White Christian nationalism, as represented by evangelicals, is an essential source of meaning and an important link in the global rise of right-wing populist politics. Iemima Ploscariu shows that things could have been different by examining a largely forgotten episode in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe and discussing alternatives within faith communities that transcended the boundaries of ethnicity, language, and social status.
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Evangelicals have come to the forefront in recent politics, especially with the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States of America. There was overwhelming support for Donald Trump’s far-right MAGA campaign from many who identify as Evangelical Christians. Meanwhile, in Romania, an obscure independent candidate who expressed admiration for Romania’s interwar and World War II fascist leaders became one of the finalists in the December presidential election. He too received large support from conservative faith communities.
These are but two recent examples of politically right-wing candidates in the USA and Europe who managed to draw the vote of conservative faith communities. Evangelicals have increasingly become associated with politically right-wing ultra-nationalism and xenophobia, though there are those among them actively opposing Christian nationalism. Historically, they often challenged the status quo as descendants of the Radical Reformation, and were even accused of socialist leanings in Imperial Russia.
Ethnically diverse interwar Romania
“Alternative Evangelicals” (2024) tells the story of evangelicals in 1920s and 1930s Romania through the prism of believers from two ethnic minority groups within the burgeoning evangelical churches of the time. After World War I, Romania acquired the border regions of Transylvania (from Hungary), Bessarabia (from Russia), and parts of the Banat and Bukovina (from Austria-Hungary). These regions contained large populations of ethnic minorities, as well as ethnic Romanians who identified as Protestant or Evangelical. These believers spoke Hungarian, Serbian, German, Romani, Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, or Romanian, among other languages.
This transformed the Kingdom of Romania from a largely homogeneous ethnically Romanian and religiously Greek Orthodox country into one of the largest and most diverse countries in Eastern Europe. According to the 1930 census, evangelicals made up only about one percent of the more than 18 million registered citizens. But their communities were expanding rapidly, attracting the attention of U.S. and British co-religionists as well as the suspicion of Romanian Orthodox and state authorities. German, Hungarian, and Ukrainian minorities constituted the majority of evangelical churches in these regions before World War I, but they were soon outnumbered by the rapid growth of ethnic Romanians who converted to these groups during the war and interwar period.
Converts to evangelical faiths across the social and ethnic spectrum
Romanian evangelical churches did not have a history of anti-Semitism like the Romanian Orthodox Church or the Catholic Church, and they accepted new members regardless of an individual’s ethnic background. Women were also more involved than before in teaching and leadership within these churches. These were all important factors that made Romanian evangelicals remarkably inclusive at a time when European statesmen were bent on creating distinct ethno-religious boundaries and clearly defined national identities. To reach this goal, European nation builders implemented nationalization policies to replace ethnic minorities in work places, schools, and among governing authorities with (often ill equipped) individuals from the ethnic majority.
Converts to these evangelical groups spanned the social, ethnic, and political spectrum. The majority were peasants, reflecting the majority of the Romanian population at the time. Mapping the social history of evangelicals reveals that there were also significant numbers of urban believers who were doctors, teachers, bankers, factory owners, and engineers. The Eastern Regions (Bessarabia, Bukovina, Dobrogea) and the Western Regions (Transylvania and the Banat) – Romania’s post-war borderlands – were the most ethnically diverse. Crisana-Maramures, just northwest of Transylvania held the largest number of evangelicals, followed by the region of Bessarabia. In the Old Kingdom of Romania (the regions of Wallachia and Moldavia), there were fewer evangelicals but the congregations maintained an ethnically mixed character in the urban areas where they were concentrated.
Evangelical services would include different languages. The sermon could be in Hungarian with simultaneous Romanian translation, or in Romanian with Russian translation, and in countless other combinations, depending on who was preaching and who was present. The congregational singing must have sounded like a modern day Pentecost, with different language versions of the same hymn being sung simultaneously. Evangelical publications, especially in the region of Bessarabia, would have as many as three different language versions: Russian, Romanian, and Yiddish. These churches were linguistically rich communities that embraced their linguistic diversity as a means of deepening their understanding of their new identity and the Christian faith. Their faith helped them build bridges across different social, linguistic, and gender boundaries, and created communities that provided assistance to those within and outside the religious community.
