An Interview with Rev. Gábor Iványi
Rev. Gábor Iványi leads the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship (Magyarországi Evangéliumi Testvérközösség), an independent Methodist church founded in Hungary in the 1970s. Rev. Iványi is a familiar figure in official circles; in the 1990s he conducted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s church wedding and baptized two of his children. Today, however, he is a vocal critic of Orbán’s regime, and the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship has been seriously impacted by the 2011 religion law. The East-West Church Report met Rev. Iványi at his Budapest office in October 2017, and would like to thank Benjamin Novak of the Budapest Beacon for acting as interpreter.
Why was the 2011 religion law adopted?
On the one hand, it was adopted due to KDNP, the Christian Democratic People’s Party [coalition partner of Orbán’s party, Fidesz], which is very pro-Catholic, but there are also strong Reformed interests competing there. For a very long time they wanted to be the ones who decided who the “real” churches are. They still subscribe to this old notion that they are the ones who decide who enters the gates of heaven.
On the other hand, the Catholic and Reformed Churches are losing their base at an incredible pace. The importance of a church is mathematically determined by the number of one percent tax donations it receives. Our church used to be number seven on that list. Compared with the Catholic and Reformed Churches, annual donations to our church were on the rise, whereas theirs were declining. I suspect the historical churches were very worried that eventually they might be replaced in this ranking of importance, not by our church, but by aggressively growing Pentecostal churches.
There is another problem here to do with Hungary’s history. In 1895 the law placed the Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran Churches in one category [“accepted”], while the smaller churches, such as Baptist and Methodist, were in another [“recognized”]. Through 1946, the Catholic Church was able to prevent this law from being enforced in such a way that these smaller churches would be properly recognized.
Then, under the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, Hungary was required to create a real environment for religious freedom, so that these smaller churches could all operate. But when the Communists took power in 1948 they found it advantageous to maintain the earlier situation. They continued to deal with the major churches while forcing the smaller ones to be part of the Council of Free Churches [Szabadegyházak Tanácsa]. This carried on all the way up until 1990.
In that year, just before the political changes [formal end to the Communist system], a new, liberal church law was adopted. As a member of parliament between 1990 and 1994, I was part of the working group that prepared it, working alongside now Cardinal Péter Erdő. But the Christian Democrats immediately started work to try to dismantle this new law. I was on the human rights committee back then, and such debates were frequent in meetings. In 2011 those same people succeeded in replacing the law. The 2011 law essentially restores the situation of 1895, where the larger churches are favored, but it’s the state that directs what they’re doing.
What encouraged you to adopt an independent position, not sanctioned by the state? What challenges did you face on this path?
We didn’t want to break away from the main Methodist Church. In 1973 the mandate of the Church’s superintendent ended after 16 years. Moves began on the state’s behalf to figure out who would replace him. But a younger faction within the Church maintained that the state had no business appointing the superintendent, because the state had not entered with the Methodists into the same kind of relationship that it had with the Catholic or Reformed Church. Under a Stalin-era agreement, ranking positions within those churches had to be approved by the state, and nobody could be appointed who could not be trusted from a political perspective. No such agreement was ever made with the Methodist Church: it wasn’t that significant a church. Yet even without this agreement, the same practice was employed with the smaller Protestant denominations.
The debate within the Methodist Church got to the point where a faction was saying, “Why act as though the person who will lead the Church is going to be decided by a secret ballot according to church statutes, when in reality that is not what is going to happen?” The counterargument started to evolve on the other side, based upon Romans 13, that there is no power except from God. Although if you continue to read that passage, it says that God will punish the evil and reward the good. It has nothing to do with unlimited power.
So everybody knew that the authorities were going to influence the churches, and one side was arguing it was God’s plan and we must acquiesce. Our side said, “But if that’s true, shouldn’t it also have been the case under Hitler? Let’s not allow ourselves to get involved in any backroom dealings.”
Aside from the state agency dealing with the historical churches [the State Office for Church Affairs, Állami Egyházügyi Hivatal], there was the Council of Free Churches, responsible for managing small churches like the Methodists. They said they did not care if the superintendent whose mandate was ending wanted to go into retirement, he was the only one they would work with. They declared that they would not give their approval for the Church to convene a congress to elect a new superintendent, even though such approval was not needed! Our presiding bishop was in Switzerland, but the superintendent was actually in charge. They brought this Swiss bishop over, and the Council of Free Churches persuaded him to give his blessing for this superintendent to remain in power.
Once that happened, the Council initiated disciplinary proceedings against everyone who had been part of the opposition. They essentially told the Church to handle the problem, or else the state would ensure “the smooth operation of your church affairs.” What that meant was that the Council would essentially censor, kick people out, make police reports, file criminal complaints against ministers and church members. So our group believed that those who launched the subsequent attack against us were not doing so from a position of power within the Church.
