I’ve been asked the question so many times that it’s high time to put it to bed.

What does Abraham Kuyper’s theory of sphere sovereignty have to do with the Seven Mountains ideology delivered by the “prophet” Lance Wallnau of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and all the rage among Christian nationalists more generally?  

In short: “very little” so far as theory is concerned; “little” again in terms of structure, purpose, and authority; but “a fair bit” in terms of tone and cultural anxiety. So nuanced an answer gets us down into the weeds, but given the current situation with the Christian Right, it’s worth the effort to sort things out.

The Theory of the Spheres

First, the theory.

For Kuyper, spheres are ontological domains of reality that arise out of creation and call humanity to develop and enrich them. Each sphere—education, the arts, religion, politics, business, technology, etc., etc.—is to unfold along lines set out by its own distinctive “principle” or purpose, striving to realize its innate potential. These spheres are “sovereign” on their own ground in that each has a charism uniquely its own, not to be interfered with by that of another. 

Thus, the state is not qualified to run a church, a business, or a school; but neither is a church qualified to run a university (attention CRC Synod) or a state (Mr. Wallnau, get thee hence!). More pointedly, given the momentum of our own past half century, business principles—the market mentality—will work mighty woe when it takes over churches and schools and everything else. 

For Kuyper, in sum, the “spheres” are sites for robust cultural flourishing, a grand theater calling for a lot of human action. All people belong on this stage, irrespective of their particular religious convictions. Kuyper’s great project was to call Christians out of the pietistic cloister where he saw too many of them huddled and push them toward center stage. In a complicated dance they were to operate in the order of creation but also out of the order of redemption—that is, guided by general knowledge available to all but also by the unique insights provided by scripture and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Zero Sum vs. Principled Pluralism

By contrast, Wellnau’s “mountains”—not “spheres”—are for conquest and domination. Where Kuyper could see valuable contributions coming from all over the philosophical map (he deemed Plato, Kant, and Darwin to be “geniuses,” “stars of the first magnitude”), Wellnau lays out a zero-sum competition between God’s chosen saints and agents of Satan. The consequences are ominous.

On the eve of the 1901 elections that made him prime minister, Kuyper cautioned his followers not to view their opponents as enemies but as fellow citizens who were also motivated by love of country. Agents of Satan, on the other hand, deserve the bloody elimination that hovers like a fever dream in the Seven Mountains imagination. 

Kuyper’s concept is thus based on another pluralism: not just of domains of human activity but of the various religious, ideological, or “worldview” camps that arise out of people’s different responses to Christ’s offer of redemption. Contrary to Seven Mountaineers’ dream of executing final judgment tomorrow, Kuyper reserved that exercise to Christ alone at the end of time.  

In the meantime, he said, Christians were not to lord it over others but to raise in each sphere a compelling witness to the gospel’s contribution to the common good—toward realizing the creation potential in each sphere. Not to seize mountains but to cultivate fields side by side with others of different, even contrary, fundamental convictions. After all, if the gospel holds the best promise for human life, then those who claim its mantle should be able to demonstrate that by the results of their work. 

Sources

Kuyper claimed that sphere sovereignty is rooted in the Bible, but he actually drew his case out of a grand picture of world history, the lively world of the late Middle Ages in the Low Countries, and some venerable Calvinist social and political theory. Plus, the language of “spheres” was common in his day among observers like Max Weber as they tried to get a handle on the explosive proliferation of human activity during the great bourgeois boom of the 19^th century. 

Wellnau’s source for his “seven mountains”? As a college dropout, certainly not rigorous study. Rather, enough social media charisma to get him access to the circle of self-appointed “apostles” and “prophets” of the NAR with their flurry of dreams and visions direct from the Holy Spirit. These regularly confirm Donald Trump to be God’s anointed agent to save America from the demonic pedophiles populating the deep state, the global elite, and the Democratic Party. 

The “seven mountains” revelation was Wellnau’s own and lays out the means and end for the righteous ones to overturn these grave threats. Yet, for all the novelty attending the theory, two tired notions lie behind it. First, the ancient heresy that America is God’s chosen nation. Second, the dream that the millennium is at hand and will be soon delivered by a Big Revival, one last great outburst of the Holy Spirit that will convert the whole globe. This will get rid not only of all the minions of Satan but all the trying complications of history. 

Similarities

The Manichaeanism here, the millenarian fantasies, and the unaccountable authority doubtless spin Kuyper in his grave every day. So why might Wallnau and other oracles of the Christian Right like Kuyper if they ever read him? 

1. Politically, whatever his calls for the common good, Kuyper’s voice was persistently one of militancy and crusade, summoning Christians to do their utmost at a crucial turn in world history. The rising force of philosophical naturalism—which denied the supernatural and therefore, Kuyper said, any viable concept of the ethical—threatened to drown the Christian witness beneath the blood of might-makes-right and a flood of Social Darwinism. There are more than echoes of this theme on today’s Christian Right, however differently—and inconsistently?—they might apply it.  

His militant tone was also due in part to Kuyper’s role as a movement leader, especially a political party leader. He was always trying to get out the vote and so lived in constant tension: his commitment to principled pluralism uncompromising, his sense of urgency unrelenting.

2. With the climbers of the Seven Mountains, Kuyper could view his spheres strategically, scanning the horizon for the most likely frontiers for Christian action. At first, like the Christian Right, he saw the greatest threat in an expanding state, but later he wanted to shore up civil government amid the whirlwind of modernization. He kept his focus on the domains of education, journalism, and other sites of cultural formation, seeing with today’s Christian Right (and a good bit of the Left) politics as lying downstream from culture. But he consistently wanted a voice at the table—however loud and argumentative it might be—never to run other people out of the room. 
   

3. One more point of felt similarity—a sense of being a beleaguered minority, the remnant of a once dominant people now set upon by smug elites. MAGA’s oscillation between self-pity and vengefulness regularly recurred in Kuyper’s ranks. 

But he also had an apt word of warning in this context. We Calvinists once had official privilege in the Netherlands, he told his followers, and that turned out badly. It cankered the church; it denied our Catholic and humanist fellow citizens their due rights; and it left us suffering due pay-back today. So we have to suck it up, stay faithful, and show that ours is indeed a better road toward national wellbeing.  

Conclusion

In sum, the independent charismatics of the NAR and their “Evangelical” (that is, unreconstructed Fundamentalist) compatriots have come, at different times and stages, out of the pure spiritualism of their religious origins, with its dream that personal salvation solves all problems, into the realization that one has to have some kind of political and cultural engagement in the larger world. Some of the readers among them have turned to Kuyper as a safely orthodox and apparently anti-liberal resource. 

But as Richard Mouw once observed, Fundamentalists in America can’t decide whether they are living in Babylon or Jerusalem and so oscillate between those, and only those, options, not realizing that with Paul, they—and we—are living in Rome. They are left swinging between quietism and conquest, and with the election of Ronald Reagan started moving from the first to the second. Kuyper rejected both options but with a nuance that Fundamentalists just can’t process and that we too might forget.