On Hegseth's "sphere sovereignty"

I'm thinking I was in college before I ever heard someone with theological chops put two words together into a phrase with some chops of its own--"sphere sovereignty." I remember learning that "sphere sovereignty" was a phrase worth knowing, in part because it originated in the quite sovereign rule of a Dutch preacher/politician named Abraham Kuyper, a man who was spoken of in very high-regard-ish tones.

I wasn't the greatest student back then, never was really, so let me tell you what I remember of "sphere sovereignty": it was a good thing, a good, good thing because it set boundaries by making the claim that the institutions of society each had their own separate domain and calling, their own private property. Thus, the Christian school I attended as a boy was not run by the c0nsistory of the church, any church--it was "parental" Christian education because a stratagem of the Calvinism at the base of our faith ruled clearly--"Kuyper said it!"--that the church had its own "sphere" of influence, as did the school. While the same men (not women back then) could be members of the local Christian school board and members of the church consistory, one of those organizations should not run the other. 

Why? Because sphere sovereignty was a principle of life, or thus saith Abraham Kuyper, who, I learned, gives us Reformed-types our marching orders. When Kuyper created a university--the Free University--he named it what he did because it was free from entanglements of any political or ecclesiastical entity. In it's sphere--the sphere of education--it was sovereign--or free.

"Sphere sovereignty" might have created some heft at Dordt College midway through the 20th century, but it's never been slung around on a banner or proclaimed on a t-shirt in the U. S. of A, never, that is, until Pete Hegseth, Trump's Secretary of War (their language, not mind). 

Hegseth's form of Christian nationalism has its own take on "sphere sovereignty," and what he and his cronies say doesn't set forth the kind of liberty and diversity at the heart of the doctrine's original application. In other words, what Secretary Hegseth and other Christian nationalists (who often brandish the word "Reformed" too) are selling isn't what I heard for the first time in 1966 just a few blocks down the road from where I'm sitting.

As Justin Bailor, from Calvin University, writes in a recent column in World, 

. . .it is Christ who is sovereign over all, and not any institution or any particular Christian–whether preacher, pope, or prince. A proper regard for the origins, essence, and purpose of sphere sovereignty reveal it to be a theory of limited government, and even more than that a theory of social diversity, cultural pluriformity, and civil liberty. It is as such opposed to all forms of tyranny.

There's no room therein for Hegseth's noxious Christian nationalism. 

Thus saith sphere sovereignty.