St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who was the greatest Christian philosopher of antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence, maintained that a Christian state is the only type of state where true justice can be achieved. This is because, in such a state, the body politic would rule according to Christian tenets and values, which would align the state’s laws with divine law.
Writing after Christianity was proclaimed as the official religion of the Roman Empire by the Emperor Theodosius I in 380, he said: “Were our [Christian] religion listened to as it deserves, it would establish, consecrate, strengthen, and enlarge the commonwealth in a way beyond all that Romulus, Numa, Brutus, and all the other men of renown in Roman history achieved.”
In a congenial manner, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in his address at Hungary’s 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference a week ago, denounced the agenda of left-wing protagonists who are actively working to “replace Christianity and the nation” in Western society.
My friends, two plans are on the table. One is the liberal plan, and the other is the patriotic plan for Europe. The liberal plan sees the old, cultural, Christian Europe as obsolete. They want to move beyond it. For decades, they have been working to fabricate a new identity to replace Christianity and the nation.
Christianity certainly did not start in Europe, and therefore it cannot be defined as a European religion. Nonetheless, it received “in Europe its most effective cultural and intellectual imprint and remains, therefore, identified in a special way with Europe.”
The Christian faith—via the institutional Catholic Church—not only provided humanity with a purpose in life in this world and in the next, but it helped the human individual harness his individual gifts so that he, too, could contribute to the well-being of others and of society. We see this, for example, during the Middle Ages when there was no longer a Roman Empire to maintain a united civilization.
In its place, the Catholic Church assumed this role and was vital in the formation of laws, universities, architecture, literature, art, and so forth, right up to the Renaissance. And this happened not just in the West but in the East, too, with Sts. Cyril and Methodius who, during the ninth century, brought Christianity to the Slavic peoples and helped create a civilization.
Yet, as indicated by Mr. Orbán, the globalized politics of the West for the last few decades has done nothing but berate the Christian foundations upon which Western society was built. Non-governmental organizations, like the United Nations through its exploitation of soft law, have sought to replace the Christian virtues ingrained in society with altruistic guidelines and codes of conduct as human rights that are unbecoming. The European Union has also been a part of this anti-Christian crusade. Both have led to the dismantling of the infrastructure of civilization—the family—by promoting abortion and imposing the use of artificial contraception under the term of “reproductive rights,” or recognizing homosexual unions or transgenderism under the pretension of equality.
Incidentally, this is a reason why Muslims have gained a firm foothold in our Western society. They collectively refute any relativization of gender identity as advocated by the LGBTQ+ activists and, likewise, oppose abortion and artificial contraception, whereas we in the West are aborting and contracepting ourselves out of existence.
Ironically, part of the anti-Christian movement has come from those who profess to be Christian, such as certain Roman Catholic bishops and priests or cafeteria Catholics and ecclesiastical communities like the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists or Christian fundamentalists. The former is due to their dissension from Church teaching. The latter, whether they have a systematic theology or not, is because of their approach to their faith.
