Charisma Magazine, one of the best-known papers of the Evangelical Christian movement, asserted that “the Faith Church alone, singlehandedly, kicked George Soros out of Hungary.” It is surprising in itself to find an ostensibly Christian magazine reacting positively to any “kick-out”, but especially when the title “Power of God Falls on Church That ‘Singlehandedly Kicked George Soros Out of Hungary’” ascribes the ejection to the “Power of God”. For not a word is true. Soros was “kicked out” not by Sándor Németh, leader pastor of Faith Church but by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, because Soros’s foundation supports human-rights defenders and his university, founded in America, defends democratic values.
The claim came from Rodney Howard-Browne, a US pastor of South African origin, who preached in the hall of the Faith Church in November 2018. His source of information he gave as Sándor Németh, who had said, “Look, I need your help, because Soros is trying to work to shut my money down and is attacking tithing and everything.”
It is not known when or how Soros attacked the 10-per-cent payments or what need he had to deprive Németh. What is known is that the Hall of Faith where the Faith Church operates and where Howard-Browne was preaching when he spoke of the Soros ejection, was put up with bank monies from the then Hungarian Socialist / Free Democrat government and from the Soros Foundation. It is not known where the ill-informed American pastor could dredge up the absurd notion that the Faith Church had ejected Soros, if not from Németh himself. Why would Howard-Browne spread such a lie if he had not heard it from Németh? And what moral depths are reached when a leading pastor boasts of kicking out Soros, most of all when it is not so, but a lie?
It is shocking indeed to find an act that never occurred ascribed to God in an American Christian magazine that is continually full of such miraculous events. It is as serious in its prophecy that Donald Trump is God’s “chosen” as it is in stating that the Faith Church “kicked George Soros out of Hungary.” That is why more than 80 per cent of American Christians voted for Trump. It is also difficult to reconcile with the Bible how any head of an ostensibly Christian assembly could “kick out” of Hungary a donor and benefactor who had spent millions of dollars on supporting Hungary’s poor, Gypsies, deprived and minorities, and indeed Hungarian culture and press freedom as well. And it was not true in any case.
Nor is hatred – of those with liberal views ‒ a Christian virtue. George Soros is after all as much a scion of Abraham as the Benjamin Netanyahu whom Evangelical Christians see as divine, though accused of corruption. Yet Soros is a symbolic figure in a world Jewish conspiracy and has been for decades a target of neo-Nazis, Hungarian and international. It belies belief how “philo-Semitism” can distinguish Jews and non-Jews on political grounds, blessing one (though corrupt) and cursing another (though a donor, humanist aid, and patron of persecuted and poor), while calling for equal rights for all. There is no explaining how the head of the Faith Church, a founder of Hungary’s liberal party, its supporter for ten years, its collector of nominations, should have arrived at this juncture. Hatred and persecution of criminals for political ends (as with with gays and trans-gendered) is no good explanation, for sure. The Bible gives the Church no such task. It emanates love of “this world”.
Likewise suggestive is the remark of Sándor Németh’s that the US pastor quotes. It tells how Németh is an enemy of Soros, whom he kicked out of Hungary single-handed (though what right had a preacher or a “Christian” congregation to do any such thing?) because Németh the miser is afraid Soros will take his money away. It was fear for his money that prompted him to kick Soros out of the country, at least according to the myth in the magazine, and this is ascribed to God’s power. Those who imagine God will “kick out” anyone expect fire to fall from the sky on those they see as their enemies, in Jesus’s words, do not know “what spirit lies in it.” Jesus came to save people, not kick them out. In this his task is to preach the Gospel, not support monsters, liars or corrupt dictators. Jesus did not make use of Herod’s assistance, nor Moses stand by the Pharaoh. They opposed them.
Sándor Németh claimed George Soros had attacked the tithes, from which came his multi-millions as a “preacher”. The Faith Church states officially that paying tithes is voluntary, not compulsory. In truth, however, all believers have an obligation of conscience to pay ten per cent of their income into the Faith Church, where Sándor Németh disposes over it without any supervision or control. There are his untaxed billions, rusting and moth-eaten. The Faith Church teaches that those who fail to pay their 10 per cent of income, on top of the expected donations, are stealing from God and will be cursed. So there is no need to make tithe payments compulsory or check on them, because everyone pays for fear of the curse. According to Németh, George Soros attacked this and therefore had to be kicked out of Hungary. A noble motivation. But has anyone heard anything of it?
Sándor Németh would be in deep trouble if asked when, where and how George Soros wanted to deprive him of his money, and when and how he tried to attack tithe payments to the Faith Church. For Soros certainly does not deal in such matters, and has never tried anything of the kind, nor could do so, unless he used the techniques of Németh’s figurehead Viktor Orbán, so that anyone criticizing or questioning the Biblical foundations of tithe payment was immediately associated with George Soros. But that would be crazy, as crazy as the contention that Soros was ejected from Hungary by the Faith Church (which equates with Sándor Németh, the private religious entrepreneur.) It was the Orbán regime that attacked Soros by legislating to curb the Central European University (CEU) and civilian bodies. So Soros’s Open Society foundation and the CEU left Budapest, to Hungary’s great damage and shame.
