of all the vows Kuyper made in the depths of the church struggle, his foreswearing of politics seemed the least plausible. And so it was. His Encyclopedia did appear in full, his Dogmatics in the form of lecture notes by his students, but his commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans never was forthcoming. Practicing politics, not writing political theology, increasingly commanded Kuyper’s future. Even when out of office, he never left off editorializing, organizing, and maneuvering in party councils, and those labors eventually landed him back in the parliamentary chair that once, “rejoic[ing] with my whole heart,” he had “escaped from for good.”
His reengagement began in 1887, right after the Doleantie, with the revision of the Netherlands’ Constitution and the government’s initial responses to the worsening Dutch economy. It climaxed in 1897 with old friends lost, his party split, and another close encounter with psychosomatic collapse. In between, it proceeded by some of Kuyper’s most far-sighted and creative work: in political philosophy, a linking of the old antirevolutionary critique to the emerging industrial economy in defense of workers’ rights; in program, a leftward tack that turned the Antirevolutionary Party into a thoroughgoing Christian Democratic organization, purged of the old elite who had tried to keep it safe for conservatism. When these “aristocrats” saw Kuyper in this decade, they saw red — in both senses.
By 1887 Dutch politics had reached an impasse that stemmed back a dozen years, to the time of Kuyper’s first term in Parliament. The religious parties had enough seats to insist on changes to educational policy, while the Liberals were hopelessly divided between traditional and progressive wings over the question of franchise extension. The relentless agitation on both issues in press and Parliament, not to mention the boiling economic crisis, effectively killed the classic Liberal dream of a politics of reason — of liberal Reason, that is, whereby public affairs would be directed by men of broad vision and secular education, chosen by select peers and steering the state by the laws of nature. By the mid-1880s traditional Liberals were arguing against franchise extension from raw partisan calculation, not from principle, while religious conservatives stood on principle for educational equity but against democracy. The stalemate left Parliament crippled amid the turbulence of 1886, when a compromise education bill was vetoed by the Upper House, still under Liberal control, while the Eel Riot and all the social unrest it manifested elicited from the Lower House only obtuse legalism.
It was the need to settle the royal succession (unsettled by the recent death of William III’s sole surviving son and the aging monarch’s own imminent demise) that provided the occasion for a constitutional revision that broke this deadlock. The result was a classic Dutch study in ambivalence. On educational matters the 1848 charter was not amended at all, once the Liberals pledged to stop reading it as exclusively secularist. As to suffrage, the new measures, while explicitly rejecting universal suffrage, enfranchised any adult male who showed “signs of capability and prosperity.” In practice the electorate was expanded from 12 to 27 percent of the adult male population. The electoral map was also overhauled. The larger old districts with two delegates elected on alternating four-year intervals were split up into twice as many units with one representative each, the whole lot to be elected every four years. Whatever the re-framers’ intentions, the new system was a clear step toward democracy and dramatic shifts in government. It was a table set to Kuyper’s tastes.
He responded with an upgraded dose of familiar prescriptions. If secular and religious elites deemed the unschooled unqualified to vote, Kuyper moved to educate them. De Standaard inaugurated a question-and-answer column in which subscribers could have the fine points of politics applied to their particular situations. This education included campaign techniques that could have been borrowed from an American political boss, or from Kuyper’s reorganization of diaconal services during his Amsterdam pastorate. The whole country was divided up into sections, districts, and wards. For each locality a list of likely Antirevolutionary voters was compiled, and each of these was leafleted by young volunteers recruited by ward leaders who were themselves part of a hierarchy of supervisors going all the way up to party central, which supplied the propaganda materials. Advice on how to visit potential voters recalled Kuyper’s own practices of pastoral calling: “Proceed quietly, calmly, and with assurance. Don’t use big words. . . . Go house to house, man to man, and keep records so that you know what’s been taken care of.” On the new expanded landscape of Dutch politics, one historian concludes, “there was no party that worked its electorate as systematically as the ARP.”
With the rank and file in tow, Kuyper made sure things were also coordinated at the top. The ARP delegates’ convention approved a fourteen-point action plan that translated the party’s general program into concrete legislative goals. Measures were debated by the delegates in open session, an education in itself as well as a progressive step in Dutch political practice. Going into a campaign with a specific platform was equally novel.
Most startling of all was the transcendence of an ancient religious hostility. Kuyper helped arrange a meeting between Calvinist and Catholic leaders that forged a plan of comity whereby each side would support the other’s candidate in the run-off phase of the general elections. After three hundred years of fulminating against the pope and for a Protestant Netherlands, Kuyper’s Calvinists now joined Roman Catholics to restore a Christian Netherlands. If both secular and religious opponents assailed the result as a “monster alliance” between Dort and Rome, this particular child of Frankenstein would sit in most Dutch cabinets throughout the twentieth century.
It had its first chance immediately. The newly expanded electorate of 1888 returned a 53-47 religious majority to the Lower House, and under the leadership of Baron Aeneas Mackay the first confessional cabinet was installed, to trumpet fanfares across the religious press. Within a year the education question was addressed with a bill that provided state subsidies for teachers’ salaries at religious schools.
The social question came next. Responding to the findings of an 1887 parliamentary inquest into labor conditions, the Lower House passed legislation that barred any kind of paid employment for children under age twelve, instituted protective measures for women and for children aged twelve to sixteen, and set the standard work day at eleven hours. These were significant measures. The Labor Act was the Netherlands’ first since the Child Labor bill of 1874, and the Education Act addressed the coalition’s oldest grievance.
