Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920): a Model Christian Statesman against Mandatory Vaccination

“There is not one square inch in the whole domain of human existence, over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not say ‘Mine!’”

Those are the timeless words of Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), the prime minister of the Netherlands who recognized that Christ is Lord over all areas of life. Kuyper was a very important figure in Dutch history. Some of his accomplishments are as follows:

As only a partial list, he was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, the driving force behind a major schism in that church, a professor of theology, the long-time editor of a daily newspaper, the founder of the Netherlands’ first mass-based political party, an effective advocate for public funding of religious schools, the founder of a university, a much celebrated traveler in Britain and America, a member of the Dutch Parliament (and later Senate), from 1901 to 1905 the prime minister of the Netherlands, and throughout his adult life an absolutely indefatigable author on topics political, theological, cultural, and devotional.[1]

Kuyper very openly opposed mandatory vaccination. He noted that doctors can be wrong, and compulsion is not justifiable until one already manifests a disease – at which case it is too late for vaccination. Moreover, government does not have jurisdiction over one’s body, and conscientious objections must be respected. Finally, mandatory vaccination reduces to absurdity when requiring one to be vaccinated a second time. In Kuyper’s words,

For this reason alone, compulsory cowpox vaccination should be out of the question. Our physicians may be mistaken and government may never stamp a particular medical opinion as orthodox and therefore binding. Moreover, compulsion can never be justified until the illness manifests itself and may therefore never be prescribed as a preventative. A third reason is that government should keep its hands off our bodies. Fourthly, government must respect conscientious objections. In the fifth place, it is one or the other: either it does not itself believe in vaccination, or if it does, it will do redundant work by proceeding to protect once more those already safeguarded against an evil that will no longer have a hold on them anyway. Vaccination certificates will therefore have to go—and will be gone at least from our free schools. The form of tyranny hidden in these vaccination certificates is just as real a threat to the nation’s spiritual resources as a smallpox epidemic itself.[2]

Kuyper thus would be a very important force in protecting his people from vaccine tyranny. Kuyper headed the Antirevolutionary Party (ARP), which he was the chief architect of. Formed in 1879,[3] a core part of its platform was opposition to mandatory vaccination.[4] As Kuyper, speaking for the ARP, writes, “Thus we protested against the compulsory inoculation of our children.”[5]

Beyond opposing state-imposed vaccination, did Kuyper oppose vaccination on a personal level? That would probably be the case. Not only did he oppose mandatory vaccination, but he recognized that vaccination is deadly. First, as The Vaccination Inquirer and Health Review reports, Kuyper states the following about a child slain by vaccination:

The Rev. Dr. A. Kuyper, Professor at the Free University, Amsterdam, writes, 3rd September, — “A child of Mr. J. Forster, Professor in Medicine at the Amsterdam Town-University, one year old, has been vaccinated by his colleague, Mr. H. Hertz, Professor of Medicine at the same institution. The lymph came down from the Munich-park. The child was poisoned by the vaccination and died twenty-four hours afterwards. All the newspapers have mentioned the fact, causing a great sensation.”[6]

Those who are pro-vaccination do not typically acknowledge vaccine-caused deaths. Second, in his Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, Kuyper takes issue with the enforcement of vaccination on the “carelessly” drawn conclusion that the procedure is “harmless”:

But without knowing the genetic action of vaccine, the general conclusion was considered equally justifiable, that inoculation with this virus is a harmless preventive against smallpox, and, on the ground of this so-called scientifically discovered law vaccination has been enforced by public authority; while now, alas, in the end it appears how carelessly this conclusion was drawn. Hence extreme care is necessary, lest we proclaim as a general law what afterward appears to rest on defective observation.[7]

Kuyper’s words shown above, then, do not lend themselves to being pro-vaccination.

Takeaway

Thanks to the labors of men such as Kuyper, a voice against mandatory vaccination would be entrenched in the public sphere of the Netherlands. The mandatory vaccination of teaching staff and school-age children, which began in 1872, would end in 1928.[8]

Kuyper, then, did not use his influence to shill for vaccination — as so many do today. Rather, as an adherent of the Christian religion, he worked to protect people from being forced to undergo this pagan poison rite.

Lord willing, God will raise up more courageous Christian leaders to continue Kuyper’s righteous fight against mandatory vaccination. Jesus is Lord over all areas of life, as Kuyper recognized, and therefore the state has no moral authority to poison the population with vaccines.

Notes
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[1] James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013), ix.
[2] Abraham Kuyper, Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto (1880; Bellingham WA: Lexham Press. Kindle Edition, 2015), 16.2, § 204, Kindle Locations 4917-23.
[3] S. Bishop, More Kuyperania (December 8, 2015), Koers, 80(3), 1-6. Retrieved September 1, 2019, from https://dx.doi.org/10.19108/koers.80.3.2240.
[4] Abraham Kuyper, Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, James D. Bratt, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 472.
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Vaccination Inquirer and Health Review, vol.II, no. 19, October, 1880. In The Vaccination Inquirer and Health Review, Volume the Second, April 1880 to March 1881 (London: Edward W. Allen, 1881), 99.
[7] Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology: Its Principles, trans. J. Hendrik de Vries (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 138.
[8] Geurt Henk Spruyt, “Politicians and Epidemics in the Bible Belt,” Utrecht Law Review, Volume 12, Issue 2 (June) 2016 (accessible at https://www.utrechtlawreview.org/articles/abstract/10.18352/ulr.349/), 115.

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