The Gospel according to St Viktor
Battling Islam in Oxford-on-Danube
Three weeks ago a notice appeared in my inbox. Pusey House, an Oxford institution founded, according to its website, to “promote theological study and holiness of life, and to provide spiritual counsel and support to members of the University”, was holding a conference which it obviously thought I might be interested in.
I was. The title of the two-day event was Christian Revival: Our Post-Liberal Hope? Its prospectus began with the initial claim that “the long post-war consensus in the West—politically defined by liberal democracy… has broken down” and the secondary one that “in this post-liberal moment, a trans-denominational Christian restoration is gathering force—intellectually, spiritually, and culturally.” The conference promised to help give direction to this movement.
The event was sponsored by the Danube Institute of Budapest and, of the eight promised speakers who would seek to define this alternative, four were visiting fellows of the Institute and a fifth was an MP for Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party. A sixth was introduced as a “columnist for UnHerd” called Mary Harrington, who is a regular on the New Right circuit; a seventh was Dr Iain McGilchrist of left-brain/right-brain fame; and the eighth was billed as “The Lord Glasman”. More of all three later.
And, as readers here might imagine, I signed up immediately.
What did Viktor Orbán — for whom the Danube Institute is a well-funded instrument of soft power — want with the Anglo-Catholics of Oxford? I have written about this extensively on here, but a reminder that the Institute’s relationship with the Hungarian government is well established. It operates under the aegis of the Batthyány Lajos Foundation, which receives significant public subsidy from the Orbán administration. Between 2022 and 2024 the DI spent over £1 million on visiting fellows, contributors and partners from outside Hungary, most of them ideologically aligned with the New Right. Note: the institution that has funded Matt (former Professor Matthew) Goodwin, Frank Furedi plus a significant number of his Spiked acolytes, is the MCC, which is similarly funded. There is a good summary of how all this works available here:
The interconnections between all these institutes and various New Right initiatives are probably evidenced by the fact that I received the invitation at all. In 2023 I registered for the National Conservatism conference in London and I think someone has a joint mailing list.
A surprise invitation
I had to miss the first day of Post-liberalism but was sure I could catch up with the proceedings on YouTube. The second day contained two public sessions in the morning and what was billed as a private session in the afternoon. So a week earlier I emailed the organiser, Dr Jonathan Price, who is the Director of the Centre for Theology, Law, and Culture at Pusey House (an outfit which receives significant funding from an Anglo-Polish conservative), and asked him if there was any chance of my being able to sit in on the private session. To my considerable surprise he agreed, and even kindly offered overnight accommodation. We agreed to what are known as “Chatham House rules” – that I wouldn’t attribute contributions to named speakers.
Filling the void
The session titles were grandiose, the first one being “From Consensus to Confusion: The Collapse of the Post-War Moral Order”, followed by “Christianity and the Re-Sacralisation of the Public Sphere” (I looked up “sacralisation” and after several attempts by Google to convince me that it was something to do with lower back pain, I finally decided on the obvious – “the act of making something sacred”). And it ended up with “The Challenge of Pluralism: is the Christian Foundation of the State a basis for National Renewal?” To which I suspected that the answer was going to be “yes”.
Taken together, and before a word was spoken, the overarching thesis of the conference began to emerge and can be summarised in five bullet points:
One: Secular liberalism is f***ed, and a good thing too because it is responsible for the decline of the West.
Two: But it’s leaving a gigantic spiritual and political void.
Three: If we’re not careful Islam will fill that void.
Four: But here comes the cavalry in the shape of Christianity.
Five (sotto voce): thank God for Viktor Orbán.
That was the floor plan, but heavens above, there were some strange detours on the way to salvation.
We kick off
Following the welcomes the first session was introduced by a substantial young Hungarian man from the Danube Institute called István Kiss, whose English was perfect. Mr Kiss, a former political adviser to Viktor Orbán, related how he had been shocked as a student in Edinburgh in 2012 to see old churches repurposed for other uses. One had even been turned into a nightclub! In Hungary, he explained, all churches were kept open as churches.
Having delivered himself of this reproach he introduced Mary Harrington, the first speaker — one of the very few women who spoke during the conference.
Harrington is a fixture at these events. You can find her in Budapest most years, and she’s often in the US. Her brand as a “reactionary feminist” clearly tickles the New Right, leading as it does back to traditional family roles and structures, while using the language of the 21st century. She’s as cross as the rest of us about porn and strangely endearing.
Her speech at Pusey, entitled Digital re-enchantment is not necessarily Christian revival, seemed to contain a fierce argument against somebody who almost certainly doesn’t exist — but it sounded clever. In the bit I understood she joined her Hungarian interlocutor in suggesting that the British (or the English, as she always calls us) are a faithless bunch.
“Disenchanted, disaffected, disbelieving, and dispossessed”, she told the audience in the chilly chapel, “the English are the most homeless people on the planet. We need to come home and we need to come home to our ancestral faith”.
(“Judaeo-Christian” didn’t get a look in at this conference. One faith we are definitely not to come home to is Judaism.)
One phrase stood out for me, because of what it implied about her assumptions and those of some of her listeners.
“The only remedy for Internet poisoning that I know is prayer,”
she declared, adding,
“If you know, you know.”
Right there, the smug hierarchy of the elect and the damned.
Enter the Satanists
Session two was nominally about how people were converting all over the place to the faith. A Christian pollster ran his figures as hard towards the contention of a mass Christian revival as his professional reputation would allow him. He was followed by two more Danube Institute speakers, including the director of their Network Project, the American Rod Dreher.
If Tucker Carlson had been imagined by Dostoevsky the result would have been the increasingly hirsute Rod Dreher. He is a man of internal torment, who is driven to share it with as many people around the world as possible. Dreher told of how, as a rookie journalist, he had been to interview an exorcist in Louisiana and witnessed the work of poltergeists. This led him to a sense of the supernatural and that in turn had propelled him into the Catholic Church. And while several (probably most) of the speakers were Catholics or Catholic converts, for Dreher, alas, the paedophile priests scandals had so disillusioned him that he left Rome and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. Where (I thought), if there has been such abuse, no one so far has produced documentaries about it. Unless readers want to tell me different.
Whilst for almost every other speaker over the two days the enemy within was either liberalism, Islam or the Church of England, for Dreher it turned out to be the occult. In 2022 here in Oxford, he had encountered a young theology student (now a priest) called Daniel Kim.