But increasingly Kuyper grew restless. Some of the party’s MPs, he complained, supported the Liberal notion that this was the final, not the first, step on the education front. The deeper problem, from his point of view, was structural. While the Antirevolutionaries were demonstrating their capacity to rule, refuting an old canard of the opposition, that very capacity came from the predominance in the cabinet of parliamentary veterans who had long resisted Kuyper’s ideological intensity and his command of party organization. In fact, by Kuyper’s measure there was only one true-blue Antirevolutionary in the cabinet, Levinus W. C. Keuchenius at Colonial Affairs. Tellingly, it was around Keuchenius that the cabinet’s first crisis occurred, and because of the very qualities that Kuyper championed in him.
The Liberal majority in the Upper House rejected the Colonial Affairs budget for 1890 as a rebuke to the minister’s ideological outspokenness and otherwise “ungentlemanly” behavior. Kuyper took the occasion to speak out publicly for his friend, and for party discipline. It was a matter of honor for the entire cabinet to stand by each of its members, he insisted, so it should either disband the Upper House or resign. When neither step ensued but Keuchenius was dropped instead, Kuyper took it as a mark of the old half-heartedness now ruining the party’s moment of opportunity. This government would not, could not, establish a lasting standard for Antirevolutionaries the way that Thorbecke had for the Liberals, he mourned, because it lacked the combination of character and consistency that Thorbecke had brought to the table. Let it fall then when it must, and let the party learn better for the next round.
In fact, it fell the following year over the question of military service, an issue that divided the coalition as much as education united it. Kuyper’s program had called for an end to the purchasing of exemptions from conscription so as to make the burden of military service fall more equitably across class lines. The move would upgrade the quality of the army above its current caliber of paupers and proletariats, thus reduce the hauteur of the officer corps, and instill a national spirit more consistently across the land. Roman Catholics tended to buy exemptions more often than did Protestants, both out of fear of the moral squalor of the barracks and to protect prospective priests from the delays and dangers of military life. When the military service bill of 1891 failed to claim a majority, the Mackay cabinet fell. Kuyper electrified the ensuing party delegates’ convention with one of his great keynote addresses, “Maranatha,” which cast the upcoming campaign in apocalyptic light. But instead of galvanizing a purer Antirevolutionary regime, the election turned the Dutch government over to Liberal cabinets for the next ten years.
The Colonial Question
It was appropriate that Kuyper’s disillusionment hinged on Keuchenius’s fall, for colonial matters called up hard passages from the nation’s past and hard questions for the party’s future. By 1890 the shift from the old state-controlled cultivation system to free markets in the East Indies was twenty years old and had run into all manner of problems. First of all, the move had sparked huge increases in state spending and oppression in the form of the war to “pacify” Aceh. Then too, the flood of entrepreneurs into the area had created a commercial bubble that threatened to burst in the mid-1880s and take down Dutch capital markets with it. The consequent shift to big-bank cartelization had the predictable result of inducing crony capitalism which, in the Billiton Affair of 1882, reached into the royal house. Most of all, the new policy had not brought the native peoples to the Liberals’ promised land but simply relocated their oppression from state exactions to free-market exploitation. Neither their culture nor their social system was prepared to deal with untrammeled capitalism, which included an extensive opium trade and the unregulated importation of coolies from China on top of persisting native slave labor.
In this context the Antirevolutionaries’ “Ethical Policy” won new attention. As detailed in Kuyper’s 1878 program, the approach substituted soft power for hard, development for exploitation, paternalism for neglect. It emphasized cultural over economic factors and hauled the Netherlands before the court of divine justice to atone for (critics would say, to rationalize) its colonial depredations. The East Indies confronted the Dutch with a debt of honor, Kuyper began, a debt that entailed stern obligations but also opened up a worthy destiny. All colonial policy was henceforth to be calibrated to native interests instead of those of the Dutch economy. First off, the government should abolish the slave and opium trades, whatever the cost to public or private purses. It should promote the Indies’ financial and, eventually, political independence. Hence it needed to cultivate a native civil service and native education. (In 1874, Kuyper pointed out, there were but forty-four native children in school out of a population of 20 million.)
It would be worse than neglect, however, for these future leaders to be acculturated to the crass materialism of trade or the philosophical materialism of the schools. To truly rise from “backwardness” to “maturity” (a construct Kuyper shared with most Western opinion of his day, conservative or progressive), the native peoples needed Christianity. While ensuring equal rights toward individuals of all faiths, Dutch administrators should give informal support to Christianity, as befit a nation of that heritage. They should remove any barriers to the propagation of the gospel, remove as well their support of Muslim chaplains and proselytizing, and give equal funding to Christian as well as public schools. To use later idioms, this qualified as either cultural imperialism or the indigenization of the gospel. In politics and education no less than religion, Indonesians must assimilate Western offerings to their own cultural patterns.
Of course, not a little of the homeland’s disputes echoed through this program, but for Kuyper the imbroglio at Colonial Affairs involved the personal as much as the political. Keuchenius’s combination of genuine expertise, ideological passion, and outsider status resonated with Kuyper all the way down. Born (1822) at Batavia (now Jakarta) to Dutch administrators there, Keuchenius quickly rose to high office himself, only to start publishing critiques of Dutch colonial conduct that registered back home like Multatuli* on a Calvinist slant. Upon returning to the Netherlands and standing for Parliament, Keuchenius reaffirmed this reputation by joining the Liberal opposition in 1866 in accusing the Conservative Minister for Colonial Affairs of corruption. The fierce floor fight that ensued built into a major constitutional crisis when King William insisted on royal prerogative to choose his own cabinet ministers. Keuchenius questioned the integrity and intelligence of the king in return (not least because his majesty was also scheming at the time to sell Luxembourg to the French); the Lower House upheld Keuchenius’s case and their own prerogative. The affair sealed Keuchenius and the Conservatives in lasting antipathy.
