Smearing sphere sovereignty

Pete Hegseth was sworn in as the Secretary of Defense on Jan. 24 after a close vote for his confirmation by in the Senate—a vote that required Vice President J.D. Vance to cast the tie-breaking tally. One angle of criticism that resonated throughout Hegseth’s confirmation was a familiar one: Hegseth’s brand of Christianity represents a dangerous threat to American democracy. As Daniel Darling has articulated well on these pages, the persistent claims from the anti-Christian nationalist-industrial complex have started to strain credulity.

As a nominee for a cabinet-level position leading American armed forces, Hegseth has become a kind of litmus test for concerns about Christian nationalism in the Trump administration. From his tattoos to his religious rhetoric, Hegseth has been criticized as an extremist and a zealot. One remarkable example of journalistic malpractice in this vein appeared in The Guardian, which ran a piece with the breathless headline, “Revealed: Trump Pentagon nominee endorsed extremist Christian doctrine on podcast.” What was this “extremist” Christian teaching? None other than “sphere sovereignty,” which, according to Jason Wilson, is “a worldview derived from the extremist beliefs of Christian reconstructionism (CR) and espoused by churches aligned with far-right Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson.”

There’s a lot to unpack in just this part of one sentence. As Julie Ingersoll, a religion scholar at the University of North Florida notes later in the piece, sphere sovereignty is actually a Protestant, and specifically Reformed or Calvinist, teaching with a long pedigree, stretching back into the 19th century and particularly the thought of the Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), and Kuyper convincingly rooted the doctrine in the longer Christian tradition.

In one sense it all turns on who is claiming sovereignty and who is exercising authority. As Kuyper put it in his most famous quote from the original speech at the founding of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880,

Not one segment of our intellectual world can be hermetically sealed off from the others, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not call out: “Mine!”

It is Christ who is sovereign over all. It is He who claims ownership over everything. “The earth is the Lᴏʀᴅ’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it” (Psalm 24:1).

Kuyper does in this sense defend a kind of theocracy, the rule of God over all things. But it is God who rules over all and not any human person or institution, Christian or otherwise, who does so in his stead. In this way Kuyper elaborated on sphere sovereignty as a principle of liberty and diversity. It is explicitly opposed to the rule of any human authority over all areas of life, or even any institution or sphere impinging on the rights and responsibilities of another. In this sense it is a doctrine that is opposed to a hierocratic view associated in Kuyper’s time with Roman Catholicism and which today is experiencing a revival of sorts as neo-integralism. But it is also opposed to all forms of tyranny, whether the pope or clergy claiming authority over the civil government, the civil authorities claiming sovereignty over the church, or any of the other different institutions of social life lording it over another.

This is why Kuyper’s vision of a Reformed university is that of a “free” university, a school independent of both church and state, founded to be true to its own principles and calling, directly accountable to its sovereign, Jesus Christ. And so just as Christ rules over all, He does so in different ways and for different purposes in different institutions and different contexts. Christ rules over the church in a special way as redeemer, the head of the body of believers. Christ also rules over families, businesses, governments, schools, and soccer clubs. But each of these, just like the individual Christian believer, is directly accountable to God for its exercise of authority and faithfulness to its divinely instituted purposes. And not all of these institutions are wholly or even mostly inhabited by Christians, especially in a free society like America.

Thus it is Christ who is sovereign over all, and not any institution or any particular Christian–whether preacher, pope, or prince. A proper regard for the origins, essence, and purpose of sphere sovereignty reveal it to be a theory of limited government, and even more than that a theory of social diversity, cultural pluriformity, and civil liberty. It is as such opposed to all forms of tyranny.

Reconstructionism may understand itself to manifest a version of sphere sovereignty, but if it does then it is actually a perversion of the doctrine’s original purpose and design. And journalists as well as Christians would do well to appreciate sphere sovereignty’s proper use and distinguish it from its abuse.