Armenia faces a mounting church–state confrontation as Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government targets the Armenian Apostolic Church, signaling deeper struggles over legitimacy, national identity, and regional geopolitics.

While officials describe the actions as law enforcement, critics see a familiar pattern: the use of repression, legal ambiguity, sometimes violence, and civil-society proxies to neutralize dissent — largely unnoticed, or worse, deliberately ignored, by most of the international community.

In terms of scapegoats, the Armenian Church has been serving as a target and maybe a distraction by the Pashinyan administration over the past months. It is highly distressing, discouraging, and an unwelcome attitude by a leader who I guess feels threatened by perhaps the only institution that could challenge his legitimacy. Indeed, the Church itself might have been more circumspect. Its own leadership is problematic for its part. No question there.

As one Diaspora Armenian recently shared, “The way the government in Yerevan has gone about things will cause immense harm, I fear,” adding, “I wish many things, but what power do I have? What leverage?” — a reflection of disrupted checks and balances in Armenia.

Reading the media and looking at the tendencies in Ukraine and elsewhere for governments to interfere in spiritual matters, the church–state confrontation may well intensify as part of this process with bad results. The issue is rarely just about theology or reform. More often, it reflects deeper anxieties about legitimacy, control, and the narrowing space for dissent.  The plight of Armenia can be predicted in terms of maps, the Turkish National Curriculum and State-sanctioned religious practice, or in terms of Ukraine; even recognized dueling churches show the telltale signs of what is really going on in the undercurrents of a country, often to the dismay of observers who can predict where this is leading and can see from where the outside meddling originates.

Schism between Church and State

Whether in Armenia or Ukraine, tensions surrounding religious institutions frequently serve as early indicators of broader political........

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