It was thus a sign of Groen van Prinsterer’s alienation from the Conservative party and its antirevolutionary poseurs that, in the campaign of 1871, Keuchenius was one of only three candidates to receive his endorsement. It was of lasting significance for Kuyper that he was one of the other two. The affinity between them only grew over time, so that Kuyper named his last-born son for Keuchenius, who served as godfather at the baptism. In family-systems theory Keuchenius provided Kuyper with a worthy substitute for his late brother Herman — a new brother who drew deeper on the faith the more he defended Indonesians’ interests, rather than losing his faith, as Herman had at war in Aceh. From a political point of view, Keuchenius’s fall in 1890 showed how marginal Kuyper was to the party’s parliamentary caucus, ruled as it was by the third member of Groen’s 1871 troika, Savornin Lohman. With this brother Kuyper had worked most closely to date; from here out they came into increasing conflict in a party civil war that would climax in 1894, one year after Keuchenius’s death.
Confronting Economic Crisis
Before that, however, Kuyper was taken up with the Netherlands’ continuing economic woes, a preoccupation that magnified intra-party tensions but also launched one of the most significant turns in the Antirevolutionary movement. In a concentrated span of writing and organizing that climaxed at a Christian Social Congress in November 1891, Kuyper led his followers to a forthright confrontation with the emerging industrial future. Economics had never been the strong suit of the Antirevolutionary cause, whose leaders, coming mostly from theology and law, tended to submerge economic questions beneath political-philosophical generalizations. The rank-and-file were habituated to assurances from the pulpit that employer benevolence and employee obedience were all that Christian ethics needed, or was permitted, to mention on the matter.
By the late 1880s these nostrums were manifestly inadequate. That decade saw not just a relative but an absolute downturn in the Dutch economy after an era of easy expansion. The agricultural sector was in the middle of what turned out to be a twenty-year depression, drowning under a flood of imported American and Ukrainian grain. The infant industrial sector stumbled over this first hurdle and could not keep full employment for its own workers, much less absorb the mass of idled people from the countryside. While strikes and labor violence never swept the Netherlands as they did nearby in Belgium and the mining regions of France, local shutdowns in the provinces and the Eel Riot in the capital augured to fearful eyes what might yet be. In short, at home as in the colonies, the 1880s exposed the limits of the free-market economy and invited alternative proposals.
For Kuyper the problem was not external; it threatened his movement from within. The issue came to a head in Patrimonium, a Christian labor organization that included employers alongside workers. Among the former was Kuyper’s major funder, Amsterdam brewer Willem Hovy. Since its founding in 1876 it had been content with a program of class cooperation and moral uplift, but by 1891, when it had grown to be the largest union in the country, its worker side was chafing under the pains of the depression and their leaders’ inability, or reluctance, to do anything about them. It scored the inadequacies of the Mackay cabinet’s new Labor Act. It protested the weak voice that laborers had in ARP councils — no surprise since they still lacked the right to vote. Still, “the lordly gentlemen we help elect” should pay attention, declared Patrimonium President — and Hovy employee — Klaas Kater at the union’s 1890 convention. “They must not think they can rely on us forever as their hewers of wood and drawers of water” during campaign season and then forget about us at The Hague. Nor was it truly antirevolutionary to think that “plutocrats and aristocrats know the needs of our back alleys” or have any desire to alleviate them. It was time for greater worker representation in party and in Parliament — time, therefore, for universal suffrage. Were such steps not forthcoming, Kater warned, it might be time “to break with the ARP and form our own party!” Even stronger tones emanated from the Frisian countryside, in the nation’s northwest. Patrimonium leaders there complained that most farms were owned by absentee landlords who cared nothing of their hirelings’ lack of food and shelter, even as the rural slump deepened and a series of fierce winters brought starving children to death’s door. “Our Frisian Ireland” needed not just universal suffrage but the nationalization and redistribution of land, cried the plaintiffs. Some clergy among them invoked the writings of the American progressive Henry George and an Old Testament model of “Mosaic socialism.”
Faced with an exodus from the ARP and fearing the lure of the new Dutch socialist movement, which was especially strong in Friesland, Kuyper called for a Christian Social Congress to be held coincident with the Patrimonium convention the next November. Modeled on similar meetings recently convened by Belgian Catholics and German Protestants, the Congress was to bring together Dutch Protestants of all ranks for a thorough discussion of the “social question” and a set of biblical answers thereunto. Then in May 1891 the bar was set higher with the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” which launched a century of Catholic social thought.
Thus Protestant honor, harmony within his movement, the road to social stability, and the alleviation of crying need all hung in the balance in Kuyper’s mind as the Congress approached. He responded with one of his most scintillating addresses, “Christianity and the Social Question.” It assimilated antirevolutionary political philosophy to the social-democratic agenda, laid out a stark challenge to conservatives within his movement, and brought the audience of a thousand that heard it to their feet in tumultuous applause.
But this was not mere opportunism on Kuyper’s part, for he had shown a persistent concern for labor issues across three decades of public life. He had chafed at the local count’s suzerainty in Beesd, had preached on “Worker and Master according to the Ordinances of God” from his Utrecht pulpit, and had commenced a series on the social question just two weeks after De Standaard’s founding. Before that he had published, with his own introduction, a Dutch translation of a pamphlet on “Christianity and Labor” written by Wilhelm von Ketteler, bishop of Mainz and father of the Catholic social gospel. He had aroused ire in Parliament by his disquisitions on the Child Labor Act of 1874, which he opposed as being piecemeal and, as it indeed turned out, ineffectual. Most recently he had addressed the Dutch social situation and the Labor Act of 1889 in a Standaard series that was subsequently reissued as Manual Labor (1889). Kuyper’s concern was not only persistent but consistent, and “Christianity and the Social Question” brought together the themes of these various occasions in grand symphonic chords.
