The 2025 World According To Viktor Orban
And: The Free Press Publishes My Tale Of The Chartres Pilgrimage
Today was the last day of the annual Tusvanyos festival (say “toosh-VAHN-yoash”), an annual gathering of the Fidesz party faithful in Băile Tușnad, a village in a forested valley deep in the heart of Transylvania. Tusvanyos always culminates with a long, newsmaking speech by Viktor Orban, in which he assesses the current geopolitical moment, and lays out, in general, his government’s priorities for the coming year. Orban was introduced, as usual, by the Reformed pastor Laszlo Tokes (above left), a true hero of the Christian anti-communist resistance. As leader of a church in Timişoara, the pastor, an ethnic Hungarian, refused to accept dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s view that Christianity was destined for history’s ash heap. Here’s how that great man of God started the 1989 revolution. I so regret not being able to interview him for Live Not By Lies. Crowns of glory await him in heaven.
This more earthly Magyar gentleman also embodies the spirit of Tusvanyos:
I won’t bore you non-Hungarian readers with his remarks on Hungarian and European politics, except to say that the PM remains profoundly at odds with Brussels. Correctly in my view, he cannot understand why the European Union is so committed to pursuing an unwinnable war with Russia over Ukraine. He told the crowd that it is folly to think that was is about democracy. Rather, he said, it’s about toppling Vladimir Putin and returning Russia to the Yeltsin era — a provocative formulation, given that for Russians, the Yeltsin years represent the chaos and deprivation of Wild West capitalism, in which many believe they were exploited by rich Westerners.
It’s not that he’s against democracy, said Orban, but even “good will” can cause war if exercised in the wrong time and wrong place. Orban praised former West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for reunifying his country, saying he had the good judgment to do it at the right time. The push to bring Ukraine into the EU and NATO is exactly the wrong thing to do at this time, said Orban, because it would destroy the balance of forces that makes it possible for Europe and Russia to live in peace.
Next spring, Orban faces his toughest re-election bid yet. He’s running against Peter Magyar, a Fidesz turncoat who offers Hungarian voters weary of 15 years or Orban rule a chance to vote against Orban without voting for a left-wing party. Yet Orban made a persuasive case that a Peter Magyar government would do Brussels’ bidding, and sell out Hungarian sovereignty on Ukraine and on cultural matters. I think he’s right about that, but worryingly for someone like me who supports Orban, he had nothing to say about the main complaints driving former Fidesz voters who say they intend to vote for Magyar: the perception of corruption and cronyism, the woebegone state of the country’s health care system, and an underfunded higher education system. (To be fair, he did praise Hungary’s universities, but that did not address the specifics of their criticism.)
It is clear, though, that Orban is going to run as he did successfully in 2022: as the man who will keep Hungary out of war, and who will continue standing up for the country against the bullying of Brussels. The vote next April will tell if that’s enough. Milling in the crowd before the speech, I had a pleasant conversation with a family whose patriarch, Zsolt, is a Fidesz stalwart, but whose daughter, in her mid-twenties, told me she plans to vote for Magyar’s Tisza party — for all the reasons I just enumerated. Later, I spoke to a fellow Fidesz backer who said that the young crowd at the previous night’s rock concerts were decidedly pro-Tisza, from what he could tell.
To me, the most interesting part of the Orban talk came at the end, when the PM showed himself to be a geopolitical thinker without parallel in Europe today. He repeated a familiar theme for him: that European civilization will not survive the loss of its ancestral Christian faith. He linked this to mass migration. Since the victory of Frankish leader Charles Martel over Islamic forces at Poitiers in 732, all the way to the victory over Ottoman armies at the gates of Vienna in 1683, Europe has had to define itself against militant Islam. In that nearly thousand-year period, Europe was consonant with Christendom.
That self-concept crumbled in the Enlightenment and beyond, when Europe began the process of de-Christianization. Orban believes that Europe today has not been willing to defend itself against the peaceful invasion of Islamic migrants largely because it has lost its Christian character. Instead, Europe has been characterized as culturally Christian, meaning that it holds to values that originated in Christianity, but without the religious foundation to give it strength. Today, he said, only Central Europe — the countries that Americans usually refer to as “Eastern Europe” — retains cultural Christianity. The rest of Europe has what he called “zero Christianity” — and as a result, is Islamizing.
Already the major cities of Western Europe are well on their way to becoming Islamic, he said. When the great wave of migrants expected to come soon out of sub-Saharan Africa begin to show up, a “mixed” European population will not have the will to resist.
Orban predicted that in ten years, his successor will have not only to guard Hungary’s eastern and southern borders from illegal migrants, but also its western border with Austria, whose capital, Vienna, counts 41.2 percent of its high school students as Muslim.
