Europe's Crisis of Faith

This is not the first time in history that Europe has been forced to come to grips with an urgent and overwhelming refugee crisis. Nor, as it turns out, is it the first time that refugees have been slandered with xenophobic hate speech and broadly stroked suspicion. In 1933, T.S. Eliot proclaimed to an audience at the University of Virginia that a “unity of religious background” was more desirable than the sheltering of “any large number of free-thinking Jews.” His sentiment has found a modern parallel in the words of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who wrote last week in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Syrian refugees must be kept out of Hungary. “Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity,” Orbán asserted. “We have no option but to defend our borders.”
Despite Orbán’s vision of Hungary as a monolithic Christian fortress, his country is no longer the bulwark of Christianity it may have been during the medieval Ottoman wars. Half a century of aggressively secular communism has dramatically altered Hungary’s religious makeup. In Budapest, the Hungarian city with the largest amount of Christians, only 40 percent of the population belongs to one of the city’s three principal churches. Surveys of religious affiliation in Western Europe tell a similar tale of Christianity in rapid decline. According to a 2011 census report, the number of Christians living in England and Wales fell by four million from 2000 to 2010. And while France boasts an extraordinary Catholic legacy—including a glorious papal history and the iconic Notre Dame cathedral— 25 percent of the population now identifies as non-religious.
Orbán is not alone in his fear of emergent Muslim influence. Slovakia has expressed unease at the prospect of accepting Muslim refugees because they “don’t have any mosques in Slovakia.” Cyprus, Bulgaria, Estonia, and the Czech Republic have each worried about the religious, linguistic, and cultural incompatibilities their countries would face under an influx of Arab asylum-seekers. Such concerns about European religious unity and cultural solidarity may be legitimate, but disguising such anxieties under the cloak of Christian protectionism is a grave misuse of the brand.
What each country seems to ignore is the sheer volume of Biblical content that directly condemns their acts of hostile intolerance. The Gospels incessantly underscore the importance of showing generosity to the weak and needy—even when doing so surpasses one’s financial capabilities. Tithing originated in part to aid orphans, widows, and refugees. The Book of Matthew orders its readers to clothe, feed, shelter, and welcome “the stranger.”
Nonetheless, Orbán’s greatest biblical oversight may be the fact that it was a book written by refugees for refugees. The plight of the Israelites is filled with sojourning and wandering as they flee persecution, poverty, human trafficking, and war. Abraham, escaping famine in Canaan, flees to Egypt; Jesus becomes a refugee in infancy, fleeing Egypt with his parents to escape Herod’s wrath. No matter how one interprets the texts, the scriptures reiterate time and again the same moral principle regarding asylum-seekers: “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien; for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”
Contrast these notions with the prejudice, mistrust, and lack of empathy summated by Orbán’s impending 175-kilometer razor-wire fence. Orbán may be fretting about the future of Christianity in Hungary, but the false political trumpeting of Christian allegiance is an ill-timed assault on Christianity itself.