For economic conservatives (that is, neoliberals) and American evangelicals, who assume an automatic affinity between their respective positions, Kuyper’s deliverances will be bewildering at best, outrageous at worst. With intense and often heated rhetoric “Christianity and the Social Question” denounced laissez-faire capitalism as inimical to human well-being, material or spiritual; as out of tune with Scripture and contrary to the will of God; as the very spawn of “Revolution.” The “Revolution” Kuyper named here was the French, but he could just as well have used “Industrial,” for the principles behind and the attitudes stemming from both constituted the deeper revolution in consciousness that Antirevolutionary thinking had always faulted most. Wherein did this revolution lie for economics? In replacing the spirit of “Christian compassion” with “the egoism of a passionate struggle for possessions,” Kuyper said. In the abrogation of the claims of community for the sake of the sovereign individual. In the commodification of labor, which denied the image of God and the rightful claims of a brother. In the idolization of the supposedly free market, which deprived the weak of their necessary protections, licensed the strong in their manipulations, and proclaimed the consequences to be the inevitable workings of natural law. In the advertising that inculcated a covetous consumerism as the norm of human happiness. The French Revolution, but as Kuyper repeated throughout his work, also the “utilitarian,” the “laissez-faire,” and the “Manchester” schools, which were the philosophical apologists for industrial capitalism,
made the possession of money the highest good, and then, in the struggle for money . . . set every man against every other. . . . As soon as that evil demon was unchained at the turn of the [nineteenth] century, no consideration was shrewd enough, no strategy crafty enough, no deception outrageous enough among those who, through superiority of knowledge, position, and capital, took money — and ever more money — from the socially weaker.
And since “it cannot be said often enough,” as Kuyper intoned in “Sphere Sovereignty,” that “money creates power,” the new bourgeoisie soon took command of the state, overriding its divine mandate to protect the weak and turning it into an engine of their own interests.
That natural law, however, made Kuyper doubt progressive proposals to correct economic abuses by legislation or regulatory reforms. With an eye toward the “laissez faire” Liberals’ massive public investments to promote commercial enterprise in the recent past, and the crony capitalism of the current Dutch Indies scene, Kuyper declared: “The stronger, almost without exception, have always known how to bend every custom and magisterial ordinance so that the profit is theirs and the loss belongs to the weaker.” Of course, specific reforms might be legitimate. In Manual Labor Kuyper countenanced changes in inheritance laws to protect the poor, a break with the Netherlands’ historic free-trade policy to protect domestic producers, and tough border controls to protect domestic labor. But besides being prone to elite cooptation, such gestures amounted, Kuyper jibed, to calling upon the physician when an architect was really needed. That is, “[w]e must courageously and openly acknowledge that the Social Democrats are right” to insist that the evils and inequities of the current Dutch situation stemmed from “the entire structure of our social system.” Socialists were wrong in the blueprint they drew up, he hastened to add, but even there, not so much for the design of the interior as for neglecting to lay the foundations of the house in God’s eternal ordinances. Kuyper repeated that these broad principles were laid out along “clearly visible lines” in Scripture and creation, and then repeated it again, as if sheer insistence would obscure the conflict within his own movement over how those ordinances applied to current conditions.
Calvinists’ Economics
Since the conversation about Calvinism and economics would be dominated in the twentieth century by the seminal work that Max Weber published just a decade after Kuyper’s remarks — that is, by a consideration of how the Protestant ethic fit the spirit of capitalism — it is important to note what Kuyper deemed Calvinism’s controlling principles to be. First and foremost, he asserted a preferential option for the poor. Jesus, “just as his prophets before him and his apostles after him, invariably took sides against those who were powerful and living in luxury, and for the poor and oppressed.” Granted that the poor are no better than the rich, Christ and Scripture always reproved their sins more gently than those of the wealthy. So did Kuyper’s Utrecht sermon of 1869 with regard to “worker and master.” Second, the merit of any economic system, both as to its theory and practice, had be measured by the respect it exercised for human beings as bearers of the image of God and by the basic security it provided for human existence. Reducing laborers to a factor of production violated their dignity and the divinely mandated use of their God-given creative powers, which properly make work an opportunity and a blessing. Third, solidarity was both the biblical ideal for human society and the pragmatic grounds for its true flourishing. God created human beings to live relationally with each other and the natural order under the canopy of transcendent norms. Practically, this obviated any system that proceeded from or to the individual person as isolated or sovereign. It obviated as well any proposal that looked to the triumph or eradication of a particular group or class, or that maximized (whether as means, end, or predictable consequence) the separation or perpetual antagonism of peoples. Kuyper’s economics, like his politics, was first to last a communal theory with a communal ethic. In particular, it assigned property rights not a primary but a derivative standing that brought them “hobbling up at the rear of the unavoidably righteous demand” for a genuine social life. And to that end it assumed that people, together, could both understand and competently modify market operations.
But Kuyper was also sensitive to the realities of power and did not expect them to melt away, whether under free markets, socialist controls, or Christian love. Rather, in economics as in politics he proposed to divide and balance powers for the best approximation of justice that might be attained on earth. Thus “Christianity and the Social Question” rehearsed in 1891 what he had proposed in Parliament in 1874 and repeated again in Manual Labor in 1889. First, a complete law code for labor needed to be drawn up, similar to commercial, criminal, and civil codes, so that its rights and obligations were embedded within the formal legal system. Second, the educational system should be diversified to provide the trade skills needed to make the future Dutch labor force internationally competitive, rather than forcing all children through standardized book learning. Third, labor should be empowered through collective organization so that it might register its due weight in the struggles and negotiations of economic life. This would reduce not only the oppression but also the demoralization of workers as they found solidarity with their fellows. A concentric array of labor councils, extending from local grassroots out across the entire nation, would more likely be responsive to workers’ interests and expertise than would state regulators. These councils would then meet with their employer counterparts to settle terms, conditions, and grievances. The state’s role in the process would be to supervise binding arbitration in case of impasses. Finally, returning full circle to the grievances that had prompted the Congress in the first place, economic empowerment required a political basis. Democratizing the franchise would ensure as nothing else that workers’ needs would be heard in the halls of legislation. It would also cement their solidarity with the rest of the nation.
