Abraham Kuyper by James D. Bratt

Author:James D. Bratt [Bratt, James D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO018000
ISBN: 9781467437363
Publisher: Eerdmans Publishing
Published: 2014-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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