What is going on in Armenia? It is a question Armenians themselves have asked over the course of the past year, which saw the government of Nikol Pashinyan arrest two bishops of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and accuse that body’s head bishop, or catholicos, of adultery while attempting to unseat him. Most significantly, on August 8, Armenia signed an initial “peace agreement” with arch-nemesis Azerbaijan in a ceremony presided over by US President Donald Trump.
According to this agreement, Armenia will lease a strip of territory (the so-called “Zangezur Corridor”) on the left bank of the Araxes River, which forms the border with its ally Iran, to the United States for ninety-nine years for the sake of constructing a transport corridor composed of a road, railway, and possibly oil and gas pipelines. These facilities will then be made available by the United States to traffic between the Republic of Azerbaijan to the east and its exclave of Nakhichevan in the west, which a narrow strip of Armenian territory has separated since both countries seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991.
In Western media, the agreement has been widely celebrated. In Armenia, people are less certain. In past years, the question, “What do you think of Pashinyan?”—Nikol Pashinyan is the country’s prime minister—has been met with a kind of resignation. This was true even in 2023, when 120,000 Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh, a formerly autonomous Armenian-majority region in neighboring Azerbaijan. “What else could he do? He’s doing what has to be done,” was a common judgement on Pashinyan’s handling of Karabakh’s collapse.
Now the mood is different. On June 20, Pashinyan went to Istanbul, where he shook hands with the president of Armenia’s giant neighbor and (in the eyes of many Armenians) mortal enemy, Turkey. The Armenian Apostolic Church has canonized the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Ottoman authorities in 1915-18 as martyrs and saints, but the price of Erdogan’s granting Pashinyan an audience in Istanbul was the termination of Armenia’s decades-long campaign to obtain international recognition of those events as genocide. Pashinyan seeks “normalization” with Turkey and its ally Azerbaijan.
Pashinyan, a liberal and former journalist who came to power in Armenia’s “Velvet Revolution” of 2018, presents himself to the wider world as a statesman and peacemaker. But when it comes to his domestic critics, he brooks no opposition. The focus of his ire is the hierarchy of the Armenian Apostolic Church, especially its head, Catholicos Karekin II.
“The Church’s crime has been to oppose the terms of Pashinyan’s diplomacy.”
The Church’s crime has been to oppose the terms of Pashinyan’s diplomacy with Azerbaijan and Turkey. Ten days before Pashinyan’s visit to Istanbul, Karekin was in Switzerland urging the protection of Armenia’s threatened cultural heritage in Karabakh at an international conference for the protection of Armenia’s cultural heritage organized by the World Council of Churches in Bern, Switzerland.
While Pashinyan has been content to cede Armenia’s claim over Nagorno-Karabakh, the catholicos has insisted on regarding the territory as Armenian. After all, scores of centuries-old Armenian churches and monasteries, such as the stunning thirteenth-century Gandsazar Monastery, are located in Karabakh along with the relics of saints and cemeteries. Karabakh is integral to Armenian Christianity in other ways, too. The Armenian alphabet, invented to translate the Scriptures into Armenian, was devised in Karabakh.
When Pashinyan further tried to appease Baku by handing over four additional Armenian villages outside Karabakh to Azerbaijan in 2024, the Church was at the forefront of the protests that broke out in response. The archbishop of Tavush, Bagrat Galstanian, emerged as their leader, and the catholicos signaled his support by temporarily relieving Galstanian of his spiritual duties so that he could concentrate on leading the protests. The stage was set for a showdown between Church and state. Unfortunately for Pashinyan, the Church is Armenians’ most-trusted institution—with 62.5 percent of Armenians saying they “fully trust it” in a 2024 survey.
On June 9, a Sunday, Pashinyan publicly denounced the catholicos—who has led the Armenian Church since 1999—as invalidly elected, accusing him of having fathered an illegitimate child. “We have returned the government to the people. Now we must also return the Church to the people,” Pashinyan declared. He concluded by accusing Karekin of having sex with his uncle’s wife.
Then, on June 17, Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan dared to speak out publicly in defense of the catholicos. His home was raided in response, and he was arrested for “making public calls to overthrow the government,” while Pashinyan threatened to nationalize Karapetyan’s real estate and electricity companies. A week later, on June 25, Archbishop Galastanian—the protests’ original leader—was arrested and charged with terrorism.
Escalating the feud to an all-out war on the Church hierarchy, the prime minister announced to the nation on June 26 that he would form a committee of ecclesiastics to select a new catholicos. In response, on June 27, Karekin summoned the Armenian Church’s archbishops to Etchmiadzin, Armenia’s equivalent to the Vatican, to discuss the Church’s response. The meeting ended with hundreds of priests, seminarians, and laymen flocking to the compound after Pashinyan dispatched the security forces to arrest an archbishop on charges of insurrection.
As I followed the English-language news and spoke to Armenians over the days that followed about their view of events most expressed fierce loyalty to the Church and to the catholicos along with disbelief at the attack that Pashinyan had launched on them. Many drew a connection between Pashinyan’s desire to be fêted in the West as a peacemaker and his attack on the Church.
