From Neo-Calvinist Theology to Illiberal Regime Norms: The Hungarian Reformed Church and the Discursive Construction of “Christian Europe”

This paper examines how Hungary’s illiberal regime exercises discursive agency in producing and stabilising regime norms. Building on mainstream understandings of regimes as institutional configurations of formal and informal rules structuring access to power, it develops a complementary perspective that foregrounds regimes as historically contingent, norm-based systems of governance that are socially constructed and discursively sustained. Drawing on constructivist and critical discourse-analytical insights, the paper assumes that norms inform collective identities; identities underpin the definition of state interests; and interests, in turn, guide policy. From this vantage point, regime durability depends on the strategic production and circulation of a moral order that defines who “we” are, who “they” are, and what counts as necessary, legitimate or unthinkable. Hungary is a crucial case, where “illiberal democracy” was explicitly announced as a regime project and linked to a particular vision of “Christian Europe”. Empirically, the paper traces how the Neo-Calvinist narrative of the Hungarian Reformed Church (HRC) is translated into state discourse on “Christian Europe”. Rather than assuming that regime ideology originates in the state, it reconstructs the genealogy of key norms – “Christian Europe”, national mission, protected community and hierarchies of belonging – in HRC texts and practices and in governmental discourse. The argument is that these norms “glue together” the illiberal regime by providing a coherent vocabulary for who belongs, who must be protected and which enemies threaten the community. Using the Discourse-Historical Approach, the analysis combines a historical and intertextual perspective. First, it examines how, in the 1930s, the Horthy regime drew on Neo-Calvinist ideas associated with Abraham Kuyper to reposition the Reformed Church within the Hungarian state, linking theological notions of vocation, sovereignty and community to conservative–nationalist projects. Second, it investigates how similar motifs reappear in contemporary HRC documents (synod resolutions, pastoral letters, strategic plans) and in political texts by leading government figures between 2010 and 2025, including prime ministerial speeches, parliamentary debates and public campaigns. The paper shows how Neo-Calvinist themes are selectively re-articulated in the language of “Christian Europe” and “illiberal democracy”, where they legitimise institutional change, welfare redistribution and exclusionary citizenship policies as the defence of a threatened Christian civilisation. In this perspective, the Hungarian illiberal regime emerges as a historically layered normative order co-produced by religious and political actors and articulated across theological, national and European scales. By foregrounding the HRC as a key discursive actor, and by tracing continuities and ruptures between the Horthy era and the present, the paper contributes to debates on political regimes in three ways: it conceptualises regimes as discursively constructed normative orders rather than only as institutional configurations; it highlights the role of religious actors in stabilising illiberal projects; and it demonstrates how regime transformation operates through strategic norm production aimed at building a “new society”.