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On a stage in Budapest, Hungary, on Tuesday afternoon, Vice President J.D. Vance had a remarkable request for the Hungarian people: reelect a dictator.

Vance knows that country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has fostered rampant corruption, curtailed the independence of the country’s judiciary, attacked its universities’ academic freedom, spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, and promoted racial homogeneity. But Vance had one major justification for flying to Europe to personally campaign for Orbán’s reelection, as Orbán flags in the polls: Orbán was the United States’ partner in morality. “Because what the United States and Hungary together represent under Viktor’s leadership and under President Trump’s leadership is the defense of Western civilization,” Vance said on that stage. At another event that day, he called on people to vote for Orbán to preserve that morality: “Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, for truth, and for the God of our fathers?”

It was not the first time the Trump administration had tried to help a foreign leader with their election. No need to obscure its ambitions with secret CIA operations: The Trump administration has stumped for far-right parties in Europe, including ones with Nazi sympathies; backed El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who has turned the country into a harsh police state; and saved the right-wing populist President Javier Milei from an election loss in Argentina.

But even in this new era, Orbán is still a remarkable candidate for the presidential administration to support. That’s because Orbán isn’t just leading the most corrupt country in Europe; he’s also Russia’s primary asset inside of Europe. As recent reporting has found, Orbán has repeatedly called Russia’s foreign minister after closed-door meetings of European leaders to fill him in, leaking sensitive information. Orbán’s foreign minister has reportedly worked on Russia’s behalf to get an oligarch’s relative off of European sanctions lists. Publicly, Orbán portrays the E.U. as a sinister organization, and has even blocked military aid to Ukraine, which he has made out to be Hungary’s enemy. And as a result, Russia is working to keep Orbán in place. So when the Trump administration goes to bat for Orbán, they’re allying themselves with Vladimir Putin—and against pro-democracy politicians in Europe.

It’s an odd place for the United States’ presidential administration to intervene. But Vance articulated one primary reason why he would drop everything to fly to Hungary to help the prime minister there: to fight for Christendom.

There’s been a lot of talk, in recent years, of Christian nationalism in America. But Christendom, as an idea, dreams much bigger, beyond national borders. In its benign use, Christendom is an archaic label for the Christians of the world. But among a certain small cadre of conservative intellectuals and theologians, its relevant definition is its geopolitical one. In that use of the term, the regions populated by Christians unite as one single and powerful civilization. Doug Wilson, the prominent theologian behind Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s church, for example, has written a book advocating for a new Christendom in which laws are based on the Bible, and reward virtue and faith. (In a different book, in 2005, he called the Confederate South “the last nation of the first Christendom.”) He and other theologians have discussed the possibility of a “Christendom 2.0,” a term that has been used for certain patriarchal Christian conferences........

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