EXCLUSIVE – In the United States, the term “woke” has become a catch-all term for a wide range of divisive identitarian positions, from gender to race to sexual orientation.
Cultural battles are waged over single-gender bathrooms, diversity quotas, and female sports leagues — all under the same nominal movement.
But in European politics, where the term “woke” was imported and provided a new name to a synergy of post-Soviet politics that has been growing for decades, conservatives see the movement as a distinctly spiritual opponent.
Tristan Azbej, Hungarian State Secretary for Aid of Persecuted Christians, sat down with the Washington Examiner in his nation’s D.C. Embassy to discuss what he believes has been decades of purposeful neglect toward persecuted Christians worldwide for the sake of an overarching political project.
“The ‘woke’ movement could have originated from the U.S., but there is something very similar that has quite a few decades of tradition since 1968 in Europe, and that could be labeled as cultural Marxism. And there might be different schools of thought, but they merged at one point,” Azbej said.
He continued, “The order of the woke topics might be slightly different in the U.S. and in Europe, but many of them meet […] and the whole totalitarian mindset of censoring anyone and everyone who speaks out of the canon, of canceling everything, of trying to push any conservative or Christian reference or value out of the public discourse — this sort of aggressive, totalitarian attitude is very much the same.”
While this cultural clash most evidently manifests in America through the lens of gender and race, it takes a more spiritual aspect on the Old Continent.
“In Europe, they believe in an ideological war, the woke advocates impose this ideological war on Christian politicians, on Christian social values, and in Europe, they try to portray Christianity as an oppressive idea,” Azbej told the Washington Examiner. “Within that false narrative, the reality on the ground doesn’t fit — it contradicts the woke narrative.”
Hundreds of millions of Christians around the world currently live under religious oppression or outright violent persecution.
Some faith communities face spiritual suppression in countries hostile to their faith, such as in the People’s Republic of China. Others are gunned down for their beliefs in countries such as Libya, Nigeria, and the Sudan.
Approximately 4,476 Christians were killed for their faith last year, according to the Christian human rights organization Open Doors. In the same year, 7,679 Christian-affiliated properties, such as churches, were attacked, and almost 5,000 Christians were imprisoned.
It is these persecuted faithful that Azbej is commissioned to collaborate with, advocate for, and distribute aid to on behalf of the Hungarian government — a class of people that he alleges are being overlooked for more politically advantageous recipients.
“What we are still experiencing in the European Union, especially in the Brussels politics and what [Americans] have experienced during the last four years, many of these governments and international organizations who are woke-minded, are using the tools of international development and international humanitarian aid as an ideological colonization tool on the developing world and as a tool to interfere with the politics of certain cultures.”
Azbej’s complaints have never been more relevant as this month, when President Donald Trump ordered the United States Agency for International Development to be entrusted directly to the State Department after accusing it of grossly excessive spending on irrelevant ideological campaigns.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted a “long list of crap” that included multi-million dollar disbursements to Guatemala, Armenia, South Africa, Western Balkans, Uganda, Latin America, and “priority countries around the world” for LGBT advocacy.
Despite Christianity’s status as the most persecuted religion in the modern day, government-appointed advocates for specifically helping members of the faith are quite rare in comparison.
During the interview, Azbej voiced support for Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for her contributions to programs seeking to aid persecuted Christians around the world, as well as the government of Austria, which announced a similar initiative last year through its Federal Chancellery.
But the Hungarian secretary thinks it will be some time before a more widespread effort is coordinated across Europe.
“In other European countries, they are still very much following the political quietness agenda,” Azbej said. “They want to stay away from any sort of faith-based engagement in crises, or at least direct faith-based engagements, but with the mindset set changing in Europe as well in many ways, I hope that there will be more and more countries and governments who understand that it is not about politics, it’s about general human solidarity and moral obligation to support the large masses of people that are innocently persecuted for their faith, and whose basic human right to freedom of religion is violated.”
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The Hungarian secretary also suspects that many in the West who follow the same faith as these persecuted Christians face the same pitfalls as himself — a lifestyle of comfortability and ease that fails to convict their conscience.
“I am a Catholic believer, but like many of the Christians in the West, I have a tendency to get very comfortable with it. I can admit to that, that sometimes just out of laziness, I don’t attend church,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And then I meet Nigerian Christians who have suffered tragic loss during a holy mass — jihadists murderers ride into churches, and with machine guns, they start to murder the faithful.”
“And I think about myself and our comfortable ways in the West,” he continued. “They, the persecuted Christians, are a real source of personal faith for me and inspiration. And in a way, it’s not us who are aiding the persecuted Christian — they [are aiding] us.”
