Sphere sovereignty

Donald Trump (oh, I’m already so tired of writing about him) appointed Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense of the United States (a post for which he is dangerously unqualified, I should say). An unintended side-effect of this is that it has brought into the wider public gaze a concept from my own intellectual and spiritual tradition and the ways in which that concept has gotten lost in translation. The Guardian reported on Hegseth’s theological beliefs saying that, “In a series of newly unearthed podcasts, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, appears to endorse the theocratic and authoritarian doctrine of ‘sphere sovereignty,’ a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism” (Jan. 24, 2025). This needs a lot of clarification.

The term “sphere sovereignty” (always a bit misleading) was coined by Dutch politician, journalist and theologian Abraham Kuyper to express the idea that a healthy society was one in which there was a rich variety of institutions and communities, each governed by their own office bearers and free from domination or control by other social institutions (or “spheres”) or subordinated to their purposes. So, the “sphere of science” – institutionalized primarily in universities and scientific associations – should be governed by scientists in accordance with the nature and purposes of science, and not subordinated to the demands and priorities of the state or the church. In doing so, Kuyper thought, office bearers in this sphere should be concerned with God’s creating purposes for science, but – crucially – that is for them to determine, not government, church or any other social sphere. So Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty” is essentially a pluralistic idea.

A U.S. interpretation

Combined with the religious and ideological pluralism of the Netherlands, that meant that Kuyper practiced (imperfectly) a pluralistic form of politics that sought to accommodate and negotiate between different religious and ideological communities and ensure that the state allowed and even fostered supported social space for a huge variety of institutions in each sphere. There would be a socialist labour union, a catholic labour union, a “liberal” union. Each representing its members in accordance with their understanding of what the proper relationship should be between labour and capital, all bound by relatively impartial labour law. Not a perfect structure by any means but absolutely not a theocracy.

Now for the weird transnational transmission of ideas. Back in the 50s and 60s, a bunch of highly conservative Presbyterians (Rousas Rushdoony, for example) made contact with some of Kuyper’s acolytes and intellectual descendants. They seized on certain aspects of this Kuyperian vision and absorbed them into their own narrative: namely, that the problem with America was that – under the influence of theological “modernism” – America had abandoned its commitment to living in strict accordance to the law of God as revealed in the OT scriptures. These “theonomists” (or “reconstructionists,” as they later called themselves) adopted what was an essentially pluralist Christian political and social vision and put it to work in an anti-pluralist project. That’s how it ends up popping up on a podcast that Hegseth was on.

It’s a bummer. America could use a good dose of the real, pluralistic sphere sovereignty. Instead, the phrase has become a theological figleaf for anti-pluralistic populism and Christian Nationalism. Lost in translation,