Your faithful diarist went out on the Feast of Stephen—and saw something like a miracle. Seriously.
Sunday, August 20th was the Feast of St. Stephen, the first Christian king of Hungary, coronated in the year 1000 with a crown sent by the Pope. It is also one of the three official national Magyar holidays. This year I received an invitation to watch the fireworks over the Danube from the terrace of the Carmelite monastery where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has his office. I stood with a crowd of partygoers oohing and aahing at the spectacular blasts illuminating the city below.
When smoke from the final explosions was still dissipating, a swarm of drones coalesced over the Danube in front of the Parliament. They formed the Hungarian coat of arms. Then, dissolving, the came back together in the distinct shape of the Crown of St. Stephen.
And then, the final image of the day: the drones came together to form a cross of light over Budapest. I took the video above with my smartphone.
It nearly brought me to tears. Why? My friend James Card, who has an eye for historical irony, captured it well. I reproduced what he said in this tweet:
I texted the image to a Spanish Catholic friend, who was both shocked and delighted. He said that the only similar drone sky-art his own government would likely muster would be an LGBT Pride flag. It’s true in contemporary America as well. Liberalism’s successor ideology—wokeness—also has a successor religion: the religion of the rainbow, not the cross.
A short while later, I saw Prime Minister Orbán moving through the crowd. I stopped him to thank him for the cross in the sky.
“It was okay?” he said.
“Better than okay,” I said. “Thank you again.”
It was right to thank Viktor Orbán. This is his doing. This is what it means to have a leader who is a Christian and not ashamed of it. This is what it means to have a leader who believes that the faith that was inseparable from the founding of the nation is vital to its survival.
This is not new with Orbán. He has spoken on many occasions about the invaluable historical role of Christianity in the life of the Hungarian nation, and of European civilization. He has called Christian culture “the cornerstone that holds the architecture of European civilization in place.”
And in 2018, at the annual summer gathering of Hungarians in Transylvania, the prime minister spoke of how Christianity is inseparable from European cultural survival, even though much of Europe has turned its back on its ancestral religious heritage. Orbán called for the defense of “Christian democracy,” which he distinguished from faith thus:
Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith—in this case Christian religious articles of faith. Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation. Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected. Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them. These include human dignity, the family and the nation—because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations.
Post-Christian Europe he said, is a place where “being European means nothing at all: it has no direction, and it is simply form devoid of content.” Elaborating on his controversial claim years earlier that he favors “illiberal democracy,” the prime minister explained that he actually means “Christian democracy”:
Let us confidently declare that Christian democracy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues—say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favour of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.
Why is Christian democracy “anti-immigration”? One imagines this in a particularly European context, where most immigration coming to Europe is from the Islamic world. In that same speech, Orbán said plainly that Muslim migrants vote for left-wing secular parties. If only 10% of a European nation’s population is Muslim, argues Orbán, then coalition politics being what they are, it becomes impossible for parties that defend Christian values and interests to win a national election.
I don’t think most contemporary Europeans (or Americans either) understand how much of what they value politically and culturally depends on Christianity. The best book to read about all this is Dominion, by the English historian Tom Holland. In it, Holland, whose work previously covered the Greco-Roman world, set out to discover the role Christian faith played in building Western civilization. To his surprise, the liberal Holland found that nearly everything distinct about the West that he values as a secular liberal humanist, has its roots in Christianity.
Can any of this survive without the faith that brought it into being? Given the steep decline of Christianity—first in Europe, and now all over the West—we are likely to find out.
You can’t have Christian democracy without Christians. This is a problem Orbán recognizes, but as a politician, cannot solve. Though 80% of Hungarians identify as Christian, only about 15% go to church. Given the swift currents of de-Christianization moving through every Western country and society, it is hard to see how the people of any nation hold out. Christian pastors, lay leaders, artists, intellectuals, and even fathers and mothers, cannot afford to be passive in this fight for civilization’s future. Politicians are not priests. As Orbán avers, elected leaders can protect the ways of life upon with Christian culture depends, but law and politics are no substitute for a life of true faith.
Nevertheless, with sophisticated barbarism overrunning the high ground of the West, it is a great and glorious thing to see that in at least one patch of ground in a once-great civilization, all has not been lost.
For example, even as European Union inquisitors are trying to punish Hungary for protecting its children from LGBT propaganda, Disney—Disney!—in Germany has greenlighted a new series for youth about a teenager who has sex with Satan and falls pregnant with the devil’s baby. Not a peep from the bespoke Huns of Brussels about that. The real threat, you see, is from retrograde Christians like Viktor Orbán, who believe things about family that most Europeans did seemingly the day before yesterday.
English-speaking people around the world who depend on their media to tell them about Hungary only ever hear terrible things about Orbán’s Hungary. It’s not the Garden of Eden, and Budapest is not the New Jerusalem. But for Christians and any other kind of conservative, it is an oasis of sanity, led by a popularly elected Christian street-fighter who never learned the word “winsome,” and please God, never will.
The Communist red star, three meters wide, used to light up the sky over the Parliament building on the Danube’s banks, until the Hungarians took it down in 1990, after Communism fell. Today it sits in an exhibit in Parliament’s basement, while a giant illuminated cross burned brightly in the night sky over the city. There are many people alive today in the former captive nations of Central Europe who never expected to see that star burn out in their lifetimes. I know this because I have talked to them.
They may not be religious, but they call it something close to a miracle. Some of them living in Hungary’s capital, where Cardinal Mindszenty hid for many years in the U.S. Embassy from the Communists, surely saw the cross in the sky on Sunday night. Maybe the cross was even visible from the window on the U.S. Embassy from which the rainbow Pride flag hung this past June.
Seventeen centuries ago, the Christian West began in Rome, when the Emperor Constantine looked into the sky, beheld a cross, and the legend, “In This Sign, Conquer.” God put that sign in the sky, not a politician. Even so, standing on the Buda heights in free and Christian Hungary on the Feast of St. Stephen the King, marveling at a sight that one would not see over any other capital (save Warsaw) in the former lands of Christendom, one might have thought: In this sign—and from this country—resist.
