The country allows the first evangelistic services on public property since World War II.
During the Stalinist period of the early 1950s, Hungary saw the persecution and arrests of many church leaders, the appointment of atheists to church leadership positions, and the dissolution of church institutions. But conditions today in the East European country are far different. For example:
• Bibles and Christian books are readily available. Four religious bookstores are open in Budapest, most churches operate book tables, and many government bookstores handle Sunday school materials. Religious journalism is thriving, church services are broadcast weekly on state radio, and an American street evangelist is setting up a ministry to troubled young people in Budapest.
• Relations with the Vatican are “normalized.” Some 65 percent of Hungary’s 10.5 million people are at least nominally Roman Catholic.
• The Bible is taught as literature in public schools. Teachers are warned not to use such classes as an occasion to belittle or attack religious belief.
Among the more notable signs of a thaw was evangelist Billy Graham’s preaching visit to Hungary in September. His two rallies, one on a downtown square in the southern city of Pecs and the other in a modern sports arena in Budapest, were the first evangelistic services on public property since World War II.
In both cities, Graham capped his sermons by asking his listeners to turn to Christ, and thousands responded. In another first, loudspeakers carried the evangelist’s words far beyond the meeting sites. And Graham’s team brought in a giant video screen to enable the vast outdoor crowd in Pecs not only to hear, but also to see the evangelist.
A bevy of church-operated bookstalls in both cities carried on a brisk business. Clerks said the big sellers were Bibles and Hungarian-language editions of Graham’s books recently printed in Hungary. Some 25,000 copies each of Peace With God and The Holy Spirit were printed.
The religious press carried advance coverage of the evangelist’s meetings—unlike his first visit in 1977, when no public notices were permitted and his meetings were confined to church property (CT, Sept. 23, 1977, p. 44). During Graham’s stay this year, he was driven to his appointments in the limousine of political party leader Janos Kadar. And he rested from an 11-day mission in Romania at Kadar’s country retreat.
For the service in the Budapest arena, organizers fielded a professional-quality, 50-piece symphony orchestra and 300-voice choir, both composed of volunteers primarily from Baptist churches. Graham team member Myrtle Hall shared the musical duties. From the electric scoreboard, high above the choir, an amber cross glowed and the words of hymns were displayed.
Each denomination had been allotted a portion of the free, but required, admission badges. Office workers estimated that demands exceeded the supply of 12,500 badges by at least four to one. Many pastors urged church members to give their badges to nonbelieving relatives and friends. More than 13,000 people crowded into the arena for the service. Ushers at several doors permitted hundreds without badges to come inside and stand after all the seats were filled.
Interchurch Relations
Hungarian church leaders said the Graham visit represented a high-water mark in interchurch relations. In Budapest, leaders from many of Hungary’s denominations were seated on the platform with Graham. Those leaders included Cardinal Laszlo Lekai, primate of the Roman Catholic Church, and Presiding Bishop Tibor Bartha, of the Reformed Church. In Pecs, Catholic Bishop Jozsef Cserhati cohosted Graham and introduced him to the crowd. Weeks earlier, Cserhati had sent letters to be read in all the Catholic churches in the area, urging parishioners to attend the Graham rally. He also distributed circulars throughout his diocese advertising the meeting. Both Catholic and Protestant choirs sang, and Catholic and Protestant clergy worked together to handle logistics.
“The meetings were the most ecumenical ones ever held in Hungary,” Baptist Union president Janos Viczian told reporters. Many Protestants, recalling centuries of Catholic dominance and repression, find it hard to warm to Catholics.
Graham’s visit was sponsored jointly by the Baptist Union of Hungary and the Council of Free Churches, an alliance that includes Methodists, Pentecostals, Seventh-day Adventists, and other small denominations, along with the Baptists. Strong support also came from the Ecumenical Council, a body that includes the leaders of the major denominations and is chaired by Bartha.
