Folk religion in a Calvinist context: Hungarian models and Scottish examples

Folklore, Oct, 2002 by Margaret A. Mackay

Introduction

President, members of The Folklore Society, and friends: I am deeply conscious of the honour which the Society has bestowed on me by its invitation to deliver the Katharine Briggs Memorial Lecture for 2001. This annual lecture was instituted in order to commemorate the life and work of a scholar who made a lasting contribution to our subject, to its wider understanding and its extending horizons. She worked tirelessly to ensure respect for folklore among the disciplines which have the study of human experience as their focus, and took a broad, inclusive and comparative approach to all she did. We remember Katharine Briggs with gratitude and affection.

In my lecture tonight I wish to pay tribute to research in the field of folk religion carried out by a dedicated team who have also been inspired by a scholar with very special qualities, whose work deserves to have our attention. The Reverend Doctor Ambrus Molnar (see Figure 1), who was born in 1922 and died in 2000, gave encouragement to others in the study of religious life both within and beyond the bounds of officially recognised denominational practice by his own commitment and dedication, often at risk to his own personal safety. Since the late 1980s I have had the privilege of a growing acquaintance with, and limited participation in, the work of Dr Molnar and his team, carried out in a part of Europe where East meets West in the lands of Greater Hungary. The fact that the research findings of the group are published almost entirely in Hungarian means that they are not widely known to international folklore scholars. And because of their relevance to the study of religious phenomena in countries such as Scotland, where I am based, I have chosen them for the focus of this Katharine Briggs Lecture.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Some Personal Reflections

But first of all, in a reflexive mode, let me say something about my own background which will help to place my interests in this conjunction of cultures in context. I was born in 1945 in the Western Canadian province of Saskatchewan to parents who would not have called themselves anything but Canadian, but whose heritage was, in both cases, Highland, Scottish and Calvinist.

My mother was born in Scotland, in the Badenoch community of Kingussie, and emigrated as a small child with her parents after the First World War. My father was a descendent of emigrants of an earlier period, Mackays from Sutherland in the north of mainland Scotland, who settled as part of a group migration in what is now Western Ontario--then known as Upper Canada or Canada West--in 1831. Like his father, his uncle and several cousins, he was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

Growing up in a manse, in a ministerial household, provided me with experiences which I could recognise later in my life for their folkloric significance. There was exposure on a regular basis to the events in the human life cycle, and responses to them, among members of the congregation and community. Consciously or unconsciously came a growing awareness of the multiple meanings associated with foodways and expressive genres such as the in-group humour of the clergy, to select but a few examples.

Life in a western Canadian city, Saskatoon, provided the multicultural context of a province which had been settled by Europeans within seventy-five years of my own birth, where Ukrainian and German could be majority mother-tongues and where the population of my primary school classroom in the early 1950s bore witness not only to several generations of settlement, but also to the influx following the Second World War of so-called "New Canadians" from Europe and from Asia.

My acquaintance with the phenomenon of Hungarian Calvinism can be said to date from this period. There were Hungarian families in the St Andrew's Presbyterian congregation. One of the church elders was a well-known medical doctor in the city, Dr George Biro, whose brother-in-law, Dr Alexander King, was a Church of Scotland official with an Eastern European remit. From time to time we would have staying with us, in town for a meeting of Presbytery perhaps, the Hungarian-born or Hungarian-speaking minister of a community created in south-eastern Saskatchewan in the first years of the twentieth century by Calvinist emigrants from north-eastern Hungary and known as Bekevar, "The Fortress of Peace."

The events in Hungary of October 1956 touched us in my home on 24th Street, and in my school, as a new wave of refugees arrived in a city which was known to have been a destination for earlier Hungarian emigrants, to be received by committees formed for the purpose including Presbyterian Church groups from congregations such as our own. I recall helping with the preparation for the wedding in our own living room of a couple who had been engaged in Hungary but had left the country separately, to be reunited in Saskatoon.

Hungary's Calvinist History

The 1560s saw the establishment of Calvinism in both Hungary and Scotland following earlier activity. In fact, in 1557 a declaration was published for Calvinism in Csenger, the Confessio Hungarica. The Protestant Reformation in Hungary took place in the context of ethnic diversity and political turmoil: Szeklers and Magyars, Saxons (settled since the twelfth century in Transylvania) and Vlachs or Romanians. The royal court of Lajos II was subject to Lutheran influence before 1526 but that year saw the defeat of the Hungarian armies by the Turks under the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I at Mohacs. The king, two archbishops, five bishops and a large number of nobles were among the heavy casualties; a subsequent weakness in the old hierarchy and a division of jurisdictions allowed diversity to thrive. In the lands under Turkish rule, religious tolerance was practised. Initially, the reformation followed ethnic lines, with the Saxons adopting Lutheranism, as did some Magyars and Szeklers, but both Unitarianism and the doctrines of Calvin, especially in such areas as the interpretation of communion, also took hold.