Conservatives in the United States have called their shot.
According to baseball lore, Babe Ruth, in game three of the 1932 World Series at Wrigley Field, pointed his bat at center field. He then hit a homerun in that spot. Baseball legend asserts the Babe was calling his “shot.”
Babe Ruth at Wrigley Field, 1932
They have told us what they intend to do in the culture war. Their recent CPAC gathering in Dallas featured a speaker lineup more suggestive of a horror show than a political convention.
An embodied trope of conservative dreams
The foreign guest of the show was the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. Orban offered a benevolent fascism. And the conservatives gathered in Dallas loved Orban.
Why should Christians in the U.S. be concerned about a speech given by the prime minister of Hungary? Because he is the embodied trope of conservative dreams. Hungary has banned immigration, same-sex marriage and adoption, legal recognition for transgender people, and sharing LGBTQ content with minors.
Orban brags, “The number of marriages have doubled and the number of abortions have halved. It is not a bad start.”
The key here is that Orban and American conservatives are just getting started. Remember how Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas recently called for outlawing gay marriage and contraception and restoring sodomy laws.
The conservative intellectual team has latched onto Hungary as the model for U.S. democracy. When you have American citizens desiring the United States of America to imitate Hungary, you should know we have a problem.
“When you have American citizens desiring the United States of America to imitate Hungary, you should know we have a problem.”
Sohrab Ahmari, American Conservative contributing editor, pushes the Hungary model where he sees no active persecution of minorities, but the majority white, Christian culture controls the public square.
“The minority in this case is well treated,” he insisted, “and not excluded and not oppressed in any way.”
The heart of Ahmari’s proposal is the teaching of religion in public schools.*
Classroom Bible instruction seems oddly specific, but public religion looms large in conservative dreams. Claiming Jesus in the face of minority cultures, persons of other faith and no faith seems to give conservatives a perverse sense of power that they mistake for authentic witness.
Trying to imagine a benevolent conservative dominance of our nation’s laws, politics and institutions makes me feel like a partially healed man who told Jesus, “I see men walking like trees.”
‘How we fight’
Orban’s speech offered a title that is the equivalent of a politician calling his shot: “How We Fight.” Digging into the bag of populist apocalyptic imagery, Orban painted a picture of “a clash of civilizations.” Images of Trump’s Jan. 6 injunction to “fight like hell” floated through the arena.
On May 13, 2019, Donald Trump welcomes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to the White House. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
Orban’s rhetoric has God everywhere. Is he a preacher, a politician or a demagogue? Orban says, “You need to trust our Judeo-Christian teachings, if you believe in God, you also believe these humans were created in God’s image. …. Be sure Christian values protect us from going so far.”
In the conservative and evangelical world, some words are “anointed” to carry the emotional freight and what the word means is insignificant. The problem, of course, is that the term “God” may bear no resemblance to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Orban uses the word “God” to promote the violence of his national policies. In Orban’s case, God is used to confirm the status of the state as an instrument of oppression against minorities, immigrants, gays and transgender persons. The American evangelicals, like Orban, often speak of God, but in the public arena they don’t say much about Jesus. The reason is that if you say Jesus, you are obligated to justice, peace, mercy, compassion and empathy.
Western civilization
Another of Orban’s carefully chosen metaphors is “Western civilization.” Orbán made clear the fight is for “the West.” It’s the Christians on one side, and everyone else on the other. “The most evil things in modern history were carried out by people who hated Christianity,” he said. In other words, God wants conservatives to fight for the West, Orbán argued.
Orban’s appeal to “The West” mixes easily with America as a Christian nation mythology.
Orban hammered home his “Western civilization” trope: “Today’s progressives try to separate Western civilization for its Christian roots. If you (do this) the worst things happen. …. Let’s be honest, the most horrid things in modern history were carried out by people who hated Christianity.”
Orban’s reading of history sounds as if he has been reading a revisionist American history stitched together by David Barton, Mike Huckabee, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley.
“Appealing to ‘the West’ is a more pernicious and ancient trope than ‘America was founded as a Christian nation.’”
Appealing to “the West” is a more pernicious and ancient trope than “America was founded as a Christian nation.” This throws us back to the etymological roots of empire, colonialism and slavery. It invokes an even more primitive interpretation of what the laws should be and how they should be enforced, an even more rudimentary understanding of good and evil.
The Christian “West,” according to David Livingston Smith, often has been less than human. He argues that we learned to demean, enslave and exterminate others in the name of God and Christianity. Here we are dealing with the most ancient enemy of Christianity, the Gnostics, those body-denying heretics who attempted to strip Jesus of his Jewishness and make him a citizen of the West. As J. Kameron Carter writes in Race: A Theological Account, white supremacy, nativism, colonialism and slavery were the children born of this illegitimate tryst. When the ghouls come out for this political horror show, there are more Gnostics in the seats than there are minions in the movie The Rise of Gru.
American politicians and preachers wax eloquently about our Judeo-Christian heritage. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, defending the Puritans, claimed he was attempting to restore “civilizational self-confidence.”
