American foreign policy priorities appear to be shifting towards the promotion of Christian Nationalist goals as evidenced by recent meetings held between U.S. and Hungarian officials. These talks involve an effort to exploit the real suffering of persecuted Christians abroad while delegitimizing protections for other religious communities.
Trump appointee to the State Department Peter Marocco, who is in charge of dismantling USAID, has met with a number of Christian Nationalist groups abroad, including those with ties to the anti-democratic regime of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Their discussions have focused on providing aid specifically to persecuted Christians abroad, signalling a possible pivot towards a foreign policy position which prioritizes Christian lives over others.
Meanwhile, at the International Religious Freedom Summit held on February 5, 2025, U.S. Vice President JD Vance chastised the U.S.’s perceived role in “sending hundreds of thousands of tax-payer dollars abroad to NGOs that are dedicated to spreading Atheism all over the globe,” a coded word for the secular application of the law, and claimed that this would be changing under the Trump administration.
Marocco has long been an advocate for dismantling programs intended for democracy promotion, which he reportedly sees as disseminating unacceptable values. At CPAC Hungary in 2023, organized by allies of Orbán and the Hungarian Center for Fundamental Rights (CFR), Marocco stated that federal foreign aid programs intended to promote democracy or gender equality were “family-undermining initiatives” being used to “indoctrinate” citizens of participant countries into “dangerous ideologies” that include support for “gay pride parades,” “illegal abortions,” “terrorism in the Middle East,” and “schools abroad exploiting and grooming children” (see Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) previous reporting on the CPAC Hungary here). As such, many of these programs were the first to be cut when he arrived at USAID a month ago, being placed under a foreign aid freeze.
Now Marocco appears to be promoting a foreign policy designed exclusively around protecting Christians abroad. On February 7, 2025, he invited Tristan Azbej, head of Hungary’s State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians, which coordinates the activities of the “Hungary Helps” (Magyarország segít) program, to Washington. This was, according to Azbej, “the first foreign delegation received in the State Department by Pete Marocco.” According to the pro-Orbán outlet Hungarian Conservative, Azbej’s office was created in 2016 as a “government organizational unit dedicated to helping persecuted Christians and other persecuted or marginalized communities around the world” after Orbán met with Middle Eastern Christian church leaders in 2016.
Hungary Helps is a government-organized non-governmental organization (GONGO) instituted by Orbán and the Hungarian Parliament on April 14, 2019, with the purpose of providing aid to persecuted minorities in various parts of the world, with a special emphasis on persecuted Christians in the Middle East and Muslim-majority countries. It also “addresses the causes of migration,” a longstanding Orbán flashpoint. Hungary Helps was funded by the Hungarian government to the tune of 130 billion forints (335.6 million euros) in 2023 and has other members of the Hungarian government, such as György Géza Bathó, the deputy secretary of state for economic affairs, on its supervisory board. While the organization claims to provide aid to other minorities, the vast majority of their efforts are oriented towards providing aid to Christian communities.
Like many members of the European far right, such as Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni and politicians from her party, members of the Italian Christian nationalist Militia Christi, politicians from the far-right political party VOX in Spain, and Marion Maréchal’s Identité-Liberté (Identity-Liberty) in France, Azbej and Hungary Helps use the Arabic letter “nuun” (ن) in their social media accounts. The “nuun” is a symbol signifying “Nazarene” (meaning Christian) that was originally used as a symbol of solidarity with persecuted Christians abroad, particularly those oppressed by ISIS. It has since been co-opted by far-right politicians pushing anti-Muslim narratives. Some Arab Christians consider the term to be “derogatory.”
Source: Twitter
Azbej, who is a leader within the Christian Democratic People’s Party (Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt, KDNP), which has been part of a coalition with Orbán’s Fidesz since it returned to power in 2010, is a frequent attendee of pro-Orbán international events, such as CPAC Hungary in May 2023 and the pro-Orbán Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) “Patriot Talks” event in December 2020 (see GPAHE’s previous reporting on the MCC here). Outside of Hungary, Azbej has met Tony Perkins on several occasions when visiting the United States. Perkins is the president of the Christian Nationalist, anti-LGBTQ+ Family Research Council (FRC), a member of the rights-stripping Project 2025 coalition, who has previously compared LGBTQ+ people to pedophiles.
Peter Marocco (left) with Tristan Azbej (right); Source: Azbej Tristan’s Facebook.
A piece in the Hungarian Conservative celebrated the February 2025 Washington meeting, writing that Marocco had “pledged to end funding for Hungarian opposition groups and revive cooperation on aid for persecuted Christians,” and that he had “praised the Hungary Helps Program as a model for effective humanitarian aid.”
