This spring has been a season of chaos where trade policy is concerned. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump levied dramatic new tariffs on US imports, including those from allied countries, only to make a jarring reversal a mere 13 hours after they went into effect. For now, most new tariffs are in a 90-day pause, except for a sky-high rate on goods from China, which seems likely to come down soon following weeks of market volatility.
Caught in the middle of this uncertainty is the global economy, countless businesses, and consumers who will pay higher prices for a wide range of items, including necessities like food and clothing. This is likely to be painful for everyone, but especially for lower-income households that spend a larger proportion of their income on critical supplies.
For Christians, the value and wisdom of tariffs can’t be settled by a simple appeal to Scripture, as some ethical questions can. But Christian thinkers have grappled with this issue in prior eras of protectionism. The Dutch thinker and statesman Abraham Kuyper staked out a pro-tariffs position around the turn of the 20th century, and decades later, his stance came under fire from Frederick Nymeyer, a Calvinist businessman from Illinois who advocated for free trade.
Neither man was a trained economist, and both argued from the Bible and their political contexts alike. But where Kuyper largely presented a pragmatic, economic case, Nymeyer argued that tariffs violate well-established biblical principles of justice and honesty.
Born in 1837, Kuyper was a pastor in the national Dutch Reformed Church before he retired from his post in 1874 to join the Dutch parliament. Over the course of his life, he edited a daily newspaper; founded a university, a denomination, and a political party; and eventually led his country as prime minister between 1901 and 1905. Kuyper is most known, though, for pioneering the theology and cultural engagement of Neo-Calvinism, which encouraged Christians to transform realms like politics and labor without confusing those things with the church.
Kuyper’s views on tariffs were formed in a world significantly different from ours. The Dutch economy experienced a decline—and limited growth—in the first half of the 19th century. By the second half, when Kuyper came into public life, the country was beginning to industrialize. Coupled with construction of roads and railways, industry helped achieve steady economic growth. Official data indicates only a third of the Dutch population still worked in agriculture around 1900, while the rest took jobs in other services or industries, such as textiles.
By the time Kuyper entered the political scene in 1874, debates about the merits of free trade were widespread across Europe, with the continent toggling between protectionist and more open trade policies. Kuyper primarily engaged with the issue as a politician. And in booklets, newspaper editorials, and at least one book, he praised protectionism, which he—like many politicians now as then—saw as a method of promoting worker interests, funding social programs, and creating better jobs for ordinary people.
One of the most robust defenses of his views came in the second volume of his book Antirevolutionaire Staatkunde (Anti-Revolutionary Politics), in which Kuyper bemoaned an outflow of Dutch workers into better-off Germany. He blamed this pattern on his country’s trade policies and posited that more tariffs would spur home-grown manufacturing, allowing Dutch workers to stay in the Netherlands. Kuyper also criticized the idea that the Netherlands would have to rely on other countries, like Germany, for necessities.
Kuyper built his arguments with statistics and appeals to secular authorities, including other protectionist writers. Joost Hengstmengel, a university lecturer in the Netherlands, told me that insofar as Kuyper made theological arguments, he primarily used the universal economy doctrine, which says God divided gifts “at the creation of the world, forcing the nations to specialize in certain industries.” And “in order to maintain this division of nations and labor, Kuyper argued, tariffs are necessary.”
That connection between God’s creation purposes and tariff policy seems strained—and Kuyper seems to have wanted a more extensive Christian position. He bemoaned that he was not an economist and that his Anti-Revolutionary Party “had not produced technical economists whose views were grounded in a Reformed world and lifeview,” Jordan J. Ballor, coeditor of a 12-volume compilation of Kuyper’s work, said in an email interview.
And part of Kuyper’s opposition to free trade appears to have stemmed from the less noble motive of negative partisanship. Free trade’s “greatest champions in the Netherlands of his day were also radical secularists and anti-Christian ideologues,” Ballor said, which meant being “for or against free trade had more baggage than simple trade policy.”
Decades after Kuyper’s death, Nymeyer challenged his case for tariffs and argued that protectionism was “unscriptural and unsound.” A protégé of libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and a Calvinist himself, the Illinois businessman believed Kuyper’s way of seeing the world centered communities and institutions to the detriment of the individual and, when it came to tariffs, divided at least some individuals along industrial or national lines.
In a 1956 entry of his periodical Progressive Calvinism, for example, Nymeyer tackled Kuyper’s argument that free trade would lead to higher unemployment for sawmill employees due to a flood of finished goods flowing into the Netherlands. Even if new tariffs on products (in this case, lumber) could protect some jobs, Nymeyer said, such policies would also raise the price for the consumer. In this, he charged, Kuyper did not “recoil from hurting other people in the Netherlands for the sawmill employees”—not to mention sawmill employees in other countries who would see demand for their work fall. “What virtuous morality,” Nymeyer asked, “is there in helping one man at the expense of another”?
“In plain language, Kuyper has scales for morality with two sets of weights; one set of weights for Dutchmen; another set of weights for Swedes (foreigners),” Nymeyer wrote. “Somewhere in Scripture there is a very unfavorable comment on the morality of different sets of weights (Deut. 25:13-16; Proverbs 20:10 and 23.)” The Scriptures Nymeyer cited are concerned with dishonesty, though fairness is a clear theme too.
But for all Nymeyer’s certainty on the subject, Scripture doesn’t prescribe a Christian position on tariffs. It does extoll wisdom (Prov. 4:7), foresight (Prov. 22:3), impartiality (Lev. 19:15), prudent use of resources (Prov. 6:6–8), and care for the poor (Deut. 15:4). Christians have debated trade policy before and will again in the future, and we can at least expect these virtues of each other—if not our leaders.
Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.
