Abraham Kuyper: Say No to “No God, No Master!”

The name of the party contains the prefix “Anti-”. The revolution that the ARP opposed was the French Revolution. But note that the “Anti-” prefix in ARP works on “Revolutionary,” not “Revolution.” ARP is the Anti-Revolutionary Party. What it opposed in particular was revolutionary ideology. The root principle of revolutionary ideology, Kuyper¹ says, was “its defiant cry Ni Dieu, ni maître!”—No God, no master! Revolutionary ideology does not propose defiance of higher law; it denies the very existence of higher law. And without higher law, what can reprove and correct government law? In denying higher law, revolutionary ideology sets the stage for totalitarianism.

The ARP did not seek to turn back the clock or idealize the pre-​revolutionary dominance of throne and altar politics. For Kuyper, the proper posture toward revolutionary ideology was to oppose it in a spirit of critical appraisal. Indeed, for Kuyper, the situation in the ancien régime was intolerable. The error of the French Revolution lay in its overreaction, overreach, and foundational principles, not in the fact that it opposed the old order. Kuyper understood proper reform to be distinct from radical revolution, and for this reason he opposed the revolutionary spirit, which was a perennial threat and not simply a historical event.

At age twenty-​seven, in 1864, Kuyper began corresponding with and learning under the Dutch politician and historian Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–1876), who mentored Kuyper in a Calvinist and anti-​revolutionary outlook. Groen van Prinsterer sharply distinguished the conceptions of liberty that animated the French and American revolutions. Groen van Prinsterer, as well as Kuyper, also sharply distinguished Christian and irreligious visions of freedom.

Kuyper, in his commentary on the ARP political platform, puts it this way: “What we oppose is … the political and social system embodied in the French Revolution.” He continues:

But the French Revolution as a historical phenomenon is distinct from the ideas and principles which animated it. And so, for Kuyper and the anti-​revolutionaries, the Revolution becomes a symbol of a perennial struggle between true and false worldviews. As Groen van Prinsterer argued:

The ARP was opposed to the use of potentially unlimited state power to impose the revolutionary worldview. Recall the statement from Rousseau that “whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body. This means merely that he will be forced to be free.”⁴ That mentality was precisely what Kuyper opposed. He stood within the broad Christian tradition that viewed the government as a “minister” of God (Rom 13:4), with its own distinct sphere of responsibility and corresponding dignity. The state is thus empowered by but also accountable to God and the moral order instantiated at creation, often referred to by Kuyper as the “ordinances of God.” By this he meant that “all created life necessarily bears in itself a law for its existence, instituted by God Himself.”⁵

The moral order instituted by God in this way provides a standard by which proper function might be distinguished from tyranny, thereby establishing the rule of law. And so, given his convictions about sin and corruption, Kuyper also understood the deep human desire for power and the lust for domination over others, such that he warned of the dangers of state tyranny:

Likewise, localism and decentralization were foundational principles and commitments for antirevolutionary political thought.⁷

Many of those whom Kuyper opposed were by the 1870s in the Netherlands calling themselves “the liberals” and organizing politically as “liberals.” Kuyper and the ARP thus pit themselves against some self-​described “liberals” at the time. A century or more after The Wealth of Nations, “liberal” had taken on political meanings quite contrary to Adam Smith’s thought. “Liberal” also took on, especially in Continental Europe, anti-​religious attitudes. Writing to Groen in 1874, Kuyper contrasts such secular, revolutionary liberalism with his own advocacy for a “conservative” liberalism, and he asserts, “Our party, too, must be liberal, but in contrast to revolutionary liberalism it must stand for a Christian liberalism.”⁸⁹ In this way the ARP was always understood to be a conservative party in Dutch politics.

The Dutch anti-​revolutionary movement was self-​consciously part of a larger historical and international tradition of Christian social thought. Kuyper and Groen drew directly on the work of Edmund Burke (1729–1797) as well as Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), and for Kuyper the movement included or was inspired by figures in America associated with the Federalists (especially George Washington and Alexander Hamilton) as well as other Europeans including Heinrich F. K. von Stein (1757–1831), Karl Ludwig von Haller (1768–1854), Félicité Robert de La Mennais (1782–1854), François Guizot (1787–1874), Heinrich Leo (1799–1878), and Julius Stahl (1802–1861).

