Baptism or Blood? Reformed Identity, Nation and Transborder Belonging in Hungary

This paper explores how confessional and national categories relate to each other in the official discourse of the Hungarian Reformed Church (HRC) and of the Reformed Church in Hungary (RCH). It does so through a theological reading of three sets of texts: the 2009 Constitution, the 2017 Cooperation Agreement between the Hungarian government and the Reformed Church, and the bell-ringing decisions issued between 2012 and 2020, in connection with the centenary of the Treaty of Trianon. Read together, these documents point to a recurring pattern in which theological language and national-cultural self-description are brought into close proximity, often without a sustained account of their theological relationship. Three textual loci come into particular focus: the membership clause (Article 6), the Agreement’s compound formula ‘nation-sustaining service’ ( nemzetmegtartó szolgálat), and the parallel commemoration of 22 May and 4 June in the bell-ringing decisions. This analysis reads these texts from within the Reformed tradition, drawing on Calvin’s baptismal ecclesiology, Berkouwer’s account of the marks of the church, and Ferenc Szűcs’s distinction between the ordo creationis and providential ordinances, with Andrew Walls’s distinction between indigenising and pilgrim principles as an interpretive framework. The central claim is that the dominant tendency is one of synonymisation: confessional and national categories are aligned in ways that leave theological differentiation underdeveloped. The Hungarian case may be situated within a wider world Christianity context, where churches in post-imperial Protestant contexts have served as carriers of national identity. The article, therefore, argues for a more carefully differentiated ecclesial language in which national belonging is received as a providential and historical reality, but not allowed to displace the baptismal grammar of the church.