Still, Kuyper could not leave off — or even begin — without invoking the “moral” considerations that stood “above” such practical arrangements. Economics too was shaped by collective consciousness: “Because we are conscious beings, almost everything depends on the standard of values which our consciousness constructs,” and Kuyper put Christian patience high on the list. This might seem to point back from architect to physician — to Marx’s pious physician, in fact, dispensing the opiate of eternal consolation to the masses — but Kuyper typically spoke this way to wealthy agnostics, warning about the price of their derision of religion. Put positively, only proper consciousness would replace materialism and egotism with compassion and equity as the land’s prevailing norms. Since the state was incompetent and the market uninterested in generating such values, their cultivation belonged to the agencies of public opinion — church, school, and press. Yet ethos depended on more than ethics. Workers’ morality was closely tied to their morale, which in turn was grounded in a sense of their own life chances. Here Kuyper’s prescription was definitively petit bourgeois: the channeling of sexual desire within marriage and family relations, the availability of reliable, dignified work, and minimal dependence on welfare subsidies. Each of these pieces would feed upon the others to form energetic, disciplined citizens who did their own part while contributing to a public interest that surmounted their own.
Kuyper’s economics thus resonated with his political theory and with some perennial notes of Calvinist social thinking. He was again more concerned with whole integrated systems than with individual parts. He showed a typical Calvinist ambivalence toward wealth — it was more a proving ground for than any proof of salvation. Greed now joined aggression as the worst expression of collective depravity, and a balance of powers was again arrayed to control them. Kuyper’s distinctive contribution to this tradition was the constellation of vigorous localism, praise of diversity, and principled pluralism that he asserted in the face of industrial consolidation and labeled “sphere sovereignty.” In his own movement his speech, like Leo’s encyclical, launched a tradition of social critique that was purposefully Christian, critical of the political economy of Left and Right, and aimed at keeping intellectuals engaged with their blue-collar brethren. As for the latter, Patrimonium took new confidence from the Congress to develop into a mature body of Christian labor advocacy, grounded in gospel mandates for an industrial age.
More immediately, however, Patrimonium delegates found the Social Congress disappointing. On the three major questions that came out of study committees for general discussion, only the report on the legitimacy of the strike was forthright: it was approved as a last resort but then sometimes as a duty. The report on labor councils fudged on the issue of employer membership, and the temporizing resolution that was finally adopted hardly described the keystone that these councils formed in Kuyper’s economic architecture. As for the most contentious question, the Frisian radicals fumed as the chair of the study committee on land nationalization went to Free University professor and Amsterdam city councilman D. P. D. Fabius, whom they scorned as the “evil genius . . . [of] aristocracy.” Their revenge was to so attack the report in breakout discussions as to keep it from even coming to the floor for a vote. Their greater satisfaction would unfold over the next five years, as Kuyper led an insurgency of “the little people” against “the lord millionaires” on the issue of suffrage.
Splitting the Movement
The Liberal cabinet that assumed office in 1891 took up the franchise question immediately, and the radical character of their proposal threw Dutch politics into an uproar. Reported by the Left-Liberal Minister of Domestic Affairs J. P. R. Tak van Poortvliet, the bill would instantly expand the Dutch electorate from 300,000 to 800,000 voters. That would effect, to opposition eyes, precisely the universal suffrage that the 1887 Constitution had proscribed. The once Progressive Liberal Sam van Houten, whose atheism had appalled the religious parties often enough in the past, now joined most of them in opposition — all of the Roman Catholics along with the conservative Antirevolutionaries, led by Lohman, who had held Tak’s portfolio at the end of the Mackay cabinet. Kuyper, on the other hand, supported Tak with a volume of journalism and maneuverings in party councils that within three years left the party split and its two old headmen barely on speaking terms. The fault, if such it were, was not Kuyper’s alone, though his superior initiative made him the catalyst of the process. The issue was genuinely substantive if never free from the personal. The outcome was an Antirevolutionary Party run by the “new men” who had been initiated in the school struggle, a party fully modern in discipline and ideology — fully modern as well in the contemporary Continental sense of being more dogmatic and sectarian.
Tak’s bill was so ambiguous as to invite and finally die of a hundred clarifications. Just how did one measure the “capability and prosperity” that the Constitution required of people to vote? Tak said a permanent address was the answer, but what was permanent, and what was an address? The classic Liberals set the bar high to guarantee an educated and economically independent electorate; Lohman joined them to quell the passionate masses.
Kuyper condemned the Constitutional provision itself as betraying subservience to “God Intellect and God Mammon.” Ideologically he had the harder task, since Antirevolutionaries took it as axiomatic that popular sovereignty defied God’s and that “democratic” necessitated “excess.” Kuyper prepared his answer at two party rallies already during the Mackay regime. “Not the Liberty Tree but the Cross” used the centennial of the French Revolution in 1889 to limn the godly democracy that must oppose it. “Maranatha,” the keynote address at the delegates’ convention during the 1891 campaign, invoked Christ’s final judgment upon the works of man to warrant voting rights for all men.