That’s when they told me, as pastor, to hand over the keys to my parish in the Kispest neighborhood of Budapest. I answered that I would not give them the keys, because they were not in a position to take them. Then church leaders came and broke the locks on the church, installed new ones, and hung up a sign saying there would be no more services at this church. I went along to the church to hold a Tuesday evening Bible study and I saw that sign. The Spirit of the Lord raised me up—I was in much better physical health back then!—and I broke the lock. I told the people about the unlawful thing that had just happened, and they decided to get together and write a letter to the church authorities telling them not to do anything similar in future.
A few weeks later, at night, the church authorities installed a bigger lock. And then a debate started within our congregation: “Maybe we shouldn’t break this lock?” Someone very wisely asked, “Why not, is it because this is a bigger lock?” So I asked if anyone there had a saw that could cut through iron, and the congregation voted on a resolution to remove that lock too. The police were already watching what was going to happen, and so the way we agreed to cut this lock off was that everyone present in the congregation would get a turn pulling the saw. There was one very enthusiastic 80-year-old lady who wanted to pull the saw too, but she was too weak. She asked that we hold her hands on the saw so she could also cut at the lock! From that point on, for more than four years, I would preach on the street. By 1979 we decided to ask the state to recognize us as a separate church. This was unprecedented, but there was fatigue among people in the congregation; they were standing out on the street week after week. The state authorities—I don’t know why—just decided to grant us that status.
So it was never our intention to split from the Methodist Church. We gave our Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship the acronym MET in Hungarian, as a sign that we still belong to the METhodist community, like the Israelites who left stones when they crossed over the Jordan into Canaan to indicate that they were still part of the larger Jewish nation.
What do you think of the use of Christianity in recent Hungarian political discourse?
It’s disgusting. To say that George Soros is Satan and that you must fight against him with a rosary. . . I don’t believe in the use of the rosary, but it is incredibly disrespectful to those who do believe in the power of the rosary to suggest that they would now start throwing it or whatever at George Soros. When they say you should hate the refugees, this goes against what the Bible teaches. All this is made even more stupid by the fact that the government tries to portray things as if we Christians are fighting against the Muslims in the Middle East, while at the same time we do business with them. And how ironic it is that this government would build or renovate a church in Syria while churches in Hungary are being treated as we are.
Blame can certainly be assigned to the government for what’s going on, but the average person who sees this happening is not blameless. There’s a passage in the Bible that says, “Resist Satan, and he will flee from you.” Those people who are quiet in the face of what the government is doing share the blame. There are even those who claim that if God didn’t want it this way, He wouldn’t have allowed for this to happen, for these guys to be in power. But God has left this for us to decide.
It sounds like people want to be Christian without any responsibility.
Jesus said that you have to take up your cross. You cannot be a Christian without carrying your cross. It reminds me of when I visited Israel, I saw them renting out a cross for tourists to carry. It had a wheel at the bottom of it!
There was no thorough lustration process [deCommunization, particularly disqualification of Communist officials from public office] in Hungary after the Communist period. If there had been a better examination of responsibility for what happened in the recent past, might attitudes be different now?
There has never been any attempt at closure. Going back one hundred years, Hungarians have not been able to be reflective or have self-criticism. We joined World War I and the consequence was Trianon, but we didn’t learn from this, we only saw ourselves as victims. That’s how we entered World War II. The first anti-Jewish laws of the 20th century were introduced in Hungary, in 1920. First they curtailed the ability of Jews to take part in higher education, with the numerus clausus law. This developed further by restricting Jews in employment. All of this eventually resulted in Jews’ citizenship being questioned, their assets looted, and them being murdered.
The monument with the Archangel Gabriel marking the German invasion claims that it wasn’t the Hungarians who did this against the Jews, but the Germans. [Unveiled on Budapest’s Freedom Square in 2014, the monument is entitled “A Memorial to the Victims of the German Invasion.”] But the Germans weren’t in Hungary in 1941, when [Admiral Miklós] Horthy put some 20,000 Jews on trains and sent them to Kamianets-Podilskyi, an active war zone in Ukraine, where the Germans executed them all.
When [Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin] Netanyahu visited recently and met with Orbán, Orbán said it was a shame that we didn’t stand up for our Jewish people during World War II. It’s not that Hungarians didn’t stand up. It was Hungarians who looted these Jews, Hungarian law-enforcement officials who threw them into the wagons and accompanied them to KamianetsPodilskyi. Hungarian soldiers were part of the brigade of soldiers who executed these people. If Hungary started to examine this past now, it would take at least a quarter century before we got to the point where Germany is today.
