Sphere sovereignty

Sphere sovereignty implies that no one area of life or societal community is sovereign over another. Each sphere has its own created integrity. Neo-Calvinists hold that since God created everything "after its own kind", diversity must be acknowledged and appreciated. For instance, the different God-given norms for family life and economic life should be recognized, such that a family does not properly function like a business. Similarly, neither faith-institutions (e.g. churches) nor an institution of civil justice (i.e. the state) should seek totalitarian control, or any regulation of human activity outside their limited competence, respectively.

The concept of sphere sovereignty became a general principle in European countries governed by Christian democratic political parties, who held it as an integral part of their ideology. The promotion of sphere sovereignty by Christian democrats led to the creation of corporatist welfare states throughout the world.

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 sexual activity and procreation. 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 at the turn of the 20th century 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.

As Christian democratic political parties were formed, they adopted the principle of sphere sovereignty, with both Protestants and Roman Catholics agreeing "that the principles of sphere sovereignty and subsidiarity boiled down to the same thing", although this was at odds with Dooyeweerd's development of sphere sovereignty, which he held to be significantly distinct from subsidiarity.