Both of these deliverances leaned heavily on the antirevolutionary theoretical tradition; it was the innovations and emphases between the lines that bore notice. Thus, “Not the Liberty Tree” looked ahead to “Christianity and the Social Question” by tracing the social crisis back to the principles of 1789, but it also looked back to Ons Program to take up the enduring dilemma at the heart of the tradition. It contrasted good antirevolutionary democracy with bad-because-godless democracy on the assumption that a common allegiance to divine ordinances would save freedom from the anarchy-tyranny oscillation of the French Revolution. Godly allegiance was not natural, Kuyper reiterated; it required hearts surrendered to the gospel. But if democracy required Christian faith to survive, where was the freedom of conscience — the freedom to believe otherwise or not at all — that it was the historic mission of the Netherlands to uphold before the world? More immediately, how could a Christian politics be effective without being religiously oppressive? Because the common people of the Netherlands were Christian to the core, “Liberty Tree” answered. Democracy, far from being dangerous, was in itself trustworthy — certainly more trustworthy from a Christian point of view than the system of privilege that had delivered the country over to the rule of secular Liberals with pious Conservative dressing on the side.
Still, granting that democracy was safe for Christians, and fairer to boot, was Christian democracy fair? “Liberty Tree” did not finally answer that question, but “Maranatha” did. “Without any craftiness or secret intentions” on our part, Kuyper declared before the assembled delegates and so too before the whole nation, “we accept the position of equality before the law along with those who disagree with us.” In fact, Antirevolutionaries needed “to appreciate our Conservatives’ historical bent . . . our Liberals’ love of liberty . . . the Radicals’ sense of justice and . . . the nobler Socialists’ compassion with so much indescribable misery.” Once for all, the Antirevolutionaries’ pluralism would be a principled pluralism, operating from their own convictions while respecting those of others. This politics would be effected via coalition with the party that most closely shared the Antirevolutionary agenda of the moment. “Maranatha” emphasized that this would be a co-belligerency and not a coalescence, because the allies in place were the very Roman Catholics whom some within his movement still distrusted and whom others had left the party in order to reject. Indeed, over the next century Catholics would contribute the 40 percent rank-and-file support that the Calvinist tenth needed for victory in national elections. But as Kuyper made clear in subsequent newspaper commentary, this was not the only coalition possible. We ally with Rome against all varieties of Liberals, he said, with Left Liberals against Right Liberals, with all Liberals against the Socialists, and with all Liberals and Socialists against the Conservatives.
That flexibility both reflected and served the other, democratic agenda of “Maranatha.” For while Conservatives might be honored for their contribution to national life, they were not the Antirevolutionaries’ default ally. Gazing out at the assembled delegates, Kuyper made the point very clear: the ARP was not the safe haven some in the audience had taken it to be in migrating from the ruins of their own party. He brought out heavy theoretical artillery to make the point. While we honor all our opponents as people,
we take exception to and resist . . . their disastrous principle, which is detached from Christ and which is the same in all these groups. Together they form a single spiritual family, bred from a single stock. The father of the Liberal is called Conservative, the offspring of the Liberal presents himself as a Radical, and the Socialist is the legitimate child in the third generation.
Conservatives were no better set than Liberals to resist Socialist claims. “The oppressed are asking the Liberal why, if ‘the people are sovereign,’ that sovereign people should any longer be trampled en masse by the oligarchs. . . . They are simply applying the principles of the French Revolution . . . with merciless consistency and without any nobler chords.” If “Social Democracy laughs at the bandages our Liberals bring out,” Conservative hand-wringing was beneath contempt.
To political philosophy Kuyper added an urgent reading of history. “The politics of Europe is undisputedly in search of a new configuration. The oligarchy of financially and intellectually advantaged classes is finished.” It was the historic mission of the Antirevolutionary cause to guard this impulse from mob rule and give it a “Christian-democratic shape” instead. “This can still be done now,” he told the throng. “But if you squander this God-given moment and let it pass unused, you will be to blame for having thrown away the future of your country and you will soon bend under the iron fist which will strike you in your Christian liberty and, unsparingly, also in your wallets and property.” Yet Kuyper could not let democracy’s potential dangers have the last word. “Even if the zeitgeist were anti-democratic, you should still seek the broadening of popular influence,” for “all the Scriptures preach” and all “history and experience teach that the moral power of faith tends to reside much more among the ‘little people’ who run short every year than among the affluent who annually increase their net worth.”
Showdown with the “Double Names”
The conservatives in his audience, whether antirevolutionary by conviction or convenience, did not take this well, nor the Christian Social Congress six months later, which they either ignored or criticized. The franchise debate only grew hotter over the next two years and inevitably bred an intra-party contest between the two leaders. Lohman issued a pamphlet against the Tak bill in 1892 and protested Kuyper’s direction in correspondence with him. “I don’t like radicalism,” he wrote in 1893, adding that he liked “praying radicals even less than non-praying ones.” He also faulted Kuyper’s combination of roles. To be chair of the Central Committee and to agitate a particular policy as newspaper editor represented a conflict of interest, or at least a skewing of intra-party debate that was hardly “democratic.” Years before, Lohman had reminded Kuyper that journalism and parliamentary work were separate (and sovereign!) spheres entailing radically different skills and duties. He had enjoined him to either stop dictating the caucus’s work from De Standaard or take over: “the party in the House may not be disrupted by someone who judges everything tactically without himself bearing a single responsibility. I offer you my chair. Immediately.”
Now Kuyper half accepted that offer. Agreeing that the pro-Tak position in the party must be argued by someone on the floor, Kuyper accepted election to the Lower House again in 1893. There the confrontation with Lohman became direct and daily, and Lohman himself became less tempered in expression. Your rhetoric and maneuvers show you to be a true disciple of Robespierre, he told Kuyper. There could be no greater insult in the Groenian heritage.