Orban said that if resistance is possible, it will come from the countries of Central Europe, which remain culturally Christian. What he did not say is that this is a thin hope indeed. Churchgoing in the region’s countries is low. Though the Hungarian government and the country’s post-communist constitution recognize Christianity as the foundation of the nation (whose first king, Istvan, is a Catholic saint), only about one in ten Hungarian youth attend church with any regularity. In Poland, a bastion of Christianity even under communist dictatorship, religion is in freefall among the young. According to a 2021 CBOS survey, only 23% of Poles aged 18–24 — that is, those born after communism fell — regularly attend church, down from 69% in 1992. Additionally, 36% of young people in this age group report never practicing religion.
Orban said that the key decision European nations made to turn their backs once and for all on Christianity came when they legalized same-sex marriage. This claim will make headlines, but the man has a point. If I understand him correctly, it’s not that Orban blames same-sex marriage for Christianity’s decline, but rather cites its acceptance as the most important marker that a country has ceased to be Christian. He might have cited the work of sociologist Philip Rieff in the mid-1960s. As I wrote in 2013, in The American Conservative. Citing polling data, I wrote that
It seems that when people decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex, they typically don’t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit going to church altogether.
This raises a critically important question: is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?
Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.
Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.
You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).
Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.
Orban might also have turned to philosopher Charles Taylor, a more contemporary source. As I wrote in that same 2013 piece:
As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.
Gradually the West lost the sense that Christianity had much to do with civilizational order, Taylor writes. In the 20th century, casting off restrictive Christian ideals about sexuality became increasingly identified with health. By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom.
To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order. As Rieff characterizes it, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for’ is ‘more’.”
Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.
Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.
Orban ended his address on a somber note. He pointed out that the Christian faith, on which Western civilization depends, must be passed on from mothers and fathers to their children. Said Orban, “We will soon find out what kind of parents we have been.”
I fear that he knows the answer. Nevertheless, Orban fights on. At least somebody does.
His election challenger, Peter Magyar, has carefully avoided taking a stand on same-sex marriage (in Hungary, gay couples are permitted to register civil partnerships, but marriage itself is reserved for opposite-sex couples), keeping his focus on more practical matters, and avoiding antagonizing older, more conservative voters. Magyar is 44 years old, compared to Orban’s 62, which may provide another clue as to the Tisza leader’s views.
In any case, a 2023 GLOBSEC survey showed that 56 percent of Hungarians back same-sex marriage, though it did not break down those results by age. It is not hard to reckon that opposition to gay marriage is primarily concentrated among older Hungarians, with younger, mostly irreligious youth taking the same path as their age cohorts in western Europe.
Correlation is not causation, but if Orban is right that accepting same-sex marriage is the key turning point in a country’s abandonment of Christianity, then whether or not he wins a fifth term in 2026, he will likely go down in history as a tragic figure. But the tragedy will not be Orban’s — it will be Europe’s.
The Chartres Pilgrimage
There was a sign of hope for beleaguered Christendom in France earlier this summer. The Free Press at last published my account of the pilgrimage to Chartres made by 20,000 traditionalist Catholic youth — most of them French, but with a meaningful number of pilgrims from elsewhere in Europe, and even in America. Excerpts:
On a cool, wet June morning on the Left Bank of the River Seine, cheerful throngs of young adults are padding along the streets with packs on their backs. They are converging on Saint-Sulpice, the bulky 17th-century stone church that dominates the Saint-Germain neighborhood of Paris. From the giddiness of the kids, you might think there was a pop concert planned in the large square in front of the old church. Non.
“We’re here to pray,” says Cyriaque, 25, who came to the capital from the country’s southwest. “It will be fun.”
Cyriaque is one of about 20,000 limber young Catholics—and a few stiffer older ones—about to embark on a pilgrimage to the cathedral of Chartres, 62 miles southwest of Paris. The annual Pentecost trek—the 43rd such march in modern times—is a moving youth festival of old-fashioned Catholicism, featuring hymns, devotions, and the Latin Mass. It’s Woodstock for Catholic traditionalists, if Jimi Hendrix had been a Benedictine monk singing Gregorian chant.
“People just want to find something outside of their day-to-day life,” explains Cyriaque. “They’re looking for transcendence.”
Hence the Latin Mass: It’s the “most beautiful,” he says.
More:
Yet there is no talk of these controversies among the masses gathered outside Saint-Sulpice. Most of these kids were toddlers, or not even born, when the 21st century dawned. Far from the scowling, bitter reactionaries of Pope Francis’s caricature—or the anti-traditionalists imagined by the Society of Saint Pius X—these young pilgrims seem ebullient, friendly, and, well, completely normal.
Outside of Saint-Sulpice, I stop to chat with a group of young women wearing the uniforms of France’s Scouting movement, which has historically been tied to the Catholic Church, unlike its more secular version in the Anglosphere. I ask one—Isa, 19, from Orléans—why she is there.
“Jésus,” she declares.