The 2 million-member Reformed Church, with two graduate-level “academies” training more than 150 seminarians, is Hungary’s largest Protestant denomination. Next in size is the Evangelical Lutheran Church, with about 400,000 members, served by a seminary in Budapest. Baptists, the most numerous among the so-called free churches, are next with well over 25,000 constituents in about 500 congregations and a seminary in Budapest. Seventh-day Adventists, Pentecostals, and Nazarenes each number between 4,000 and 6,000 adherents. They and other small denominations jointly sponsor a pastoral training institute in Budapest. Several of the larger denominations operate charity institutions, and the Roman Catholic Church runs eight secondary schools with about 2,000 pupils. That figure is down from 3,000 schools in 1948, when they were nationalized.
A number of churches publish weekly newspapers and other publications. The Protestant denominations jointly provide a church news service for the secular press, plus English- and German-language editions for international distribution. In addition, several leading churchmen are members of Parliament.
One Reformed Church pastor said Graham’s visit was a timely one in the religious life of Hungary. He cited renewal trends in the country’s large denominations, among them increased interest in the Bible generally and the emergence of many Bible-study groups. “Both our Reformed seminaries, which have had strong liberal traditions,” he said, “are being pushed by the evangelical trends.”
At a special meeting of the Ecumenical Council attended by some 150 church leaders, Graham spoke on past and present revivals and renewal movements.
“I sense something is happening here in Hungary,” he said, citing the depth of commitment and Christian unity he had observed. Council president Bartha thanked Graham, saying: “You spoke on a topic that is much on our hearts—renewal.”
The Need For Renewal
Many churchmen affirm that renewal is a critical need in Hungary. Strapped by severe clergy shortages and often by their own narrow outlook and traditions, the churches are struggling with the impact of industrialization and urbanization. Hungary has made great progress economically over the past two decades and is one of the healthiest of the Soviet-bloc countries. But, as in the West, part of the price has been widespread upheaval of home life, splintering of traditional values, and secularization. Divorce is on the increase. Alcoholism, drug use, and delinquency are spreading among the youth. Government studies show that the majority of people who move from villages and rural environs to the cities drop out of church.
In recent years, government officials have been promoting a “partnership” between church and state in addressing social ills. Observers say this accounts in part for the easing of restrictions on the churches. Seminary enrollments are up, and correspondence courses have been introduced to speed up the training of clergy recruits. Small Bible-study and prayer groups flourish despite the lack of official recognition and approval. State television not long ago broadcast a series on the Bible, which a Baptist pastor described as “surprisingly positive.” Western evangelists appear frequently as guest speakers in church pulpits, often without the customary advance approval of the authorities. New York street evangelist Tom Mahairas, a former drug addict, has been invited to work among social dropouts in Budapest.
In the process, the State Office for Church Affairs (SOCA), under the headship of Imre Miklos, has undergone a transformation, SOCA was founded in 1951 to monitor and regulate church activities and leaders. Like its counterparts elsewhere in Eastern Europe, it often had to implement harsh party policies designed to restrict and weaken the churches. However, SOCA today is often found taking a positive role in church matters, mirroring perhaps Kadar’s own philosophy. “Ideological differences,” he says, “need not prevent Christians and Marxists from working together.”
Government and church sources acknowledge that many unresolved issues and tensions remain between church and state. But they seem convinced that the new style of pragmatic compromise, rather than confrontation, is the way to achieve the most progress.
EDWARD E. PLOWMANin Hungary
TELEVISION
Court Ruling Could Hurt Christian Broadcasters
Cable television companies are no longer required to carry local television stations, including religious stations, following a court decision in July. In response, the National Religious Broadcasters, National Association of Broadcasters, and Public Broadcasting System have filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. They also asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to devise new rules to protect local stations from being dropped arbitrarily from cable program offerings.
The FCC’s “must-carry” rules required cable television companies to include all local stations within a 35-mile radius. That requirement was ruled unconstitutional by the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., since cable managers could not freely choose the stations they offer to subscribers. Broadcasters say the court’s decision is unfair to new stations, ones that broadcast to a small audience, and those with low ratings.
The court ruling “means cable systems can make any decision they want,” said veteran religious broadcaster Jerry Rose. “If they don’t like religious or ethnic programming, they can just leave it off. The FCC and the courts have bowed to big ratings. They are not serving local television needs as they are supposed to be doing.”