The conflict climaxed in the election campaign of 1894, which amounted to a national referendum on franchise extension and still counts as one of the most hotly contested in Dutch history. Inside the ARP it became a battle for the future of the party. A week before the delegates’ convention, nine of Lohman’s friends in the parliamentary caucus joined him in a public statement declaring the Tak bill to be unacceptable. Kuyper as usual had out-organized them and turned out an unprecedented attendance of a thousand delegates at the convention itself — many of them “new men” who swamped the traditional elite on the floor. The convention forthrightly condemned “conservatism of every stripe” and committed the party to a platform of “final franchise extension.”
As the two sides departed to campaign against each other, Kuyper declared exactly what the war was about. It was to deliver the party from the “men with the double names” who had too long dominated its doings. The foe was comprised of men such as Baron B. J. L. de Geer Jutphaas, Squire T. A. J. van Asch van Wijk, Baron J. E. N. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye van Hoevlaken — and also Squire Alexander Frederik de Savornin Lohman. Plain solid burgher names spelled a better future: Bavinck, Heemskerk, Keuchenius — and Kuyper.
Unfortunately for the pro-Takkians, the double-names had enough clout — and the Liberals, along with the ARP, had enough divisions — to send them down to defeat. The Right Liberals formed the next cabinet, and the Antirevolutionaries, with fewer seats than ever, organized two separate caucuses in Parliament, one under Lohman, the other under Kuyper. The division between the two men and the two outlooks was permanent. It lasted even after Sam van Houten steered through a more modest suffrage bill in 1896 — more modest only in comparison to Tak’s measure, for it doubled the Dutch electorate overnight to encompass half the adult males in the country. The 1897 elections swelled the number of seats held by the democratized wing of the ARP and inaugurated an era of unity and prosperity in its ranks. The ARP Right cautiously undertook a series of talks with other conservatives; they emerged a decade later as a separate party, the Christian Historical Union.
The Political and the Personal
This passage in Kuyper’s life has been interpreted from radically different points of view. Some regard it as the raw opportunism of a demagogue bent on eliminating rivals, using egalitarian rhetoric as needed. From this angle, Kuyper’s later turn to the Right is taken to spell what he really thought all along. Others see a principled reading of history at work, matching the need of the hour to a genuine democratic streak in Calvinism that had been too frequently obscured by the tradition’s elites, who were the true opportunists in the fray.
No one can deny that the battle gave Kuyper a great opportunity, effected a real change, and exacted a significant toll. Democracy did triumph in the Netherlands in 1896, and if it did not come in the form of the household franchise that Kuyper espoused, the “individualistic” system that actually obtained boosted the religious parties and made their future success much more likely. Likewise, the undisputed leadership he had now sealed in the ARP made an eventual prime-ministership for Kuyper more than plausible.
Also triumphant was the new sort of mass politics that Kuyper had long championed. Its shape can be inferred by comparison to the traditional type that Lohman represented. Hailing as he did from the bench in North Brabant, where consistent Calvinists were in short supply, Lohman viewed himself as a classic tribune of the people. By his command of the law he would protect minority rights (whether Protestants in North Brabant or religiously-grounded education across the nation) while trying to shed the light of the gospel to unbelievers. Substantively, that amounted to keeping restraints upon the sinfulness of the human heart. Methodologically, it entailed empowering expertise and deference. Once elected, Lohman believed, representatives were elevated above the people and were responsible to conscience alone, not to a party platform or to pressures from mass journalists who, he chided Kuyper, tended to scribble about things they did not understand. Indeed, to Lohman parties were but temporary means to more important ends; not just the democratic ideology but the whole apparatus of modern politics was borderline revolutionary. As Dutch historian Jeroen Koch says of him, Lohman was at heart a bridge-builder, not a crusader, and those bridges were designed to link elites across the court system and Parliament to rule on behalf of the whole nation, not just a single party. Much of this system would indeed be realized over the course of the twentieth century in the regulatory apparatus that conservatives scorn as “government bureaucracy” and “activist courts” — and that was despised by Lohman and Kuyper in their own time. Kuyper, on the other hand, insisted that mass politics was the only alternative. If that made charisma the essential requirement for leadership, Kuyper’s own example argues that such did not have to come at the cost of expertise.
Yet the personal costs of Kuyper’s triumph were high. Lohman had been a trusted friend and savvy partner on De Standaard, in the founding of the Free University, in the Doleantie, and in steady correspondence pre-dating Kuyper’s collapse in 1876. Lohman’s expertise in jurisprudence and parliamentary work was essential to their success in movement-building, just as his cautious temperament saved Kuyper more than once from his own excesses. Nor was Lohman the only friend lost. In 1888 Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, the onetime Lutheran minister who had converted to utopian radicalism, successfully ran for Parliament with the backing of the Netherlands’ fledging socialists, of Frisian radicals of all stripes — and of Kuyper. Domela returned the favor. “I have sometimes thought that at bottom we do not stand so far from each other,” he later wrote Kuyper about these years. “There are whole sections of your writings that I can take over, and indeed which I have used in my speeches.” Domela’s election scandalized Queen Emma and the established parties; Keuchenius was the only MP who would shake his hand. Kuyper’s oldest friend, Isaac Hooykaas, wrote him, outraged. How can you call yourself a Christian and a patriot while supporting such a man? Have you lost all principle?
