The whiteness of ‘Christian Europe’

Abstract

In the summer of 2018, Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, spoke at a nationalist retreat in the central Romanian town of Băile Tuşnad (Hungarian: Tusnádfürdő) about Christianity and its place in European culture. Europe, he lamented, was in decline. Once upon a time, he said, ideals of family and nation had defined the life of Christian Europeans. But Europe had abandoned these traditions and become weak and rudderless. Across the continent, he said, families had become optional. Cosmopolitan fantasies about open borders and open societies were eroding national security. While Europeans professed their faith in the ideals of multiculturalism and tolerance, newcomers flooded into the continent, bringing with them religious and cultural values incompatible with Europe's Christian traditions. Soon, these migrants would replace Christian Europeans. Europe, Orbán warned, had to return to its traditions or be destroyed: 'Every European country has the right to defend its Christian culture and the right to reject the ideology of multiculturalism.' 1 At first glance, Hungary seems an unlikely place for such a full-throated defence of 'Christian Europe'. By any social scientific measure, Hungarian society is thoroughly secularised. According to surveys done by the Pew Research Center, only 17 per cent of Hungarians attend worship services at least once a month. 2 And two-thirds of the country agreed that 'belief in God is not necessary to be moral and have good values'. 3 Despite these discouraging statistics, Orbán and the government that he leads insist that moral relativism is a cancer spread by their liberal enemies to destroy the nation and that an independent and sovereign Hungary can only rest on a bedrock of shared values derived from Christianity. They have even enshrined these ideas in the country's constitution, the 2011 Fundamental Law, which begins with a preamble that recognises 'the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood' and that declares the nation's pride in belonging to 'Christian Europe '. 4