Hungarian Conservative

At the end of the opening worship service, participants collectively prayed for persecuted Christians. Since 2018, the opening day of the joint programme series of the Hungarian Catholic Bishops’ Conference and ECCH has also been designated as the Sunday for praying for persecuted Christians. The leaders of ECCH’s member churches participated in the liturgical service.

The inherent dilemma regarding the rules of engagement in a just war is that they tend to become either vague or restrictive when military operations fail to achieve victory or a ceasefire leading to peace.

The second half of the 17th century was a time of great hardships for Protestants: Protestant church history calls the years between 1671 and 1681 the ‘decade of mourning’. Thanks to some illustrated works by pastors freed from galley slavery, however, we can get some idea of what the preachers wore in those days.

Although Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen was acquitted by a court of second instance, the legal battle, unfortunately, may not be fully won. As Räsänen wrote in a press release, she hopes ‘the prosecutor will be satisfied with the decision, but if not, I am ready to defend freedom of expression and religion also before the Supreme Court of Finland, and if necessary, even before the European Court of Human Rights.’  It soon turned out that the prosecutor is considering turning to the Supreme Court.

Protestantism has been inextricably intertwined with Hungarian national consciousness and thirst for freedom. The Hungarian Protestant Bible translators made the Scripture accessible to Hungarians in their mother tongue, and also contributed to the development and preservation of the language. Practising Protestantism was also in defiance of the Catholic Habsburgs and Austria: Protestants were willing to suffer martyrdom rather than renounce their faith, as the fate of the Hungarian Protestant galley slaves demonstrates.

‘Christians no longer live by their own standards but by Christ’s, and since Jesus did not abolish the Law, the divine standards of morality, and therefore of sexuality, do not change with time or the spirit of the age.’

‘I thought, there is communism at home, half of the world is godless, they don’t know God or don’t consider Him important, and nobody wants to be a priest anymore… Thus, out of some kind of Hungarian defiance, I decided that I would become a priest.’

The year 1000 is not only memorable for Hungarians: at the turn of the first millennium, unexpected events took place in the whole of Europe, including on the fringes of the continent barely touched by Latin Christianity, in Poland and Hungary, where Christian conversion had been going on for years.

As British MP Ian Paisley Jr phrased it, ‘In recent decades, a new language and culture, foreign to the principles and freedoms that have characterised our shared values for generations, have been thrust upon us. The language contains familiar words but with new, enforced meanings: we are under pressure to assimilate new definitions of concepts like “tolerance”, “diversity” and “progressiveness” when it comes to free speech and dissenting opinions.’

The former Minister of the Interior publicly shared Bible verses, calling into question her church deciding to to endorse a gay pride parade. For this, she was charged with ‘agitation against a minority group’. Despite having been acquitted in March 2022, the zealous prosecution appealed and now she will be back on trial at the end of the month.

Former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz told the audience in Esztergom that he had a great relationship with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán during his time in public office. The two statesmen were among the first to raise concerns about the incoming wave of migration into Europe back in 2015. Meanwhile, Michael Knowles took a strong stance against transgenderism and talked at length about the difference between the liberal and conservative understanding of freedom.

Hazony suggests that significant change can be brought about in states with a Christian, Jewish, or conservative majority by creating a public culture similar to that of Israel or Hungary, where the focus is on living within the Biblical framework, building a better future, having children, teaching religion as a cultural inheritance, and serving in the military.

In the noise of today’s egos and digital stimuli, the zeitgeist, i.e. the spirit of the age, leads us deeper and deeper into nothingness. However, there is still a narrow path—blessed are those who notice it.

As a closing thought of his lecture, Dr Peterson explained that a central unifying spirit connects the biblical stories he had cited, and if we get into a proper relationship and alliance with this spirit, it will carry us through even the most horrible situations. He highlighted that the complete realisation and fulfilment of this can be seen in the New Testament.

Even though The Innocence of Pontius Pilate by David Lloyd Dusenbury offers no mystic resolution of Pilate’s drama, the philosophical conclusions it draws from the trial of Jesus are indeed far-reaching.