Azbej has stated that Hungary Helps’ major objectives are “to save as many persecuted Christian lives as [sic] possible,” “rebuild the ancient Christian towns in the Middle East and the Holy Land that were [sic] destroyed by jihadists,” and to “inspire the rest of the world, the culturally or historically, formerly Christian world – more powerful governments than Hungary – and international organizations to stand by the Christians.” Beyond helping “persecuted Christians” abroad, however, one of the missions undertaken by Hungary Helps involved the “building of a church at the site of Jesus Christ’s baptism on the Jordanian bank of the Jordan River,” which Azbej referred to as a statement that Christians around the world would “stand together and take responsibility for each other.”
One of the organizations that Hungary Helps and the Hungarian government partner with is the American-based Global Christian Relief (GCR), a religious organization that supports the “persecuted church.” GCR was previously named Open Doors USA, but rebranded as GCR and split from the Open Doors International coalition in January 2023 as GCR sought to reclassify their organization as a church under U.S. tax law, which would exempt them from providing information on their supporters to the government.
In March 2022, the Open Doors USA CEO at the time, David Curry, was invited to speak at the pro-Orbán Danube Institute, just months before being nominated to a position on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in May 2022 by then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). In a podcast for the pro-Orbán NGO Danube Institute published on March 13, 2023, Curry claimed that there was a “rising intolerance” towards Christians in response to a question from the host about the “trend of post-Christian societies where secularization has become so extreme,” citing, for example, the fact that certain religious individuals have their accounts suspended on social media for hate speech.
This is not the first time that Marocco has supported Christian Nationalist causes while in government. From January 7, 2018 to August 16, 2019, during the first Trump administration, Marocco served as the assistant secretary of state of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. During that time, he attended the MCC Budapest Summit on Migration organized by the pro-Orbán MCC university on March 24, 2019.
In his speech at the Migration Summit, he spoke of the U.S. Hungary Defense Cooperation Agreement that had been finalized by Hungarian and American officials in 2019. At the time, the agreement was widely publicized in Hungarian media but went almost unnoticed in American media. While the agreement was touted as an attempt to “modernize” a 20-year-old status of forces agreement, Marocco claimed that the agreement included, among other things, a provision that the U.S. and Hungary would collaborate to “assist and empower persecuted Christians and other religious minority communities in Iraq and other recovering spaces” following the occupation of the area by ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). Moreover, he commended the work of the Hungary Helps program in the Middle East and Africa. The speech occurred only days after the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) faction in the European Union voted to suspend Orban’s party Fidesz from its caucus for issues related to “democracy, rule of law, freedom of press, academic freedom and minorities rights.”
In defiance of longstanding State Department policy In the first Trump administration, ProPublica reported that in 2018 Marocco secretly met with with ethnonationalist Bosnian Serb separatist leaders seeking a Christian Bosnian Serb state, describing themselves as “pro-Russian, anti-Western and anti-American.” This movement was deemed off-limits by the American government due to American sanctions on their leadership, some of whom engaged in war crimes, and their groups’ efforts to undermine a peace deal the U.S. had been working towards in the region. While it is not clear what he discussed with the group, U.S. foreign policy experts claimed that his actions undermined U.S. foreign policy to seek a peace agreement in the region, and provided legitimacy to far-right separatists.
Marocco was also a part of previous missions as a private citizen to rescue Christians in Afghanistan and other countries. According to his biography, after leaving the first Trump administration, Marocco led a “private rescue of U.S. citizens and persecuted religious minorities in Afghanistan” in 2021. In 2015 and 2016, he was employed by conspiracist, Christian Nationalist Glenn Beck’s Nazarene Fund to lead “humanitarian operations” that he claims “rescued, resettled and rehabilitated more than 4,000 ISIS [Daesh] survivors.” The Nazarene Fund’s mission is the evacuation of “Christians and persecuted minorities” in areas of the Middle East, and also has operations in Africa, Asia, and the island of Haiti.
Marocco and his now-wife Merritt Corrigan have been engaged in other forms of extreme activity. Both Peter Marocco and Merritt Corrigan were both allegedly present at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, according to multiple images and CCTV footage, and entered the Capitol building by way of a broken window. Marocco was never charged by authorities for these actions. Politico has reported that Merritt Corrigan, an American citizen previously employed by the Hungarian embassy, has described Viktor Orbán as “shining champion of Western civilization,” frequently retweets articles from Russian propaganda outlet Russia Today, and referred to liberal democracy as “little more than a front for the war being waged against us by those who fundamentally despise not only our way of life, but life itself.” She has also made anti-LGBTQ+ comments, saying “our homo-empire couldn’t tolerate even one commercial enterprise not in full submission to the tyrannical LGBT agenda.”