Indeed, the positive name of the movement, as opposed to the negative “antirevolutionary” descriptor, was “Christian-​Historical,” by which was meant the transnational and transhistorical tradition focusing on faithful Christian social and political witness. Kuyper says, “There is no other cure to be found for Europe’s malady than under the auspices of the Man of Sorrows.”¹⁰

Kuyper expressed his perspective in his landmark 1891 lecture, “The Social Question and the Christian Religion.” A consequence of revolutionary ideology was a coarsening and flattening of human society, creating a void and filling that void with an increased focus on and even a mania for the accumulation of material possessions. Kuyper writes: “The French Revolution … did its evil work not so much in that it ousted the Bourbons from the throne, nor in that it made the middle class more powerful than clergy and nobility, but in that it completely overturned people’s worldview and outlook on life.”¹¹

Perhaps the key difference between the revolutionary and anti-​revolutionary perspectives on the human person has to do with whether society is simply an aggregate of individuals or a drama among contending spirits. For Kuyper, whereas “the Christian religion seeks the dignity of the human person in the relationships of an organically integrated society, the French Revolution disrupted that organic tissue, severed those social bonds, and finally, with its atomistic tinkering, left us with nothing but the solitary, self-​seeking individual that asserts its independence.”¹² In this way it is a kind of radical, atomistic individualism which Kuyper understands as being at the core of the revolutionary ideology.

Characteristic of this atomistic individualism is atheistic conviction. The Revolution’s antagonism toward God is understood as fundamental to its radical ideology. Following Groen van Prinsterer’s argument in Unbelief and Revolution, Kuyper contends: 

The consequences of the revolutionary shift are far-​reaching. “Inevitably, given this wrenching apart of everything that gives human life its dignified coherence,” says Kuyper, “this change gave birth to both deep-​seated social distress and a widespread social-​democratic movement, as well as an extremely complex social problem that is now facing every nation.”¹⁴ Thus is born, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, an international phenomenon, the so-​called “social question,” which may be understood as a grappling with industrial modernity and modern politics. In response varied outlooks emerged, from Marxist ideology, to Christian socialism, to the development of modern Christian social thought, including figures like Kuyper and the Roman Catholic pontiff Leo XIII (1810–1903). In fact, Leo’s 1891 encyclical letter Rerum Novarum served as a kind of inspiration for Kuyper’s own engagement with the social question later that same year.¹⁵

The relationship between the “atomistic tinkering” of revolutionary ideology and the subsequent collectivist ideology of Marxism and socialism is, for Kuyper, clear. The radical individualism of the Revolution ineluctably results in a social life that is reconstituted by the artificial and coercive ties of state action. Something must bind people together, given humanity’s social nature, and if these relationships are not to be found in the organic and spontaneous bonds of civil society then, so the argument goes, they will inevitably be formed by the coercive and artificial bonds of civil government. With God denied, the void is filled by materialistic consumption and government tyranny. Because of the widespread experience of poverty and want across the European continent in the nineteenth century, Kuyper points out that it is entirely natural and expected that the mass of the poor would organize politically, especially given the newfound power of democratic, majoritarian politics.

Pointing to revolutionary individualism, Kuyper concludes that “once the false theory is granted, social democracy, and it alone, is consistent.”¹⁶ Here, Kuyper, writing in 1891, accuses those who passed as liberals of the day of paving the way for socialists and totalitarians: “It is not enough to say that the social-​democratic movement issues from the liberal theory. It must also be stressed that the liberal calls for a totally arbitrary halt on a trajectory that according to his theory has to be followed. Thus the liberal has spiritual kinship with the social democrat, but unlike him he is in the wrong, because he is arbitrary, self-​serving, and inconsistent.”¹⁷ Collectivism and tyranny are the inevitable result of “No God, no master!”

When the human person has been severed from all natural social relationships, when all connections are portrayed as mere exchanges between individuals, the field of social life, previously populated by organic, bottom-​up associations and institutions, has been reduced to what can be bound by what Kuyper called the “iron ring of uniformity”¹⁸ or “the iron ring of monolithic power.”¹⁹ The state now stands alone as the arbiter of all social life and the validator of social relationships. With the organic institutions of human social life now eroded, the board has now been cleared and prepared for the man of system to set and move the chess pieces however he wills. Thus, observes Kuyper, “Today, everything has to be a free product of human creativity. The social edifice has to be erected according to man’s whim and caprice. That is why God has to go, so that men, no longer restrained by natural bonds, can invert every moral precept into its opposite and subvert every pillar of human society.”²⁰

The Revolutionary mantra of “No God, no master!”—advertised as the liberation of humanity from superstition and tradition—is transmuted into what C. S. Lewis would call “the power of some men over other men.”²¹ Kuyper argues, then, that the fundamental atheism and rationalism of the Revolutionary ideology is determinative:

Thus, mindful always of higher law, Kuyper finds the atomistic individualism of revolutionary ideology so flawed that he rejects it wholeheartedly:

Kuyper can be rightly understood as standing within the tradition of what F. A. Hayek described as “anti-​rationalist” liberalism²⁴ and elsewhere as “true” individualism,” which Hayek describes as “starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society.”²⁵ For Kuyper, the reductionist ideology that he opposed was a particular manifestation of human arrogance arising from a fallen and corrupt nature. Atomistic, revolutionary individualism violates natural laws and destroys the natural relationships of family and civil society, leading inevitably to the ascension of tyrants, animated by a lust for domination, and the exercise of arbitrary power in the social order. It is thus, as Hayek puts it, an ideology that “always tends to develop into the opposite of individualism, namely, socialism or collectivism.”²⁶