Orbán's defeat is a defeat for Christian nationalism

(RNS) — Like the journalist Lincoln Steffens, who, after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919, wrote, “I have seen the future, and it works,” America’s Christian nationalists saw the future working in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

Take Tucker Carlson, for example. Interviewing Orbán a year ago, he said, “I don’t mind sucking up: I think there’s a reason you’re the longest-serving leader in Europe. I think history, for all the criticism you’ve taken, will (vindicate you).”

And then on Sunday, Orbán was overwhelmingly rejected by Hungarian voters.

So what was the “illiberal Christian democracy” on the Danube of which their prime minister liked to speak during his 16 years in office?

It rested on a pillar of opposition to immigration, construed as maintaining Hungary for ethnic Hungarians — an ideal created historically as the result of, well, settler colonialism on the part of Magyar nomads from east of the Urals. The ideal was enshrined in 2011 via a rewriting of the country’s Fundamental Law (i.e. constitution) that declared, “We hold that the protection of our identity rooted in our historic constitution is a fundamental obligation of the State.”

As for the Christian dimension, the Law begins with the injunction “God bless the Hungarians” and proceeds with a National Avowal that includes: “We are proud that our king Saint Stephen built the Hungarian State on solid ground and made our country a part of Christian Europe one thousand years ago”; and, “We recognise the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood.” The document goes on to declare that the “protection of the constitutional identity and Christian culture of Hungary shall be an obligation of every organ of the State.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gestures with his fist on his chest after speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

To be sure, this has not served to make Hungary into a nation of churchgoers. Nor, for that matter, did Orbán’s perpetual defense of national sovereignty against the dictates of the European Union extend to neighboring Ukraine, the defense of which by the EU he continually resisted.

To advance his policies, the electoral system was rigged to enable Orbán’s Fidesz Party to win supermajorities in Parliament without even a majority of the popular vote. That made it possible to get a law passed to put the country’s public media outlets under the authority of an agency run by Fidesz, which proceeded to fill them up with Fidesz propagandists. Independent news outlets were suppressed and bought out to the point that by 2017, 90% of Hungarian media was controlled directly or indirectly by the government. Similar control was extended over the country’s education system.

Of particular appeal to conservative culture warriors in America were laws passed preventing gay couples from adopting and requiring government IDs to identify a person’s gender as the one assigned at birth. Meanwhile, think tanks established to promote Orbanist ideas made Hungary into a kind of Right Wing International. In a 2022 interview, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts declared, “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.”

Among those attracted to the Hungarian model was the writer Rod Dreher, whose devotion to the cause of re-Christianizing Europe led him to relocate to Budapest and mediate Orbánism to the likes of Carlson and JD Vance. In Dreher’s view, Orbán’s loss was the result not of his authoritarian cultural project but his tolerance of corruption amid poor national economic conditions. To say nothing of the Fidesz sex scandal that launched the political career of the newly elected Hungarian prime minister, Peter Magyar.

“It is undoubtedly true that populist, sovereignists, and national conservatives have lost their most visible champion,” Dreher wrote a day after the election. “But again, this result does not discredit the cause.”

While that, of course, remains to be seen, I have my doubts. Not only can causes be discredited by the shortcomings of their protagonists, but those shortcomings may be intimately related to the causes themselves. One need look no further than Donald Trump and his Christian nationalist devotees for evidence of that.