In the United States, conversations between Calvinists and Catholics generally follow a similar pattern. They typically focus on doctrinal disagreements, such as baptism, the Eucharist/Lord’s Supper, and the nature of the Church. These are crucially important topics that certainly require serious and sustained discussion. The doctrinal disagreements that have left deep historical marks of bitter division, and that still profoundly affect millions of adherents today, cannot simply be set aside through ecumenical optimism or mere emotional sentiment. It is therefore no wonder that conversations between Catholics and Calvinists have continued for quite some time, even after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).
However, the current political situation forces us to reflect on another issue that needs to be thought about seriously. It is no longer enough nor urgent to merely ask Catholics and Calvinists to talk about their doctrinal disagreement. What they need to discuss more seriously is how they can bring their theological resources and traditions to the table to address together the rise of authoritarianisms that growingly use Christian language.
In such a setting, ecumenism cannot remain confined to doctrinal comparison. It must also become an ethical task. If Christians seek visible unity, or at least faithful cooperation, that desire must be tested in relation to the crises of the present. The question is not only whether Catholics and Calvinists can understand one another better doctrinally. It is whether they can think together about concrete political questions and their entanglement with power, authority, and the conditions necessary for a more just and peaceful society.
The postconciliar Catholic commitment to ecumenism already gives us a framework for this broader task. The Second Vatican Council’s Unitatis Redintegratio is often read primarily as a doctrinal or ecclesial document, and understandably so. It addresses the restoration of unity among Christians and calls the church into a more humble relation with other Christian communities. But the significance of the document is larger than a narrow theological settlement. It also opens the door to collaboration around moral and social questions. It recognizes that Christian unity is not exhausted by institutional merger or dogmatic reconciliation. It must also appear in common witness, especially where human dignity, peace, poverty, and social disorder press upon the world.
That matters because ecumenism, at its best, is not a strategy for institutional efficiency. It is a spiritual discipline of conversion. Walter Kasper was right to stress that the ecumenical vision of Vatican II is dynamic rather than static. The church journeys toward the fullness of unity in Christ, and that journey demands inner renewal. But that inner renewal cannot remain sealed off from public responsibility. A church renewed by humility and repentance should also be drawn toward a more faithful engagement with the world’s suffering. In this sense, Christian mission also belongs within the horizon of ecumenism. As a result, Christians do not seek to understand one another only in order to resolve old disputes and differences. They seek one another because the world is in crisis, and faithful witnesses now require forms of cooperation that were once neglected.
One pressing issue that must be addressed today is the question of the limits of political power, which is slowly but surely eroding the conscience of American Christians.
I want to suggest that one starting point lies in comparing two ideas that emerged from very different traditions yet share a striking moral intuition. The first is Abraham Kuyper’s doctrine of sphere sovereignty. The second is the Catholic social principle of subsidiarity. Each arose in response to the disruptions brought about by modernism and secular humanism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each likewise sought to defend the integrity of social life against forms of domination. Each, in its own way, insists that human community must not be reduced to the power of the state or the logic of the market.
The comparison between the two is not entirely new. Scholars have noticed the affinity before, especially in political theory. But the deeper significance of that affinity has not yet been fully explored as an ecumenical and theological resource for resisting the new authoritarian temptation. That is where this conversation becomes newly urgent.
Kuyper (1837–1920), often regarded as a founding figure of the neo-Calvinist tradition, held a wide range of vocations and public roles, including journalism, pastoral ministry, theology, the founding of the Free University in Amsterdam, service in Parliament, and the office of Prime Minister of the Netherlands. He developed the doctrine of sphere sovereignty out of a profound concern for justice and tyranny. His question still relates closely to our own today: Why do societies that celebrate liberation so often generate new forms of domination? Why does the overthrow of one tyrant so often prepare the way for another? Kuyper believed the answer lay in a false understanding of sovereignty itself. Once sovereignty is detached from God and placed entirely in the hands of the state, the state begins to see itself as the source and arbiter of all social life. It no longer understands itself as one institution with a limited task. Instead, it seeks authority over every sphere.
