Illiberal Democracy – Reuniting State and Church?

The issue of religion is particularly relevant in Eastern Europe as at regime change many hoped for a return of pre-communist status quo on the exercise of religion and the role of the church in public life. The redefinition of social, political and private life has been taken different forms in the different countries but also differed government by government, depending on how much parties relied on the church to strengthen their legitimacy in the times of changes. In Hungary, state neutrality and guarantee of the freedom of religion has become the norm, despite the primacy of the traditional churches over ‘newer’ congregations. Post-regime Hungary is largely secular, most people have no strong ties to religion and churches are on the margins of Hungarian social life. This however does not mean that politics has not penetrated the churches – the majority Catholic Church has been a supporter of the right, while the smaller Calvinist Church lent support to the far right and the new Congregation of Faith supported the liberals (until they disappeared). At the same time, nationalism has a long tradition in Hungary, a country having lost two-third of its territory after WWI. The financial crisis, the challenge of the mass influx of people into the country and diminished trust in the European project have had enormous impact on everyday politics that provide solid ground for more and more exclusionary nationalism. This paper highlights how illiberal actors use religion to support their nationalist identity politics. Using systematic content analysis of the official speeches of Prime Minister Viktor Orban from 2010 to 2018, I examine the creation of this new discourse of Hungarian nationalism, where national identity is interwoven with loyalty to the traditional churches. This discourse is not only populist in being anti-establishment or anti-Europe but also increasingly ethnocentric being anti-migrants and uses religious references in defining itself as anti-Muslim. This culminates in Orban’s proposed illiberal democracy, within which identity of the nation rests on the discursive processes of ‘othering’ that stands for a contestation of liberal equality and diversity for the sake of saving the nation: migrants and refugees stand for culturally deviant people and liberal rationalism of EU institutions or progressive gender rights are threatening the nativist conception of society. It is this illiberal refusal of equality and diversity that calls on the support of traditional churches as a sign of Hungarianness. This echoes the anti-liberal turn in 1918 that brought church and state into closer union both symbolic and financial terms, yet references to Christianity are not evoked in a religious sense but rather religion is hijacked as a civilizational marker to distinguish and unite against Islam, and also to re-create a more nativist/cultural version of Europe in contrast to the liberal EU.