Németh could plead after his scandalous remark in Charisma Magazin only that Soros did not attack him personally for the treasure he had gathered on earth, only the “Soros network”. Yet we still do not know whether any civil bodies supported by Soros ever interfered in the workings of the Faith Church, or attacked the impenetrable, untaxed, and to put it mildly, muddy financial affairs of Németh himself. Such lies can be told only to Americans who know nothing of the matter. The critics of Faith Church activity and Németh’s enrichment cannot, with the worst will in the world, be slotted into a “Soros network”, which only exists anyway in the minds of his enemies. Hatred of Soros is an abiding anti-Semitic concept, part of the conspiracy theory of the neo-Nazis.
On the other hand, Sándor Németh himself would belong to such a purported “Soros network”, insofar as money from the Soros Foundation helped to build the Hall of Faith. Not that any such “network” ever existed. Németh himself is the best of examples of this: the Soros Foundation supported the construction of the Hall of Faith, as it did many good ventures, but that did not mean Sándor Németh belonged to a network or any expectations were made of him. He was linked by concern for human rights and democratic values with the liberal (SZDSZ) and left-wing (MSZP) parties, which protected the freedom of worship of him and the Faith Church from the political right wing. Most of all there came additional interests of power and finance. Later Németh moved over to the oppressors. George Soros never intervened in the lives or work of those whose activity his foundation found useful and supportable. In most cases the decision was not even his, but that of a curatorship he had appointed. This internal report shows the Soros Foundation supporting the construction of the Hall of Faith:
Document extract of 13 October 1997, entitled: Financial summary of the construction of the Hall of Faith: “At one time Sándor Németh’s fears for his money involved Viktor Orbán, not George Soros.“
For before Fidesz’s electoral win 1998, insiders indeed feared Viktor Orbán might lose his personal wealth. There was word later of a passing conversation in which Orbán told Sándor Németh he had nothing to fear if he did nothing illegal. Accounts say this scared Németh all the more, and so he took the chance to make a pact with Orbán in 2010. Orbán struck out at his rival right-wing party the MDF, behind which stood Sándor Németh and the Faith Church. But at the last minute, the MDF failed to gain enough nomination papers to enter Parliament. The party ceased to exist. The Faith Church, under the new Fidesz government, changed from an anti-family sect into an officially recognized church.
In line with the pact, Sándor Németh positioned his ostensibly opposition TV channel ATV so as to thwart the opposition to Orbán. Rodney Howard-Browne does not know either that the channel came into Faith Church hands at a time when Sándor Németh was a wild liberal fighting the political right wing. When he reached his pact with Orbán, the channel seemed to remain an opposition one, while its owner moved over to the far-right government. Apart from Németh’s similarity of temperament with Orbán, he adopted Orbán’s right-wing ideology so closely that even as a formerly liberal founding member of the SZDSZ, he denied the values of liberal democracy, which are also America’s values. He plugged far-right conspiracy theories expressly opposite to what he had sworn twenty years earlier. This is no Biblical pattern. This is part of a methodical, unfounded campaign against Soros, by a man who himself received money from Soros, and promotes the campaign in a stadium built partly with Soros funding.
The Evangelical Christian movement in America has supported the Republican Party so closely, binding itself to a political party that it is bound to support a lying, immoral racist President and mislead naive believers with false “prophecies”. The church was warned against this by Jesus. But Evangelicals cannot be convinced of anything. Yet they should not sink to a level where they falsify facts well known to those concerned (Americans or in our case the Hungarians), and so propagate obvious lies as to attribute them to the work and power of God. “Hallelujah”. Not even the wicked pagan world sinks so low as that, and there is no need to follow their President’s (or our Prime Minister’s) example. This has nothing to do with the Bible. What Sándor Németh claimed is as big a lie as if Rodney Howard-Browne should claim to have built the White House. It behoves them to correct the lie attributed to God and state in writing that no word of it is true.
The charismatic movement should anyway be more cautious about rejoicing and careful about facts. Rodney Howard-Browne reported gladly that Europe is awakening, which it is not. It suffers struggle and decline. He claims to see awakening in the Faith Church, which he last visited twenty years ago, but the truth is that it has failed to grow in those twenty years, having simply grown richer on government money. Masses of believers have left Sándor Németh, as his political career drifts from liberalism to the extreme right, spinning like a weathercock in a stormy wind. People who know the Bible and keep to principles cannot follow his twists without denying Holy Writ. Németh denies he moves hither and thither out of self-interest, and so his followers must undergo sectarian brainwashing to match, believing first one thing, then the opposite.
Despite Howard-Browne’s bright memories, hearts ache to remember how others in the Faith Church heard Németh once dub him a “South African jackal”, for charging too much as an invited preacher at an Faith Church conference in Jerusalem. So we are unimpressed by the idea that it was God who called on Howard-Browne to strengthen Sándor Németh in Budapest. Sándor Németh needs no strengthening. He is in with the state, drawing abundant funds and protection from an illiberal, anti-American Hungarian government, and living in safety. Unlike the fellow believers whom he left in the lurch for this government to hound and harry. If God had called in Rodney Howard-Browne to strengthen Németh, he would have warned Németh firmly to lie no longer and swear in courts of law without blenching to things for which there was evidence. But then the sudden call to “serve” in Budapest would not have paid so well.
There is a 2014 video recording of a discussion on the CEU, Sándor Németh still upheld George Soros, with no word spoken of wanting to “kick him out” of the country. There was Németh protecting George Soros as a butt of anti-Semitism, describing the allegations against him as paranoia. The only assumption from this must be that Sándor Németh’s present anti-Semitic calumnies against Soros themselves stem from paranoia.
