Sphere Sovereignty - Historical Background

Historical Background

Sphere sovereignty is an alternative to the worldviews of ecclesiasticism and secularism (especially in its Statist form). During the Middle Ages, a form of Papal Monarchy assumed that God rules over the world through the Church.

Ecclesiasticism was widely evident in the arts. Religious themes were encouraged by art's primary patron, the Church. Similarly, the politics in the Middle Ages often consisted of political leaders doing as the Church instructed. In both economic guilds and agriculture the Church supervised. In the family sphere, the Church regulated family procreation, sexual positions, sexuality, and infidelity. In the educational sphere, several universities were founded by religious orders.

During the Renaissance, the rise of a secularist worldview accompanied the emergence of a wealthy merchant class. Some merchants became patrons of the arts, independent of the Church. Protestantism later made civil government, the arts, family, education, and economics officially free from ecclesiastical control. While Protestantism maintained a full-orbed or holistically religious view of life as distinguished from an ecclesiasticism, the later secular Enlightenment sought to rid society of religion entirely.

Sphere Sovereignty was first formulated by the Neo-Calvinist theologian and Dutch prime minister Abraham Kuyper and further developed by philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. Kuyper based the idea of sphere sovereignty partially on the Christian view of existence coram Deo, every part of human life exists equally and directly “before the face of God.” For Kuyper, this meant that sphere sovereignty involved a certain form of separation of church and state and a separation of state and other societal spheres, or anti-statism.