Most also refused to concede that the catholicos’s supposed “indiscretions,” if they occurred, had any bearing whatsoever on Karekin’s place as the nation’s spiritual leader.
“If he committed a sin, that is his business,” said one Armenian friend, a university-educated woman, expressing an Armenian version of the Ultramontanism that once characterized Catholic attitudes to the pope: “We have confession for that. It does not concern me or my loyalty to him; he is the catholicos.”
Accusing the prime minister of undermining Armenia’s “spiritual unity,” Karekin has refused to step down. So far Pashinyan has not attempted to use force to unseat him. But two archbishops were in prison by the end of the summer—the archbishop defended by the crowd at Etchmiadzin later gave himself up on the grounds that the allegations against him were so absurd they would eventually be dropped. Since that time, two more have been arrested, with the latest clashes occurring at Etchmiadzin on December 18 and 19.
Behind the conflict between Pashinyan and the Church is the question of what sort of country Armenia will become after the loss of Karabakh. Where once it was not possible to slide a sheet of paper between Armenians’ spiritual and political identities (inasmuch as, for centuries, the only definition of what it is to be Armenian is a baptized member of the Armenian Apostolic Church), today a gap—albeit for now only small—is opening up, with the encouragement of the state. Among a people whose Church has for centuries been the nation, the most significant aspect of last summer’s clash between it and Pashinyan has been the emergence of the possibility of thinking of Armenian identity in political terms only—an interior separation of Church and state in Armenian hearts and minds where once there was only an implicit and unexamined unity.
It is too early to tell whether the attempt to separate political Armenia and spiritual Armenia will succeed. Those I spoke to defiantly rehearsed the shibboleths of the traditional Armenian Church-nation. I do not doubt the sincerity or strength of these sentiments. But I wonder how long they will be able to withstand the government’s onslaught against spiritual Armenia.
Under Pashinyan, the state has something to offer which the Church cannot: a purely secular Armenian identity that would allow Armenians in the homeland (and still more those in the diaspora in the United States) to orient themselves toward modernity and the prestige culture of the West. A generation ago, Armenians, like their Georgian neighbors, pointed to their ancestral Christian faith as evidence of their being Europeans, stranded in the Middle East. Pashinyan has realized that this will no longer work. It is not Armenians’ ancestral Christianity that will secure Armenia’s admission to the West; it is their willingness to let it go. Pashinyan hopes to turn Armenia into a “normal” country where the demands of peace and prosperity come first and the claims of history, religion, and tradition are reduced to myth.
In this sense, the loss of Karabakh has been a godsend for Pashinyan and others looking for a secular Armenia. Precisely because Armenia’s sacred history is so intimately bound up with Karabakh, forcing the Church to accept the loss of that territory has been an opportunity for Pashinyan to remake Armenia as a nation with a Christian past but a potential post-Christian future.
Signs of this post-Christian and post-national future have proliferated steadily since Pashinyan came to power. Armenia was always the most ethnically homogeneous of all the Soviet republics of the Caucasus. While it remains over 90 percent ethnic Armenian today, the wave of third-world migration currently transforming the West has reached Armenia, too, visible in the Indian students, nurses, and delivery boys that increasingly populate the edges of Yerevan’s shopping streets. Every year, thousands of working-age Armenian men travel to Russia for seasonal construction work (the number in 2024 was 138,000—every second working-age man in some northern Armenian villages). And yet today there are up to 30,000 Indians resident in Armenia, with visa grants to Indians having increased 580 percent between 2021 and 2023.
All of which returns us to the deal Trump brokered between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the White House. Ostensibly, Pashinyan has succeeded like no Armenian leader before him. America’s lease of the Zangezur Corridor represents the most substantial American commitment in the Caucasus region since Woodrow Wilson’s failure to have Congress approve an American protectorate over a much larger Armenian national territory in 1919. But the deal represents a major erosion of Armenia’s defensive position, allowing Azerbaijan to encircle it.
“The deal represents a major erosion of Armenia’s defensive position.”
On top of this, TRIPP will only strengthen the neo-Ottoman hegemony that Erdogan’s Turkey is building in the Caucasus. Thanks to the American-sponsored transport corridor, Turkey will be able to move goods, men, and military equipment by land from Eastern Anatolia to the Caspian Sea. The integration—economic, strategic, political—between Turkey and Azerbaijan will leave Armenia an island in a sphere of uncontested Turkish influence. Turkey and Azerbaijan cemented their “more-than-allies” relationship in the Shusha Declaration in 2021, and now appear poised to be able to realize the first stage of what looks like the long-dreamed of Pan-Turkic union. Why let 3 million inconveniently located Armenians stand in the way of such a lofty ambition?
The great winner strategically of the American-brokered treaty initiated in the White House is Turkey; the biggest loser is the survival of Christianity in the Middle East. The normalization of Armenia’s relations with its neighbors can only gain acceptance among Armenians if Armenia’s national identity is itself secularized. No wonder America’s liberal foreign policy establishment has celebrated it. Americans interested in the survival of the world’s oldest—and the Middle East’s last—Christian nation shouldn’t.