Hungary

Hungary was Christianised from the west by Stephen I, crowned in the year 1000 with a crown sent from Rome, and the Holy Crown itself went on to acquire a legal personality in Hungarian constitutional theory that no other regalia has held: sovereignty was said to reside in the crown rather than in the person wearing it.

The Reformation then divided the country along a line that still shows. Calvinism took hold east of the Danube and in Transylvania so firmly that Debrecen was known as the Calvinist Rome, while the Habsburg controlled west and north stayed Catholic and was worked over thoroughly by the Counter Reformation. Roughly speaking, the Catholic majority and the Reformed minority of today are the residue of that settlement, though affiliation has fallen sharply and a large share of Hungarians now decline to state one.

Transylvania produced something remarkable in the middle of it. The Edict of Torda, issued by the diet in 1568 under the Unitarian influenced prince John Sigismund, granted freedom of preaching and forbade the punishment of ministers for their teaching, recognising four received religions: Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian. It is among the earliest acts of legal religious toleration in Europe, and Transylvania is where organised Unitarianism has its oldest continuous institutional life.

The twentieth century produced the emblematic figure of church resistance in Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, tortured and imprisoned by the communist government, freed during the 1956 revolution and then resident inside the United States embassy in Budapest for fifteen years, unable to leave without arrest.

Hungary's post communist religion law of 1990 was among the most permissive in Europe: a religious community could register with a small number of founders and a court filing, and around three hundred and fifty did. In 2011 that was replaced.

The new law recognised a short list of churches directly in its own text and deregistered everything else, requiring any other body to apply for recognition through a vote of parliament with a two thirds majority. Several hundred communities lost their legal status as churches overnight, and with it the tax treatment, the state subsidies attached to their schools and social services, and in some cases their standing to run the institutions they already operated. The bodies affected included Methodist, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic communities, and the reformed Jewish congregation Sim Shalom.

Two objections were made and both have force. The first is procedural: making recognition a parliamentary vote means a religious community's legal existence depends on a political majority, with no obligation to give reasons and no ordinary appeal. The second is that the criteria in the law, including a required period of operation and a demonstrated public interest, are open ended enough to be applied selectively.

The European Court of Human Rights found against Hungary in 2014 in a case brought by a group of deregistered communities. Hungary amended the framework rather than abandoning it, introducing tiers of status short of full church recognition, and the underlying architecture, in which parliament decides, remains.

The case is now the standard European example of the problem with tiered religious recognition: it is possible to be perfectly free to worship and still be legally demoted.