Eszter NEUMANN

Eszter Neumann is a sociologist of education at the Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest. Her postdoctoral research explores neoconservative education policy-making in Hungary and how the government assisted the expansion of the faith-school system, transforming the Hungarian education system.

The Hungarian authoritarian conservative government is progressively outsourcing education and welfare to religious organisations. No matter what strategies these religious elites have chosen to navigate this political challenge, they have actively contributed to consolidating the autocratic power and cementing a hierarchical and segregated society.

Since the late 1990s, christianity has become a key resource for European radical right politics. Radical autocrats have appropriated religious narratives to construct divisive and exclusivist interpretations of the nation. They present themselves as the protector of the ‘pure people’ from the corrupt elite and dangerous others such as religious and ethnic minorities.

Hungary’s government is a prime example of how conservative religious narratives are used to legitimise authoritarian populist governance. Since the 2015 migration crisis, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been portraying himself as the saviour of Europe, led by a sacred mission of protecting the true ‘christian identity of Europe’ from the external threats of immigration and the internal threats posed by ‘liberal elites’ and ‘Brussels’. Breaking off from the political consensus on the separation of church and state, Orbán proclaimed that his government is building an ‘old-style christian democracy’ where christian churches are the state’s strategic allies. 

The alliance of state and church

The boundaries between state and church have been blurred in different ways in European states with right-wing populist governments in power. The Polish catholic church had taken a leading role in setting the political agenda and dominating the political discourse with symbolic themes such as abortion and catholic nationalism under the PiS government. The Turkish government has co-opted quasi-civil organisations to orchestrate religious rhetoric and traditional values. Hungary represents another case. In exchange for ideological resources and political legitimacy to the government’s christian conservative ideology, politically loyal churches have been invited with generous funding conditions and governing autonomy to take over education and welfare services.

Outsourcing first started with schools. Since 2010, the share of faith-based educational institutions has grown significantly; for example, today, 27 per cent of secondary schools are run by faith-based organisations, while their share was only 10% in 2010. Later, religious organisations became key providers of various non-formal education programs (after-school learning spaces and talent education programs providing support for Roma and disadvantaged students), teacher education, early childhood education and care as well as the kindergarten sector. Most recently, the entire foster care system was outsourced to the church. Concurrently, rival service-providing NGOs were cornered out of these sectors.

A mutually beneficial exchange or a suffocating embrace? 

Similar to European trends, Hungary is a steadily secularsing society. The embrace between state and church does not stem from popular demand. The government’s strategy of politicising religion met with the ambition of the big traditional christian churches to grow their resources and secular power through expanding their institutional network. Nevertheless, critical religious intellectuals and the representatives of smaller religious communities describe religious populist politics as a suffocating embrace. Some religious organisations aim to make use of the political opportunity by helping the groups scapegoated or written off by autocratic politics (the poor, the Roma and the immigrants), but only a few raise their voices publicly against political christianity. 

Evangelisation and social mission 

What benefits and opportunities do religious elites see in engaging with authoritarian conservative governance and supporting political christianity? The catholic and the lutheran churches, the two biggest denominations in Hungary, primarily view schools as a territory for evangelisation. Schools are seen as a medium to ingrain religion into families with the hope of expanding their respective faith communities. Church foremen have publicly shown loyalty, supported divisive propaganda and anti-LGBTQ+ politics, and suppressed dissent in schools. Other faith-based organisations consider education a form of enacting the church’s social mission. They take over schools in disadvantaged regions and marginalised Roma communities with a view of providing better quality education and channels of mobility. The Order of Malta, in particular, became a key, state-supported actor of managing poverty in marginalised Roma communities, thus pacifying social conflicts amplified by the government’s propaganda and workfare policies. Meanwhile, the Hungarian state has completely withdrawn from providing welfare and education services in the rural margins and outsourced the task to christian charities.

Divided communities

No matter what strategies religious leaders and policy elites choose to navigate the far-right political challenge, they contribute to consolidating autocratic power, solidifying social divisions and cementing a closed, hierarchical and ethnically segregated society. The large-scale outsourcing of the education system has produced a school system with multiple providers where the state neither aims nor is capable of enforcing social justice principles. The largest churches have taken over the most prestigious elite education institutions, and faith-based organisations run schools in the most deprived communities. Consequently, the outsourcing process has amplified between-school segregation and Roma segregation in particular. In urban contexts, parents’ school choice closely follows political cleavages. Choosing faith-based education means approving the conservative populist regime. Therefore, the churches’ expansion has not only solidified the divisions within local communities but also rendered the education system a battlefield for future voters. Finally, the politicisation of religion has divided religious communities internally. While the foremen of the largest denominations have embraced the government’s divisive and exclusivist nationalism, communities of faith have become divided by the politicisation of religion and along the government’s political agendas, underpinned by religious-moral arguments, with dissenters turning away from organised religion.