For Kuyper, this was the root of modern tyranny. The state becomes dangerous when it forgets that society contains forms of life that are not its creation and therefore not its possession. Family, church, school, labor, art, scholarship, commerce, and civic association each possess their own integrity. They are not fragments waiting to be unified by state power. They are differentiated spheres with their own internal responsibilities and norms. The task of the state is not to swallow these spheres but to preserve justice among them, protecting each from encroachment by the others.
In this way, he sought to protect a moral vision in which freedom rests on plurality rather than uniformity. From this perspective, peace does not come when all things are brought under a single center of power. It comes when distinct communities are able to flourish without domination.
That same moral concern appears, though in a different theological expression, in Catholic social teaching. The principle of subsidiarity is usually associated with Quadragesimo Anno, but its foundations are already visible in Rerum Novarum. That encyclical is often remembered, rightly, for its defense of workers in the face of industrial exploitation. Yet its social vision extends beyond the immediate labor question. What is at stake is the nature of society itself.
In Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) insists that human beings are naturally social and that they form smaller communities within the larger body politics. These communities are not mere conveniences. They are essential to the moral life of people. Families, churches, labor associations, and other voluntary bodies possess a legitimacy that the state must respect. The state exists to protect natural rights, not to dissolve the social forms through which those rights are exercised. In this sense, the state is not the source of all association. It stands in relation to associations that precede it in moral significance.
Here the parallel with Kuyper becomes difficult to ignore. Both reject the idea that society consists only of isolated individuals on the one side and the state on the other. Both resist the centralization of authority into one commanding institution. Both defend smaller communities as necessary to human dignity. And both insist that political authority becomes unjust when it exceeds its proper limits.
Still, neither tradition can be retrieved uncritically. Each has its own limitations and therefore requires critical engagement.
Kuyper’s deep suspicion of centralized governmental authority has, in some strands of American evangelical politics, been reinterpreted as a justification for restricting federal power, even to the point of weakening vital public institutions that serve smaller communities. Ironically, such applications subvert the very purpose of sphere sovereignty, which was meant to protect communal life and moral responsibility rather than undermine the state’s role in promoting the common good. It is also widely recognized that sphere sovereignty, which contributed to the politics of pillarization in the Netherlands, was later appropriated by Afrikaners in support of separate development, one of the intellectual currents that informed apartheid.
The Catholic tradition also faces a serious ambiguity. Rerum Novarum offers a powerful defense of laborers and associations, but its treatment of capitalism remains limited and ambivalent. It condemns exploitation in moral terms while stopping short of a structural critique of capital itself. That hesitation creates a problem. Smaller communities may be defended against the state while still being captured by the market.
This means that both sphere sovereignty and subsidiarity require ongoing critical engagement even as they are being retrieved. They cannot function as slogans. They must be grounded in a deeper theological account of justice, personhood, and the common good. Even with these limitations, however, their convergence remains significant. Both traditions have rich potential for broader ecumenical cooperation in resisting a false choice that has come to dominate the contemporary political imagination.
This, I think, is where ecumenism must become more urgently relevant. I should clarify that I write neither as a Kuyperian scholar nor as an advocate of Kuyper, nor as a Catholic. I write, rather, as someone who grew up in the Calvinist tradition, now studies at a Catholic university, and has come to deeply respect the Catholic tradition. These two formative influences have shaped me profoundly, but they have also left me troubled by the extent to which some within both traditions appear willing to support authoritarian tendencies. For that reason, I find myself asking whether these two enduring traditions might begin a new dialogue. What I have offered here, of course, is only one example from the rich and extensive parallels that can be drawn between them.
Catholics and Calvinists have already demonstrated that meaningful and sustained conversation grounded in mutual respect is possible. But the present moment calls for more than doctrinal exchange alone. It calls for a shared theological reckoning with power. What might it mean for these traditions to speak together against authoritarianism?
