Misreading Kuyper? Stewart, Hawley, and The New York Times

Earlier this month Katherine Stewart, writing for The New York Times, published an article that many are reading to aid in understanding what happened in Washington, DC, on 6 January: The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage. Joshua Hawley is the junior United States Senator from Missouri, having served in that capacity since 2019. A graduate of Yale Law School, he is the author of Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness. A professing Christian, he played a small role in the storming of the Capitol, as Stewart recounts:

In today’s Republican Party, the path to power is to build up a lie in order to overturn democracy. At least that is what Senator Josh Hawley was telling us when he offered a clenched-fist salute to the pro-Trump mob before it ransacked the Capitol, and it is the same message he delivered on the floor of the Senate in the aftermath of the attack, when he doubled down on the lies about electoral fraud that incited the insurrection in the first place.

After a photographer captured this clenched fist, NBC reported that Hawley had become a pariah even in his own party. That he had dragged the 19th/20th-century Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper into his rhetoric appeared to discredit Kuyper himself, with Stewart leading the charge:

Mr. Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared–paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper–“There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.

“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”

I will not offer a detailed response to this article, as others are likely better positioned than I to do so. Nevertheless, I will make what should be an obvious point: misinterpretations of a person’s writings do not by themselves discredit that person. But have Hawley and Stewart misread Kuyper? Yes and no.

Let’s start with the no side. Kuyper really did say that “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” As an heir of the Reformed tradition of Christianity, with its characteristic emphasis on God’s sovereignty, his most famous quotation is by no means atypical or innovative.

The Heidelberg Catechism affirms that we do not belong to ourselves but to Jesus Christ in everything we are and do. Along with the larger Reformed tradition, Kuyper’s heirs affirm that life cannot be divided into sacred and secular realms and that God through Jesus Christ (and not Christianity in the abstract) is sovereign over the whole of life. Hawley is not wrong to affirm this truth–one which we probably should not expect a New York Times commentator to understand sympathetically, much less to describe accurately.

None of the traditional religious faiths willingly concedes a portion of life to another spirit that runs counter to its tenets. Even the secular liberal faith, which arguably dominates the western world, regards those who disagree with its tenets as dissidents at best and dangerous at worst. In short, liberalism has a hegemonic character, willing to tolerate potential dissidents as long as they remain subordinate to the dominating liberal spirit in society. Church congregations recast as mere voluntary associations possess no intrinsic authority over their members and pose no real challenge to the spirit of the age, having largely absorbed this spirit into their own ethos.

Now for the yes side. Enlisting Kuyper into the contemporary North American culture war has a certain plausibility, because there really are battles to be waged in the larger culture. Kuyper’s mentor Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876) is best known for his Unbelief and Revolution (1847), written in advance of the second great wave of revolutions to sweep the European continent. In its pages Groen argued that the secularizing ideologies that had emerged out of the earlier French Revolution of 1789 were rooted in unbelief. As such Christians have an obligation to work against their toxic impact. Groen would have a significant influence on Kuyper and the development of the anti-revolutionary and christian-historical movement mobilizing the Reformed Christian populace in the Netherlands in the late 19th century.

However, and this ought not to be forgotten, the antithesis between belief and unbelief does not run quite so tidily between different groups of people. Any effort to assess in a spiritually discerning way the true character of the various ideological visions and illusions on offer cannot be content to point fingers. On the contrary, we must begin within ourselves. True knowledge begins with self-knowledge, and without the latter, our efforts to remove the speck from our neighbour’s eye will be unpersuasive. Russian novellist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) expressed the matter well when he wrote:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) similarly observed that it is precisely when we see ourselves as children of light confronting the children of darkness that we become blind to the wilfulness in our own hearts.

Those who believe that Kuyper’s legacy can be enlisted in a culture war against identifiable opponents need first to ask themselves some pointed questions: Have we inadvertently succumbed to the allure of nationalism, an ideology that makes an idol of our own people? Have we unfairly misjudged the motives of our political opponents while assuming the obvious righteousness of our own? Have we failed to seek common ground with our opponents even as we properly remain true to our own principles? Have we vilified our opponents rather than seeing them as created in God’s image? Have we unduly identified the progress of God’s kingdom with our own political goals? And, finally, have we sacrificed humility on the altar of pride?

Again, we ought not to shrink from the battles that need to be fought. But we should be wary of too quickly claiming the high ground and taking comfort in our own supposed righteousness. Above all, we should not assume that the lordship of Christ which Kuyper proclaimed necessarily translates into one group’s victory over their political opponents or that it even implies the survival of a particular political community or nation. This is the lesson we can take from St. Augustine’s argument in the City of God. God will bring his kingdom to fruition in his good time, and he will use instruments of his own choosing. In the meantime we seek to live out his kingdom in this life, recognizing the limitations of our own imperfect vision until that moment arrives.

Augustine, Groen van Prinsterer, Josh Hawley, liberalism, Solzhenitsyn