Abraham Kuyper’s 1913 speech on sport and exercise is fully online

In the Digital Heritage Month Sports History is interested in the finest digital collections of historical sports heritage. In 1913, Abraham Kuyper spoke about his own sporting past – here.

Abraham Kuyper (center), with two of his sons in the Dolomites at the end of the 19th century. Photo via image bank University Library VU University (UBVU)

Today I present at the VU Sports Center my book A particular movement, 125 years of student sport at the Université Libre. For this I have made extensive use of online sources, such as a very special speech by Abraham Kuyper in 1913 for the Bond van Gereformeer from Jongelingsvereenigingen.

The idea that for a long time there was no interest in sport in Reform circles persists. This also applies to athletes from the Vrije Universiteit itself. “Physical education, physical exercise, sport? wrote the Okeanos Rowing Club in its 2007 Jubilee Book, for example. In Reformed VU circles, the sport was considered swearing in the church.

This is not correct, because very early on at the VU interesting and above all personal ideas about sports and physical education emerged. These texts are online in their entirety and are very interesting sources.

Abraham Kuyer

Abraham Kuyper, for example, was a gymnastics, fencing and swimming fanatic from his youth. “All my life I have understood the duty of vigorous exercise,” he himself said of this in 1913 during a celebratory speech to the Bond van Gereformeer of Jonglingsvereenigingen.

A passionate mountaineer, he makes annual trips to Switzerland, Tyrol, the Pyrenees, Norway and the United States. He remembered it proudly among the reformed youth: “In the best years of my manly strength, I climbed high peaks for weeks, sometimes with marches of more than ten and twelve hours a day.

Johan Snel already wrote a lot about this in his 2020 biography on Kuyper, which shows that these sporting endeavors also had a spiritual character. “In the high mountains, you have literally, physically, encountered the limits of human experience. But precisely, through our limitation, you glimpsed the reality of God.’

Kuyper also brought up this athletic and theological perspective in his celebratory speech, in which he emphasized to his audience that a Christian has a duty to treat his body responsibly: Soon you will be fully aware of this fundamental power of to be in that other trio, in power of faith, in moral power, and in power for your life task.

Sport and physical activity were therefore not isolated, but were part of total human development. “The Romans also had a proverb that is useful here,” Kuyper said. “They boasted of a human sana in corpore sano; which means: a big head only comes with a big and healthy body.

Popke Stegenga

And then there was Pastor Popke Stegenga, who, he reports, Biographical lexicon for the history of Dutch Protestantism, had joined the Lutheran Church in 1915 “because of a more liberal spiritual climate and a broader scope of action in the congregation”. Ten years later, he was appointed professor of philosophy and pedagogy at the Academy of Physical Education in Amsterdam, in particular for the Protestant Christian educational field. This institution was then located in the physiology laboratory of the Free University on Valeriusplein.

In 1923, the same Stegenga published the book Sport and piety, which partly joins Kuyper. This special work is also available online in its entirety – here.

As he should have been, Stegenga first warned against the worst forms of sports madness, “the great mass of them, who find in sports all that interests them, whose conversations are not about nothing else, whose thoughts are on nothing else, whose first and last question is about sports news. At the same time, he called on the religious community to start practicing the sport themselves. Where godliness is truly wholesome, a life which rises joyfully to God and expects all from Him, it can above all take the sport of youth as an uplifting and ennobling means of shaping and strengthening the outer life.

He even went so far as to agree to play sports on Sundays, “provided that it really brings relaxation, refreshment of the body”. All this in moderation: “As long as you don’t make Sunday a day of asshole. Despite this nuance, this last call went far too far for the critic of the heraldthe magazine of the Kuyperian movement: ‘What is said about sports on Sundays, I consider very doubtful.’

The result has been a very interesting discussion of Christian ideas about sport, a largely unwritten chapter in the history of sport and therefore a wonderful new area of ​​research.