As someone who grew up evangelical and still observes evangelical communities closely, I am unsurprised at these developments.
Numerous US evangelical missionary organisations, including Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse, have a substantial presence in Ukraine, where they can still proselytise freely. Forced to choose between the Ukrainian mission field and a country that is (among other atrocities) bombing Ukrainian civilians indiscriminately, most American evangelicals will choose the former.
This leaves open the question of whether the fall of Putin’s star among evangelical Americans leaves a void they will seek to fill by lionising another foreign strongman leader devoted to a ‘family values’ platform. If this does prove to be the case, a very likely candidate is the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a thorn in the side of the EU who promotes what he calls “illiberal democracy” and has stifled dissent against his hardline, nativist, socially conservative agenda.
Orbán is already the darling of certain far-Right Americans, such as the arch-reactionary writer Rod Dreher, a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, a cradle Episcopalian. And his brand will likely receive a major boost when the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meets in Budapest next month.
In some ways, Orbán is a more natural political role model for authoritarian evangelicals than Putin. A Calvinist himself, Orbán’s right-wing populist Fidesz party won another huge majority in the Hungarian parliament earlier this month, while Orbán himself won a fourth term as prime minister. This was thanks in large part to the backing of Hungarian evangelicals who, on the whole, find his anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ platform appealing.
While Orbán is surely Putin’s closest ally among heads of state within the EU and NATO – Hungary is a member of both – those American evangelicals who have commented on him recently seem prepared to give him a pass for this.
For example, the Christian Broadcasting Network, which was founded by notorious culture warrior Pat Robertson and has been unequivocally critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has begun to cautiously praise Orbán for harbouring Ukrainian refugees and hosting NATO forces for a show of strength against Russia, while at the same time “making it clear he’s on Hungary’s side, no matter what”.
With this in mind, and given the general right-wing American embrace of Orbán that is well under way, it is likely that the American Christian Right will move to build closer ties to the Hungarian premier, the Fidesz party and Christian structures inside Hungary.
It’s important to keep an eye on these developments for those of us concerned about international coalitions working to oppose women’s and LGBTQ rights, whether or not Orbán comes to loom as large among America’s elite evangelicals as Putin once did.
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