Jewish baptists preaching against nationalism
In Chisinau, the capital of today’s Republic of Moldova, the New Testament Baptist-affiliated Israelites were led by Ukrainian-Jewish convert Lev Averbuch and his wife, Maria. They believed in Jesus as the Messiah, but also celebrated Jewish holidays, read the Torah, prayed in Hebrew, and preached in Yiddish, maintaining a unique evangelical Jewish-Christian identity. Until recently, Averbuch has been largely forgotten by historians. Only a small group of Messianic Jews in Chisinău and Odessa actively collected information about him and his group in an attempt to reconstruct the history of their faith communities. On closer inspection, the Averbuchs and members of their congregation appear frequently in interwar secret police files, Romanian Foreign Ministry reports, and American, British, German, Polish, Romanian, and Russian missionary and denominational newsletters from the 1920s and 1930s. Their diversity was suspicious to the police, but allowed them to be part of widespread, transnational evangelical networks.
Averbuch spoke out against nationalism in his sermons and lectures as early as 1918. He argued that Christians could not embrace nationalism because it prevented believers from following Jesus’ command to love their neighbor as themselves. He encouraged linguistic, ethnic, and cultural diversity in his worship services. A Christmas or Simchat Torah celebration might include scripture readings in at least five different languages, sermons in three, and songs in many more. The Jewish Baptist congregation is well documented in government and denominational archives, but largely forgotten by scholars. Its history remains in the collective memory of the Jewish-Messianic congregations in Moldova and Ukraine.
Roma inclusion among evangelicals
A less documented community of multi-ethnic evangelicals is that of the Roma Baptists from the city of Arad in the Crișana-Maramureș region. In Arad, on the opposite side of the country from Chisinău, Roma converts broke down social barriers and joined Baptist churches. Like Averbuch’s group, they found a more inclusive fellowship and established the first Roma-led Baptist church: Credința (Faith) in Arad in the early 1930s. Here, too, Hungarian, Romanian, and Roma could be heard in one service. The growth of Roma evangelicals coincided with the expansion of Roma emancipation efforts in Romania. Believers such as Dumitru Lingurar, the son of Credința church founder Anton Lingurar, was the first ethnic Roma to attend the Baptist seminary in Bucharest, studied law in Cluj, and became a judge in the Banat after World War II.
The unifying force of music
Music was an integral part of evangelical communities and their faith identity. The songs sung during worship services or evangelistic outreaches were often older hymns with different translations. All those present could sing the songs in their mother tongue or heart language and still feel united despite different languages and traditions. Music, perhaps more than any other element in their otherwise simple worship services, helped them overcome ethnic and linguistic barriers. Congregational singing strengthened community ties among church members, as did the many hours of choir and orchestra rehearsals that took place each week in preparation for mid-week and weekend services. Musical events were also a means of attracting new adherents to their congregations.
War challenging multi-ethnic communities
Their evangelism or proselytizing angered the Orthodox Church authorities, who in turn pressured state officials to pass laws against these groups. They were labeled as sectarians and foreign pawns, rather than as communities that had found a way to deal constructively with diversity in Romania. Although they remained theologically conservative, Romanian evangelicals of the interwar period understood their faith as transcending nationalism and as something that united them with people from all walks of life.
During World War II, this transnational identity was too threatening to the Romanian government authorities; most Evangelical churches were closed by the state. Some believers were even deported to Transnistria, the strip of land between the Dniester and Bug rivers acquired by Romania, along with Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina and all the nomadic as well as some sedentary Roma. The multi-ethnic communities of evangelicals were largely dissolved as the postwar European nation-states became largely ethnically homogeneous. What the nationalization policies of the interwar period failed to accomplish, they did after the Second World War. In retrospect, these multi-ethnic congregations offer us a glimpse into a very different world of evangelicalism and alternatives to today’s right-wing populism and Christian nationalism.