‘Pray Before You Tweet’: Hungary Promotes ‘Christian Communication’

A conservative theologist, Semjen is leader of the Christian Democratic People's Party, the pseudo-coalition partner of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's governing Fidesz party. In his doctoral thesis, he famously called Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger "the devil".

He had come to the National University of Public Service, the conference's Fidesz-friendly venue, brandishing a crucifix with a Kalashnikov bullet embedded in it.

The story goes that the cross absorbed the bullet when Soviet troops fired wantonly on a church in Hungary towards the end of World War II. But it did not crack, just like the faith of Hungarians, he said.

The Budapest Forum for Christian Communicators is an attempt by Orban's government to portray Hungary as a defender of core European — read Christian — values.

Speakers stressed that both European identity and Christian heritage are at stake. It is time, they said, for Christian journalists to stand up and defend the continent.

Such a message fits well with Orban's recent efforts to rebrand "illiberalism" as a new Christian democratic movement and lead his Fidesz party back into the fold of the European People's Party political grouping in the European Parliament after its suspension in March over rule-of-law concerns.  

Semjen was in a combative mood as he listed all the times Hungary defended European Christianity — first from the Mongols, then from Turks, later from Nazis and finally from the Soviets, he said.

In an indirect sense, Christianity is persecuted even in Western Europe. It is squeezed out of the public sphere, and our Christian roots were not even included in the Lisbon Treaty.

- Zsolt Semjen, Hungary's Deputy Prime Minister

He claimed that when the...