From the 2026 budget audit
462 million Ft to fund religious communities — who chose which ones?
A 461.9 million Ft allocation supporting religious communities selected from the budget: a small line, but the same discretionary-allocation mechanism as the large ones.
About 116 Ft per taxpayer per year — for religious communities selected by an officeholder, funded from compulsory tax.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: smaller religious communities receiving state support to sustain their activities. The unseen: the taxpayer whose contribution funds communities they were not asked about — and whose own faith community, if it does not appear on the selected list, receives nothing from this line.
Objection
"Smaller religious communities without large congregations need state support to survive — the big churches can fund themselves."
Answer
A community that survives because the state selects it is not a community in the classical-liberal sense — it is a client. A genuine community sustains itself from its members and their voluntary contributions. The SZJA 1% mechanism is the appropriate state-neutral instrument: every taxpayer can direct their 1% to any registered religious community they choose. What this 462 million Ft line adds is a political selector on top of that voluntary one.
Share if you think all religious communities should compete for voluntary support, not political selection.
The analyst's verdict
Support for Religious Communities
Rationale
Religious practice is the paradigm case of a voluntary association. A church is sustained by the freely-given contributions of its believers — and Hungarian churches, like churches everywhere, have a millennia-tested mechanism for this: the offering, the tithe, the membership of the faithful. The classical-liberal frame does not judge the worth of religious life; it observes that religious life does not require involuntary tax financing, because the people who value a church can and historically do fund it directly. The six small lines carry no comparable multi-year reliance and are Immediate Cuts.
Transition mechanism
The six small lines carry no comparable multi-year reliance and are Immediate Cuts. Across the cluster, the SZJA 1% church designation — the genuinely voluntary channel — is untouched and becomes the primary funding route.
Affected groups
Churches and religious communities, who transition from state grant to offering-and-membership funding plus the intact 1% designation. No believer loses the right to practise or to fund their church; the reform removes the involuntary contribution of non-members, not the voluntary contribution of members.
Free Society Institute
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