Pro-Something

Word on the Streets is a digest website of Christian news on whose mailing list I seem somehow to have got. It does come up with some interesting posts and today my eye was caught by the one that referred to policies in Hungary promoting the welfare of families. Unfortunately the source was Lifesitenews.com, a virulently anti-homosexual and anti-Pope Francis Catholic website (how amazing the world has become, when Catholics can set up websites so openly contemptuous of the Pope!), whose interest in the matter derived from an address given by the Hungarian minister for the Family to a schismatic Academy for the Family set up in the name of the late Pope John Paul II, in opposition to the official one still run by the Vatican. The speech majored on how abortion and divorce rates had fallen in Hungary as a result of public policy, and as I am not someone who regards divorce or abortion as positive things I was interested - notwithstanding the source or occasion of the article. But, equally, I have always felt deeply suspicious about Christian rhetoric surrounding 'family life', and I want to get my head around such matters. 

I knew that Hungary has a vigorously conservative government, yet many of the pro-family policies cited by Lifesitenews seem positively socialistic. In accordance with the privileged position of family life under the Hungarian constitution, they seek to balance the demands of work and family, and include generous tax allowances, paid holiday camps for children, and utility discounts. Some benefits which on paper seem astonishingly openhanded - the payment and interest-free loan, for instance, amounting to about £60K, for couples under 40 who agree to have three children - are not quite what they seem, but there is no doubt that, overall, Hungary has chosen to prioritise parenthood and childrearing over other social goods.

Yet this is not a recent thing. Paid maternity leave for three years has existed in Hungary since 1967 and in fact recent changes have been introduced precisely to encourage more parents back into work on a part-time basis, which is likely to raise the levels of children who take part in formal childcare, currently half the rate in Hungary of the European average. There is some controversy about the effect of current measures on the economy and the disproportionate benefit to nice, middle-class Hungarian families of the state's policies, as opposed to the poor and especially those from a Roma background. 

Not that the Hungarian government would be bothered by that. Although the pro-family policy has been a consensus matter for decades, its current bite derives from Hungary's demographic decline, the emptying of its rural areas, and the perception among its nationalist politicians that the country is at the front line of Europe, called on to hold the line against Islam, and the immigrant tide that brings Islam with it. This comes across very clearly in the way the government promotes Hungary. I imagine the conservative Catholics of Lifesitenews wouldn't be bothered either: authoritarianism with a Christian gloss is just what they hunger for.

At first I was intrigued by what seemed like a strategy that reduced negative experiences for human beings - abortion and divorce - not by the usual right-wing approach of closing down access to these options, but by lessening the social stresses that led to them, that made it easier to look after children, and to contemplate looking after children. A little bit of reading, instead, leaves me feeling sullied by contact with the realities of 'Christian Democracy'. Headlines are one thing: but who is not having abortions and not getting divorced, and why?