Then she adds: “I love this pilgrimage. The ambience, the hope. It’s very hard, very physical. But it’s beautiful.”
And:
Though most of the pilgrims do not speak in philosophical categories, all of them are preoccupied with the question of meaning. After the opening mass ends, I meet Viennese pilgrim Anna at a nearby café.
It’s the cheerful 24-year-old’s first Chartres walk. She has the air of a superfan at a Taylor Swift concert. Why is she here?
“Tradition is the only safe future we have,” she replies. “What are you going to build your life on, if not God?”
There’s a smattering of older pilgrims, too. John Pepino, 57, an English-born professor at the Denton, Nebraska, seminary of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter—a Latin Mass order that is faithful to Rome—is on his third Chartres pilgrimage, accompanied this time by his 17-year-old daughter, Margie.
“I feel like a grandfather here,” he laughs.
This is not supposed to happen, I say to Pepino, jokingly. Young people, as natural progressives, are not supposed to want to recover what their elders tossed in the trash bin; they are supposed to want to free themselves from the dead weight of the Catholic past.
“I think these are just fervent young people who don’t recognize themselves in what the bishops usually propose to them,” he says.
One more quote:
An American priest leading a group of high school boys to Chartres tells me: “When they come here, one of the things they experience is that a joyful Catholic life is possible, that a beautiful Catholic life is possible. In the United States, people feel very isolated from that, because we don’t have the cultural heritage that points us in that direction. So when the boys experience that, they realize it’s not just a storybook fantasy.”
Most of these boys, the cleric continues, will be exposed to hardcore pornography years before they ever see a beautiful European church, or encounter extraordinary beauty in nature. His hope is that they will go home knowing that they can be genuinely attracted to something beautiful that is also good.
“Seeing the look on these boys’ faces when they see this kind of beauty for the first time!” the priest says. “We were at [the traditionalist monastery of] Fontgombault, and we were up at 4:15 a.m., listening to the monks sing matins in a 12th-century monastic church—it’s just something they immediately intuit as the sort of thing that they have been created to delight in.”
That priest, a member of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, was raised as a traditionalist Catholic in the U.S. He prays that the new pope, Leo XIV, will be more open to older expressions of Catholicism than his predecessor, Francis, was. “You have to know where you’re coming from, where you’re going to, and what you’re bringing with you, to have any sort of successful life or journey,” he says. “Things like the Chartres pilgrimage are giving people a sense of reorientation, which they carry into the world.”
Read it all. I like the ending especially. That pilgrimage was so moving to me that it inspired my next book project.
Readers, I’m headed back to Budapest tomorrow, and might not have the chance to write on Monday. If not, then please accept this as your Monday offering. Today, after I departed the festival grounds, I made my way to a tiny Romanian Orthodox church in the town (most people in this hamlet are Catholic or Reformed), laid on my aching back outside the entry arch, and said my prayer rope. This is what I saw when I gazed upward:
Christian Europe may be dying as the Western Roman Empire it replaced did 1,500 years ago, but I’ll take my stand with the men who built and decorated this arch, and the faithful who still pass under it to pray on Sunday. I’ll take my stand with the tough old Magyar lion in his political winter who sees clearly the civilizational crisis besetting the West, and is doing the best he can to fight for our patrimony. And I’ll take my stand as a fellow traveler with those 20,000 faith-filled young Catholics who marched to Chartres. Who knows? Next year, I might even be fit enough to join them.
Meanwhile, Champagne cheers from Băile Tușnad, the smallest town in all of Romania! I was bitten neither by bears nor vampires on this Transylvanian trip. I’d call that a win. And lo, between breakfasts, lunch, and dinners of sausage — really, that’s all I ate at the festival, aside from a pickle — I tasted for the first time Champagne made by the Barons de Rothschild. Wow, wow, wow. It’s my new favorite bubbly. If you like Champagne, look for it. Grilled kielbasa and fancy French Champagne: verily, Your Working Boy contains multitudes.
Orban is a great thinker but it is plain that Europe has lost the Christian faith. The dominant faith is the European Union, a mushy welfare state that is anti-Christian and self-hating. The European Union would have all of Europe living as the people in Brussels, Rotterdam and Bremen live, Muslim societies where the original inhabitants are meek minorities obedient to both the European Union dictates and the Muslim values. That's why all conservatives should wish for the destruction of the European Union and its military wing, NATO.
Just a brief remark on Orban’s apparently brief remark that the Ukraine war is all about returning Russia to the era of Yeltsin: In the spirit of not living by lies or historical distortion: Russia invaded Ukraine. The resulting hostilities aren’t about Russia or Russian independence, with the exception of whatever empirical notions run unchecked inside Vladimir Putin’s brain. The war is about Ukraine repelling the Russian army, asserting its right to independence and for Europe, an attempt to 1. support Ukraine and 2. keep Russia from encroaching any farther toward Poland and the West.