Photo credit: Karen MINASYAN / AFP via Getty Images
Armenia’s Government is attacking its church whilst the West remains silent
Peter Flew
Artillery Row
In 1953, President Eisenhower joined Democrats and Republicans in Congress to set politics aside and pray together. The spirit of fellowship and reconciliation that marked that first National Prayer Breakfast — however imperfectly practised — guides the annual event to this day.
Many countries have since followed suit and held their own events, with Yerevan hosting its second Republic of Armenia Prayer Breakfast earlier this month.
Billed as a space “to renew [the country’s] spiritual foundations and affirm its traditional Christian values”, it attracted several foreign delegates, including Paula White-Cain of the White House Faith Office and commissioners of the U.S Commission on International Religious Freedom. Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, delivered a keynote speech.
Yet while traditional Prayer Breakfasts aim to foster mutual understanding, it is far less clear whether the Armenian event honoured the bipartisan tradition of the US original. Few opposition politicians were present, and it came at a fraught time for the country, amid serious concerns about Armenia’s commitment to religious freedom, democracy and the rule of law.
Chief among these concerns is the fate of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church, the national church for over 1,700 years. Today it is under sustained attack from the very government that took the Prayer Breakfast’s centre stage.
Pashinyan seeks to remove and replace His Holiness Karekin II, the Church’s spiritual leader. This has seen the Prime Minister back splits within the Church. Prominent clergy and laity have been arrested and jailed, while the Catholicos and six senior bishops face criminal charges and travel bans for refusing to reinstate a bishop the Church had defrocked under canon law — a matter strictly within its own competence.
Pashinyan alluded to this campaign in his speech. He called for Armenia’s “spiritual life to leave the church and enter the streets, homes, the marketplace”, as well as “local government bodies, the government and the legislative, executive and judicial branches”. In reality this was a manifesto for subordinating the Church to the state.
As Sir Edward Leigh MP recently told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Pashinyan’s campaign represents “a flagrant violation of human rights and religious freedom” — rights guaranteed by Armenia’s constitution and international law. This affects not only domestic believers but the global diaspora too, with its sizeable communities in Europe and the United States.
The Prime Minister has offered little to justify his actions. He has made vague claims before the 2026 election that the Church is a conduit for foreign influence, a pointed allusion to Russia. Clearly calculated to win Western support for Pashinyan’s re-election, he has yet to produce any convincing evidence. Isabella Sargsyan, a leading Armenian expert on freedom of religion, rightly cautions that while such claims deserve scrutiny, they “should not be accepted at face value”.
The more plausible explanation is that Pashinyan’s campaign is a response to Church criticism of his premiership, and of what many see as his failure to defend Armenia’s interests, especially over Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of the territory in 2023 remains a heavy wound. Armenians harbour serious concerns about the Prime Minister’s ability to sign a just peace with Azerbaijan.
Having lost Nagorno-Karabakh, Pashinyan is set on normalizing relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey — the state that carried out the Armenian Genocide — at almost any cost. Turkey and Azerbaijan have repeatedly cast the Catholicos as an “obstacle to peace” for defending the rights of Armenian refugees from Nagorno Karabakh. Yet, voicing these concerns falls squarely within the Church’s constitutionally mandated “exclusive mission” to help preserve the Armenian people’s “national identity”. Subordinating the Church would silence the most prominent independent critic of Pashinyan’s strategic approach — an outcome that suits Baku and Ankara
Nor is the Church alone. Its treatment is symptomatic of a wider erosion of democratic norms. Against a tense geopolitical backdrop, the campaign for June’s parliamentary election was — according to a Council of Europe report — “highly confrontational with divisive rhetoric and marked by allegations of vote buying and other electoral violations”. The Council also highlighted “disproportionate pre-trial detention, intimidation of protest leaders and a ‘chilling effect’ on freedoms of assembly and _expression_”.
The situation has since worsened. The leaders of Armenia’s three biggest opposition parties are all in detention — thus unable to attend the Prayer Breakfast.
Occasional interventions aside Western political institutions have remained silent about the Church’s plight and wider democratic backsliding, despite embracing Armenia’s professed “Western” turn.
The EU has been conspicuously quiet. In May, just weeks before the elections, Yerevan hosted the first-ever EU–Armenia summit. None of its key participants, among them Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, raised either issue. Instead, they seemed content to treat Armenia as a geopolitical prize rather than a democracy in need of defending. Supporting Armenia’s European aspirations is a worthy goal. But, as Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, puts it: “Does the EU want Armenia simply to become a pro-Western dictatorship, or does it want a democracy?”
The Prayer Breakfast may help to shed light on the crisis in Armenia. Although it lacked the bipartisan spirit of its predecessors, its delegates were able to meet the Church’s leadership and hear first-hand the impact of the government’s actions. They should continue that engagement and ensure that message is heard in Washington, London and Brussels. For seventeen centuries, the Armenian Church has sustained its people through invasion, exile and genocide. The West must not leave it to face its own government alone.
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