If they are shunned by cable companies, small, local stations may be unable to compete for viewers as more families use cable service exclusively. Cable operators argue that they are up against stiff competition themselves—faced with a growing array of entertainment options, such as movies on videocassette tapes. If a station is duplicating programs available on other channels, or attracting few viewers, cable television decision makers want to shop for alternatives.
In Chicago, Rose found his 10-year-old station, WCFC, bumped by U.S. Cable in Waukegan, Illinois. He said many cable subscribers signed up for the service knowing they would receive his channel. After WCFC was dropped, Rose met with U.S. Cable general manager Jim Pearson to request a rethinking of the decision.
Pearson said that he has been receiving letters from subscribers who want WCFC returned to their screens. “We want to show what our subscribers want,” he said. “If we’ve made an error, we’ll put it back on.”
He said Rose’s station was removed because 80 percent of its programming duplicated shows available on national Christian networks carried by U.S. Cable. “We get requests for religious channels all the time,” Pearson said, “and we try to treat them fairly within the scope of subscriber demand. We also get complaints from people saying we have too much religion.” With the must-carry rules lifted, it is up to cable managers like Pearson to select which stations are made available to viewers.
Rose chairs a committee of National Religious Broadcasters members that is pressuring the FCC to consider drafting rules that would satisfy the Circuit Court of Appeals’ concerns, while protecting the interests of small, struggling local broadcasters.
Ralph Haller, deputy chief of the FCC’s policy and rules division, said the commission “will continue looking at the problem and asking questions as to the proper role of must-carry rules.” He said the FCC, which licenses and regulates broadcasters, is interested in assessing must-carry requirements to see if they serve the interests of the public, not in order to placate either broadcasters or cable operators.
MUSIC
Parents Group Wants Labels On Explicit Rock Records
It used to be the thumping rock beat coming from their kids’ bedrooms that worried parents. But a group of mothers in Washington, D.C., claims there is more to fear these days from rock music’s increasingly explicit lyrics.
“The stuff we were dancing to 15 years ago was nothing like this,” says Susan Baker, cofounder of the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC). The organization has launched a national campaign to pressure the recording industry to inform consumers about the messages conveyed in rock music.
“A lot of the songs today encourage alcohol and drug abuse,” Baker says. “There’s a lot of incest, sadomasochism, homosexuality, and Satan worship. And the lyrics are getting bolder and bolder.”
An evangelical Christian, Baker is the wife of U.S. treasury secretary James A. Baker. She started combating explicit rock lyrics after talking with a friend who purchased the album Purple Rain for her daughter. One song on the album refers to a girl masturbating.
“She [the friend] was horrified and so was I,” says Baker, who discovered that lyrics to other songs on the album were even more explicit. “The average teenager listens to this stuff four to six hours a day. They wake up to it, study to it, dance to it, sleep to it. They plug in their earphones and jog to it.”
Baker and other well-connected Washington wives and mothers formed PMRC last spring. She says the organization adopted a secular approach to broaden involvement.
“There has been an awakening in church circles to harmful lyrics and sexual exploitation in rock music,” Baker says, “but it has only been the church groups that are interested. Our thrust is to create a dialogue across the nation, not tackling it only from a religious point of view.”
When PMRC was founded, the organization asked the recording industry to adopt a rating system for record albums, similar to the one used for movies. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents 80 percent of the record companies in the United States, rejected the ratings proposal. But it did agree to a compromise—a generic label saying “Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics” to be placed on albums that record companies deem most explicit. Some record companies were concerned that music stores would refuse to stock albums displaying the label. However, by late September, half of the 48 companies represented by RIAA had agreed to the labeling system.
As a result, PMRC is no longer pushing for a rock music ratings system. Instead, it is asking record companies to print the lyrics of songs on the outside of record jackets. The organization also objects to sexually explicit record jackets and certain rock music videos. PMRC’s efforts have raised a storm of opposition from musicians and anticensorship groups.
Earlier this year at a hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, musicians as diverse as John Denver and Frank Zappa confronted PMRC representatives with their objections. Many opponents say the group’s proposals amount to censorship, but Baker calls such charges “outrageous.”
“Providing information is never censorship,” she says. “Suppressing something is censorship. We’re asking for more exposure. We’re not challenging an artist’s right to write smut. We’re saying that we have rights as parents to protect our children.”
KELSEY MENEHAN
