On Friday, an unusual video surfaced featuring Gáspár Orbán, the 24 year old son of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Gáspár had hoped to evade media attention, despite being a former professional soccer player and the prime minister’s son. In 2014, he sent a letter to the editor of the 444.hu website requesting that they never write articles about him, as he is “just” a private citizen. The liberal news site disagreed, after his father managed to get Gáspár VIP seats at an international soccer tournament, where he was seated with some of the world’s most famous dignitaries.
This week, the prime minister’s son made news again, when an odd video surfaced, in which he was promoting an obscure Christian church called “Felház” in Hungarian. (The word “felház” refers to houses that have multiple floors, and it’s also a play on the word “egyház,” or “church,” in Hungarian.) Gáspár was speaking alongside two other young men, and was promoting a gathering scheduled for April 21st in Budapest, and which sounds very much like an Evangelical or perhaps Pentecostal youth event. Gáspár Orbán suggested that he expects 2,500 young Hungarians to be in attendance. According to the group’s Facebook page, Felház “is a place and an opportunity, where you can meet Jesus Christ, just as he is, and just as you are.”
A Felház worship event. The photo appears on the group’s Facebook page.
In the video, however, Prime Minister Orbán’s son suggests that the mass event planned for April 21st “will change Hungary.”
“Peace and blessings! My name is Gáspár Orbán,” begins the video produced by the prime minister’s son. Gáspár explains that God spoke to him about six months ago, and instructed him to establish the Felház organization, in order to reach out to young Hungarians, including those who have no religious affiliation or who are not Christian. “It’s not a matter of having faith that God will fill the hall with 2,500 people, but that those 2,500 participants will take the Good Lord’s fire and will carry it to various regions of the country. Because this is what God expects of Felház. He wants this country to become His,” remarks Prime Minister Orbán’s son. (The video is posted to Felház’s Facebook page and is also available here.)
“God will transform this city, this country and Europe. He will use young people for this. In fact, He is already using them. We are preparing for Felház and we are very anxious, but we are very anxious because of next week’s event too. This will be a historic meeting of youth in God’s country,” adds Gáspár Orbán.
Gáspár Orbán speaking, on the right (in the green shirt.) This is a screen capture from the Felház video.
What is perhaps most noticeable in the video is just how excited–almost agitated–the prime minister’s son comes across.
When Gáspár was born in 1992, his father–who then led the liberal and partially anarchist Fidesz–was not only highly skeptical of religion, but was acutely concerned with the possibility of religious or church-based interference in politics. In 1991, Mr. Orbán opposed state funding of denominational institutions and argued passionately against this in parliament, as a young opposition MP during the days of the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) coalition government. As a young parliamentarian, Mr. Orbán would regularly hurl insults at members of the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP), taunting them to “get down on their knees,” whenever they rose to speak in the House. The young Mr. Orbán also felt that MDF was too clerical in its politics, arguing that the government of the day represented “a rotten, archaic world.”
Mr. Orbán recounted that he grew up in an almost completely secular family. In the words of a childhood friend: “Viktor only ever saw a church, when a soccer ball happened to roll up against it.”
Anikó Lévai, Mr. Orbán’s wife, whom he married in a civic ceremony in 1986, came from a practicing Roman Catholic family. The prime minister credited his wife with introducing him to the Christian faith and changing his own beliefs. Mr. Orbán’s gravitation to Christianity in 1993/94 also coincided with the transformation of Fidesz from an anarcho-liberal party, to the country’s main conservative force. It was in these years that Mr. Orbán had young Gáspár baptized by Methodist minister Gábor Iványi. Some twenty years later, Mr. Orbán introduced legislation that stripped Rev. Iványi of his church’s legal status. Today, Mr. Orbán considers himself a faithful Protestant, while he is clearly fascinated by the hierarchy and overall power structure of the Catholic Church.
Ironically, Gáspár Orbán is actively part of a smaller Protestant church or group–the type of church or Christian “sect” that does not benefit from the Orbán government’s views on religious officialdom. His father’s policies instead heavily favour a small number of “historic” churches.