These cuts took their toll. Kuyper’s winter grippe was worse than usual in 1893, disrupting his work and sleep. Things got much worse after the bruising campaign of 1894: Kuyper left on his usual summer vacation but nearly died in Brussels on the way home. He had to repair, once again, to the south of France, then to Tunisia, to rest his nerves and repair his lungs. Once again he had to give up journalism, this time for half a year rather than a year and a half, but this time haunted, not helped, by Lohman. The practical cause of his collapse was that, as twenty years before, Kuyper had added parliamentary work to his existing load; in the 1890s that included daily journalism, party management, and a full university teaching schedule. After his 1876 collapse and again in his mid-Doleantie musings, Kuyper had been perceptive enough to identify parliamentary work as especially stressful to him — whether from its daily grind, its face-to-face polemics, the visions of grandeur it inspired, its submergence of high principle in tedium and procedure, or various of these in some combination. Hooykaas had given him a warning list: “I hate politics! It’s a curse on society, the downfall of many people’s character, the cause of moral blindness, the source of untruth, unrighteousness, and I know not what.” Certainly being surrounded by “oligarchs” and their minions in The Hague must have been aggravating to Kuyper, given his mood and the country’s plight. Then too, the conflict with Lohman recalled a grievance as old as his university years at Leiden, where the sons of the elite gathered on the law track to inherit rule in the kingdom while poor ministers’ boys lived at home and studied theology in hopes of entering a shrinking profession.
His illness did not incline Kuyper toward peace, however. No sooner had he returned home, on New Year’s Eve 1894, than he moved to purge Lohman once more, this time from the Free University. Working behind the scenes with his other old collaborator, Frederik Rutgers, and a new ally, Herman Bavinck, both theologians, Kuyper called upon the 1895 annual meeting of the university’s supporting association to institute a committee of inquiry into Lohman’s teaching. Hovy, the chair of the board of directors, was caught flat-footed. He had hoped that the two would use the occasion to transcend their political feud for the sake of the university, and was aghast to find that Kuyper had plotted very differently. “May you proceed in this way, without a single bit of evidence?” wondered the saintly brewer. “Is this not a sin before God?” Lohman pointed out that the process bypassed the university’s trustees, who were designated by charter to conduct this sort of inquiry. He kept on complaining about due process after the convention predictably supported Kuyper and as the committee of inquiry predictably turned prosecutor. It did not examine Lohman’s actual teaching at all; rather, it determined that the principles which could be inferred from Lohman’s teaching were not thoroughly or consistently Calvinistic. Lohman was given an honorable discharge; his son Witsius resigned at the same time from his post next to his father on the university’s law faculty. Witsius’s father-in-law Hovy resigned as chairman of the board, although he maintained his financial support.
While the investigation was still underway, Kuyper and Rutgers formally inquired of Lohman whether he held any grievance against them that might preclude their taking the Lord’s Supper. No, nothing actionable, Lohman replied, but don’t think that the “brotherly love” required between church members is “the same as friendship.” In fact, Kuyper’s bond with the one brother-figure he countenanced as an equal had been broken for good. In this regard it is telling that soon after starting up the inquest into Lohman’s teaching, Kuyper published a memoir of the recently deceased Keuchenius. This brother had been faithful in the cause of Christ, the tract read, had advocated the cause of the “little people” in the Indies, had been true and consistent to Calvinistic principles. What is more, Keuchenius had carried on a long correspondence with Kuyper that, inter alia, detailed Lohman’s shortcomings on all these points in his parliamentary work; some of that correspondence Kuyper now quoted for public consumption.
This was airing the family linen indeed. Perhaps literal family dynamics helped push Kuyper over the edge. Keuchenius, after all, was supposed to live on in the name of Kuyper’s youngest son, but suddenly that had gone catastrophically awry. In June 1892 Jo summoned Kuyper back from vacation in the south of France with an urgent telegram: “Willy most critical. Come immediately.” Kuyper did, but as it turned out, he was only in time for the funeral.
While Kuyper’s memoir of Keuchenius recalled sentimental exchanges between him and his newly deceased godson, the meditation he published in De Heraut after Willy’s funeral made more important points. Recalling the statistics on infant and child mortality that had gone into his study of the social question, Kuyper pondered: “Why God calls away one-half of the children of men so early, we know not. What is the reason that He brings one-half of His elect to blessedness so altogether differently from the other half . . . is a question that forces itself upon us time and again, but which God does not answer.” Kuyper tried to answer anyway, first in the voice from the end of Job: “In His doings with these little ones there is such speechless majesty.” All the dead children’s great potential remained known to God and would be realized in eternity without their having to endure the sufferings of time. Equally, these puzzles showed how insignificant were the grounds of human pride — that is, showed the equal worth of the little people to the high and mighty. “God’s work of grace is not dependent upon your intellectual development,” Kuyper said to the generic reader, and perhaps especially to himself. “The little field-flower that scarcely unfolded, only to wither again, was as well watered by the dew of heaven as were the cedar and the palm tree which still stand against the storms.”
Kuyper’s next Heraut meditation evoked Keuchenius, albeit anonymously. “When God gives you a brother who understands you, who lives equally deeply as yourself, or also one who suffered as you suffered, and with the experience of his own heart comes to yours, that human comforting can already sooth and bless you.” Since three of Keuchenius’s ten children had gone to early graves and two more died in young adulthood, he was well qualified to minister to Kuyper at the time of Willy’s death. But such comforts really take hold, Kuyper continued, when we see them, too, as works of God’s sovereign appointment, “when he who comforts you does not do it for his own sake but lets himself be used of his God to comfort you, to His glory.” That is, it took a Calvinist, a true Calvinist, but this one was now dead, and Lohman gone.
*Multatuli was the pen-name of Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-87), a longtime official in the Dutch East Indies whose novel Max Havelaar (1860) exposed the depredations of the colonial system there. It caused something of the same sensation in the Netherlands as did the near-contemporaneous Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the United States. Dekker was notorious in orthodox Reformed circles for his radical opinions in religion, although some shared his critique of Dutch abuses in the colonies.