In 2018, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán laid out his vision for “Christian democracy” at a summer university conference. Unlike Western Europe, where globalism is the prevailing de facto ideology, Orbán advocated a different path for Central Europe with five fundamental tenets:
1) Defend its Christian culture, and reserve the right to reject multiculturalist ideology.
2) Defend the traditional family model, being entitled to assert that every child has the right to a mother and a father.
3) Defend nationally strategic economic sectors and markets.
4) Defend its borders, and reserve the right to reject immigration.
5) Insist on the principle of one nation, one vote on the most important issues, which right must not be denied in the European Union.
Orbán’s vision has been much criticized, but little understood. The European elite, he stated, has exchanged the foundation of its Christian heritage for a borderless “open society” in which everything is in flux, and nothing is solid: “there are no borders, European people can be readily replaced with immigrants, the family has been transformed into an optional, fluid form of cohabitation.” Orbán’s pro-natal, socially conservative agenda, which has repeatedly placed his government in the crosshairs of the European elites, puts Hungary on a different path.
Indeed, Hungary’s 2011 constitution makes this explicit, stating that the nation “shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman established by voluntary decision, and the family as the basis of the survival of the nation.” Further, it states that “Family ties shall be based on marriage or the relationship between parents and children,” and emphasizes that “Hungary shall support the commitment to have children,” and that: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. Every human being shall have the right to life and human dignity; the life of the foetus shall be protected from the moment of conception.”
Araft of pro-marriage and pro-child policies has buttressed these constitutional commitments. The marriage rate doubled between 2010 and 2021; divorces per marriage have halved during the same period. While abortion is still legal up until 12 weeks in Hungary—the government recognizes that a ban, while constitutionally viable, does not yet have sufficient public support—the abortion rate has also halved since 2003, and the teen abortion rate has fallen since 2016. As Laurie Rose at the Institute for Family Studies noted with more than a little surprise: “In sum, Hungary’s pro-marriage culture seems robust enough to survive given the increased age at marriage and the decline in divorce.”
In addition to an ambitious policy of federal family promotion, Hungary has also proactively combatted the spread of the sexual revolution. The Fidesz government passed legislation banning the promotion of LGBT “sexual propaganda” to minors in 2021, and banned lewd Pride demonstrations in March by a margin of 136 to 27. A constitutional amendment passed in April buttressed that law, and affirmed that there are two sexes. Legally changing gender was outlawed in 2020. Critics insist that this is an attack on democracy, but the policies are popular, and it is worth noting that virtually no democracy embraced the LGBT agenda before the year 2000.
Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith – in this case Christian religious articles of faith. Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation. Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected. Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them. These include human dignity, the family and the nation – because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations.
Orbán’s project seems radical primarily because every European nation once recognized their Christian foundations (the preamble to Ireland’s constitution still begins by “Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ”). But since the 1960s, Western societies have experienced a great rupture, with institutions shifting from a historic recognition of Scriptural revelation to the new foundation of sexual revolution. Blasphemy laws still exist, but apply to “misgendering” or once-foreign religions; politicians and the judiciary prioritize sexual rights over religious freedom. Resisting that shift now seems revolutionary.
In her essential book How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, Mary Eberstadt details how the collapse of Christianity in the West was triggered by the sexual revolution. She meticulously debunks the prevailing theories of secularization: that the loss of faith was brought about by a combination of Enlightenment philosophy, Darwinian scientism, Scriptural criticism, material prosperity, and the death blow of the bloody horror shows of the 20th century. There are elements of truth within each of these narratives. History is messy, and there are no simple, straight lines that can be drawn from catalyst to conclusion.
But as Eberstadt observes, each of these theories fail as an explanation for the secularization that exploded in the 1960s. “The problem is that they don’t stand up to the historical timeline,” she told me in an interview. “If the wars were the explanation for secularization across the West, it wouldn’t make sense that we see secularization in vanquished societies, victorious societies, and neutral societies like Switzerland. An even more fundamental problem is the fact that World War II was followed by a religious boom from 1945 into the early 1960s across the Western world. This is not well understood. In societies that we now regard as tremendously secular places—New Zealand, Australia, Canada, etc.—there was in fact a religious boomlet after the war. Why was that?”
Dr. Adrian Gregory, an associate professor of modern history at Oxford, concurs. In an interview shortly after he completed a research project on religion and World War I, he noted that there is little evidence to support the theory that the world wars triggered secularization. Instead, Westerners remained very religious through the 1950s—it wasn’t until the ‘60s, he observed, that people began to abandon the churches. “Then, almost within my own lifetime actually, there is a radical de-sacralization,” he told me. “Even then, you have to allow for evangelical revivals and other complexities. Regular religious worship declines very, very rapidly—but more recently than we tend to give it credit for.”