Former Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
Robert Jeffress worries about America “losing its Judeo-Christian heritage” to what he deems a benign humanism.
“For all their noise about freedom, evangelicals are not really interested in religious liberty. They are too Puritan for that.”
To evangelicals, Orban sounds like an evangelist with his own pulpit and tent. For all their noise about freedom, evangelicals are not really interested in religious liberty. They are too Puritan for that. As William Trollinger truthfully reminds us, “The Pilgrims wanted the freedom to establish a community where their faith and only their faith would be allowed.”
‘See how we’re persecuted’
No conservative conclave would be complete without some handwringing. The militant, warrior, macho-male crowd never can resist reminding one another how they are persecuted, mistreated, ignored and shamed by the evil pedagogy of progressives. Casey Ryan Kelly has identified the conservatives as “Apocalypse Man — a collection of white males with a psychological death drive and a rhetoric of victimhood.”
Like Donald Trump, they ask: “Why is everybody always picking on me?” Orban insists: “Between us, they hate me and slander me and my country and they hate you and slander you.”
Whining mixes easily with bragging. Orban’s braggadocio is obvious and sound like Trump: “Since 2010, we keep winning. … So much winning that we are just scratching our heads. Winning has become our daily habit. I am here to tell you that our values, the nation, Christian roots, and family can be successful in the political battlefield.”
Anti-immigration policies
The applause at CPAC registered the highest decibels when Orban turned to his immigration policy. “We were the first ones in Europe who said no to illegal migration and stopped the invasion of illegal migrants,” he said. “We believe that stopping illegal migration is necessary to protect our nation. To stop illegal migration, we actually built that wall.”
In an earlier speech in Băile Tuşnad, Romania, Orban said, “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed race.”
In 2015, Hungary built a barrier along much of its borders with Croatia and Serbia. Much of that fence is adorned with concertina wire. “We stopped illegal migration,” he said. “We have actually built that wall, and it stopped illegal migration.”
Hungary did build a wall. It did not stop people from crossing into the country. Refugees and migrants were trapped in squalid conditions. At the time, a local mayor in eastern Hungary had deputized locals who, armed with carbines, carried out vigilante patrols and hunted for refugees and migrants in the borderlands. Just over a decade ago, on the U.S.-Mexico border, the anti-immigrant group called the Minutemen Project self-deployed to the border to intimidate migrants, and in their view, protect the nation from illegal immigrants. The similarities are turning into a multi-alarm fire.
‘Family values’
Shifting from immigration, Orban turned to what passes for family values in Hungary. James Dobson, who has somehow convinced the IRS that his political arm of the Republican Party is a “church,” must already be planning to invite Orban to address the Family Institute. Orban makes the false claim that liberals refuse to protect families. To rousing applause he intoned, “The mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone. Full stop. End of discussion.”
He continued: “Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.” Evangelicals thought they were at a revival meeting.
“Orban, claiming the mantle of democracy, God, Christianity and traditional values, may fool the adoring fans at CPAC. The rest of the world is not convinced.”
Orban, claiming the mantle of democracy, God, Christianity and traditional values, may fool the adoring fans at CPAC. The rest of the world is not convinced.
Freedom House’s 2022 report concluded that the country was only “partly free.” Freedom House citied a worrisome lack of media diversity, widespread institutional discrimination against minorities and refugees, and a 2021 law barring the discussion of gender identity and sexual diversity in schools, the media and advertising.
Take them at their word
Evangelical conservatives may be smiling and singing sweet Jesus choruses on Sunday, but the rest of the week the sabers are rattling, the troops are massing, and the battle intensifying. The Christian soldiers are not playing; they are fighting to make a world that makes them feel at home — and that world doesn’t include what we thought were the guarantees of freedom in a democracy.
We should take the conservatives at their word. They are telling us the kind of politics they will impose on the nation. I can’t tell whether Orban imitating Trump or Trump imitating Orban came first, but either way we are staring in the face of an emerging fascism.
The evangelicals have a fascist vision, and they invited a full-blown fascist to Texas so they could applaud and use him to help make their case. The more frightening reality is that the movement doesn’t depend on Trump. The movement has morphed into a collection of “mini-Trumps” — each one competing for Trump’s mantle as if he were the prophet Elijah ascending to heaven in a fiery chariot.
What Orban and the conservatives offer is the opposite of God, freedom, democracy and Christian faith. Now, we must fight nonviolently to stop them in their tracks. We are in a fight, and it needs to happen in politics and pulpits.
*The original version of this story included the word “evangelical” in this sentence — “evangelical religion” — but Sohrab Ahmari protested to BNG that he is Roman Catholic and by no means an evangelical. He insisted he has not advocated for teaching evangelical religion or Catholic religion in public schools. Ahmari did not contest the source material from which Rod Kennedy’s reference was drawn; he contested the interpretation of it.
Rodney W. Kennedy currently serves as interim pastor of Emmanuel Freiden Federated Church in Schenectady, N.Y., and as preaching instructor Palmer Theological Seminary. He is the author of nine books, including the newly released The Immaculate Mistake, about how evangelical Christians gave birth to Donald Trump.
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