The social reforms of Hungary’s right-wing populist government have fundamentally reconfigured social and class relations (Geva 2021; Stubbs and Lendvai-Bainton 2020). Education has been a key area for building a new order in society. The government crafted an education policy discourse centering on educating a Christian nation (Neumann, 2023) and, offering favorable financial and legal conditions, invited allied Christian churches to take a greater part in education and welfare service provision. Subsequently, the share of denominational institutions has significantly increased at all educational levels, resulting in the increasing pillarization and social segregationof local educational spaces. Arguably, the churchification of education and welfare (Fodor, 2022) is a form of attenuated governance (Hackett, 2020) in the sense that the symbolic and material support offered to allied/co-opted churches distances the government from contentious policy goals, most importantly, the pacification of rural spaces through consolidating racial segregation and institutional racism (Merry, 2014).

In conversation with the literature on the role of faith schools in contemporary European educational markets (Hemming&Roberts, 2017), the presentation focuses on the effects of authoritarian-conservative education policies and policy discourse “on the ground” (Apple, 2001). Based on three town-level case studies about the discoursive strategies of local and regional church elites, the analysis explores the restructuring of local education markets and its impact on producing and solidifying inequalities and exacerbating social divisions surrounding race and class (Allen and West, 2011; Apple, 2001; Jackson, 2003).

Neo-conservative education governments have had a controversial relationship with neoliberalism (Apple, 2004; Exley&Ball, 2011). While the churchification of education is a form of privatization, the government discourse frame church-state relations as a “strategic alliance” and presents faith schools as a primary scene for socializing good Hungarians. Official policy discourses heavily draw on Christian church discourses about the importance of value-based socialization (Neumann, 2023). Rejecting market discourses, education policy-makers contend that schooling should be a “shared responsibility” and denounce former socialist-liberal governments for approaching education as a market and commodity (Neumann, 2023). The study found that while the representatives of the local state and its secular institutions describe the churchification process as the amplification of market forces, consumer choice, and school segregation locally, denominational actors distance themselves from the competition discourse, and instead, argue that high professionalism and moral integrity offers a niche that attracts families following similar values. Furthermore, they argue, that the moral integrity and smaller school size offer a family feel (Hemmings&Roberts, 2017), “safety and stability”, and ensure better student behaviour (Butler and Hamnett, 2012) compared to secular schools. At the same time, the strategy of cultural imperialism (Grace, 2015), opening up faith schools to the wider public, results in an evangelization approach that does not aim to impose religion onto anyone but instead offers it as an opportunity to explore. Thus, religion is treated situationally and strategically: religious stakeholders expect “openness” and “cooperation” from the families and the teachers, while they also emphasize being “open” to anyone who is willing to endorse religious school practices.

In the context of the church-friendly state politics and funding, faith schools have become the synonyms of well-resourced, high-quality education in the eyes of the local elites. While secular stakeholders often point out the segregation effects of the expanding faith school system and the attenuated governance strategy which refrains from coordinating and regulating the distribution of students, faith school stakeholders defend their almost-all-white schools by pointing to token Roma students and blame disadvantaged families for self-segregation and for failing to comply with school entrance expectations.

The empirical material for the study was collected in three Hungarian small towns (of 12-14000) where local school markets have been significantly restructured over the last 14 years, and several former municipal-run, secular educational institutions were transferred to church maintenance. The towns represent a geographic and socio-economic variety (including the presence of Roma minority) and were sampled in a way to characterize different levels of religiosity. Between 2020 and 2023, I conducted 41 semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders (regional and local church elites, town leadership, heads of educational institutions, and heads of school districts) and with about 20 parents. The current analysis will mainly rely on interviews with the regional and local religious elites and heads of denominational institutions.

The analysis interprets the churchification of education as a form of co-optation and attenuated governance: the Hungarian populist government, which labels itself as “Christian Democratic”, has gained symbolic and moral legitimation from co-opting the churches, while it also achieved contentious political goals, and successfully hid the role of the state in facilitating educational segregation and institutional racism. Concurrently, local church elites have taken advantage of the new opportunities, in the context of decreasing religiosity, taking over institutions provided means to expand their public roles and local power. The religious discourses of cultural imperialism (the discourse of evangelization, value-based education, the trade-off between openness and the expectation of cooperation) and the denial of market forces are part of a discoursive framing that hide the segregation effects of this institutional expansion. In the studied localities, education policy debates are highly politicized and school choices closely follow and consolidate political cleavages. Choosing a faith-based educational institution means approving Fidesz’s conservative populist regime. Therefore, the attenuated governance strategy of churchification not only solidifies social segregation and boundaries within the local communities but also renders the education system a battlefield for (future) voters, where school choice also means endorsing or rejecting authoritarian populist politics. Thus, the transformation of local school systems highlights the effects of populist politics on the ground. The case has wider implications across Europe and European education given the growing strength, political and policy influence of populist movements and ideologies.

Allen, Rebecca, and Anne West. 2011. “Why Do Faith Secondary Schools Have Advantaged Intakes? The Relative Importance of Neighbourhood Characteristics, Social Background and Religious Identity amongst Parents.” British Educational Research Journal 37 (4): 691–712. Apple, M. W. (2001). Educating the “right” way: Markets, standards, God, and inequality. New York: Routledge Apple, M. W. (2004). Creating Difference: Neo-Liberalism, Neo-Conservatism and the Politics of Educational Reform. Educational Policy, 18(1), 12-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904803260022 Butler, Tim, and Chris Hamnett. 2012. “Praying for Success? Faith Schools and School Choice in East London.” Geoforum 43 (6): 1242–1253 Exley S, Ball SJ (2011) Something old, something new: understanding Conservative education policy, cited. In: Bochel H (ed), The Conservative Party and Social Policy. Bristol: Policy Press. Fodor, É. (2022) The Gender-regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary. Palgrave Macmillan. Geva, D. (2021) ‘Orbán’s Ordonationalism as Post-Neoliberal Hegemony’, Theory, Culture & Society, 38(6): 71–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276421999435 Hackett, U. 2020. America’s voucher politics. How elites learned to hide the state. Cambridge University Press. Peter J. Hemming & Christopher Roberts (2017): Church schools, educational markets and the rural idyll, British Journal of Sociology of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2017.1351868 Jackson, Robert. 2003. “Should the State Fund Faith-Based Schools? A Review of the Arguments.” British Journal of Religious Education 25 (2): 89–102. Michael S. Merry (2015) The conundrum of religious schools in twenty-firstcentury Europe, Comparative Education, 51:1, 133-156, DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2014.935582 Neumann, E. (2023) Education for a Christian nation: Religion and nationalism in the Hungarian education policy discourse. European Educational Research Journal, 22(5), 646-665. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041211072691 Stubbs, Paul, and Noemi Lendvai-Bainton. 2020. “Authoritarian Neoliberalism, Radical Conservatism and Social Policy within the European Union: Croatia, Hungary and Poland.” Development and Change 51 (2): 540–560. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12565