“THIS is an attempt to weaken the Church in such a way that we lose the courage to stand up for the truths of the gospel,” the Presiding Bishop of the Hungarian Reformed Church, Pastor Zoltán Balog, wrote in a pastoral letter to his Dunamellek (Budapest) diocese last month. “In this, my person, my error, is only a means.”

That letter was meant to quieten tensions after the Bishop’s implication in a political scandal that is rocking Hungary. It also reveals something about the theological framework that some participants are bringing to the debate on events.

On 10 February, the President of Hungary, Katalin Novák, resigned dramatically. Simultaneously, a former justice minister, Judit Varga, the lead candidate of the governing party, Fidesz, in forthcoming European elections, announced her “complete withdrawal from public life”.

The resignations came after the revelation that, during the Pope’s visit to Hungary last year, a secret presidential pardon was issued to Endre Kónya, who had been convicted of covering up extensive child sexual abuse in an orphanage of which he was the deputy director.

It later emerged that Pastor Balog had been chiefly responsible for persuading President Novák, a close friend and fellow Calvinist, to pardon Mr Kónya, whose family has strong links to the Reformed Church, telling President Novák that it was “important to the Church”.

Pastor Balog is not only a church leader, but a prominent political figure: he was spiritual mentor to the Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, confirming him in the Reformed Church in 1996; and Pastor Balog was a senior Cabinet minister in Mr Orbán’s far-Right government between 2012 and 2018, before returning to church life.

UNLIKE the two women politicians implicated, Pastor Balog has declined to heed calls to resign as a diocesan bishop. He has, however, reluctantly, agreed to put the question of his national presidency of the Reformed Church to a synod vote on 24 April.

“You, the elected legislative body of the Hungarian Reformed Church, will decide,” he said in a video message to church members on 16 February, asking them not to let the matter be decided by critics in the media or by the political opposition.

In his communications, Pastor Balog admitted only a political misstep, not a moral failing. “My fatal mistake was not being careful enough,” he told church members. He offered no apology to victims of sexual abuse, only to Reformed Church members for causing them “to endure all that is being directed at our Church from the media, politics, the streets, and some public opinion. It’s not easy for me either.”

A lay Reformed church contact, who prefers to remain anonymous, draws parallels between Pastor Balog’s response and the discourse of Donald Trump and the American Evangelicals who support him. “In both cases, you can see a narrative of self-victimisation,” the contact says. It is one that, simultaneously, makes Pastor Balog and the Church, not the abused children, the injured parties. It also “binds the target audience to the speaker in an appeal to shared suffering”.

The parallel with Mr Trump is plausible: “If they can come for Trump, they will come for you” was a frequent trope of the former US President’s Evangelical supporters when faced with attempts to prosecute him for the January 2021 insurrection and other alleged offences. In Hungary, this has particular resonance.

The fundamentalist wing of Hungary’s Reformed Church is influenced heavily by American neo-Protestantism, and has been in the ascendant in recent years. It is especially strong in Pastor Balog’s own diocese, where he is said to have courted doctrinal conservatives intensively before his election as a diocesan bishop in 2020, and then as national synod president in 2021.

Pastor Balog’s language evokes, subtly, the register of “spiritual warfare”, which resonates strongly with the more hardline element within his Church. He will probably be looking to them to rescue him when the synod votes on his leadership.

PREVIOUSLY, hardliners have supported both Pastor Balog’s church leadership and Mr Orbán‘s government, not only because, together, they have delivered significant material state support for the Church, but also because they are seen as shields against “demonic” influences in contemporary Western secular culture.

For biblical literalists in Hungary’s Reformed Church, as for their American cousins, that list includes the public acceptance of LGBT+ people and the weakening of traditional family values.

According to my Reformed friend, ultra-Evangelicals will back Pastor Balog, because “they’ll say to themselves: he’s our man. Whatever he’s done, he’s protecting us from things which are far worse. . . There’s seemingly nothing they can’t excuse him for.”

Yet, whatever the result of the synod vote, some commentators try to be optimistic about what the scandal might entail for Christian life in Hungary — and not only in the Reformed Church.

“I think that there could be greater moral clarity for many people about the relationship of church leaders to political power: a sense of unease about it having become too close,” the religious-affairs journalist Dóra Laborczi, a Lutheran, says. “People inside the Churches are now talking more about this in public — and that’s been rare, up till now.”

Looking at the confusion between the pastoral and the political in Pastor Balog’s case, it can only be hoped that she is right.

The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.