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Armenian religion and politics are grabbing international headlines. On June 25 Armenian security forces arrested Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Prime Minister Pashinyan accused Archbishop Galstanyan of being part of a plot by “the criminal oligarch clergy to destabilize Armenia and take power,” supported by Russian political circles and Russian oligarchs of Armenian origin. Archbishop Galstanyan leads the “Sacred Struggle” opposition movement, which has held protest demonstrations calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan over recent losses and concessions in Armenia’s long conflict with Azerbaijan.

While the salience of religion in these contemporary political events is obvious, my argument in this short blog is that it is also important to take a step back and see such events in Armenia’s broader historical, geopolitical, and religious context. It is a context shaped by changing regimes domestically and regionally, and by important connections between religion and national identity. More specifically, the Armenian experience brings to the fore the question of how the theory of covenantal pluralism—which envisions a society with enduringly positive relationships between different religious communities and between religion and the state—could be applicable in a context like Armenia’s.

As I argued in a recent article in The Review of Faith & International Affairs, “Political Regimes and Religious Co-existence: When is the Covenant Possible? The Case of Armenia” the small south-Caucasian country of Armenia has lived under shifting regimes over the last couple centuries—imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet—with shifting implications for relationships between religion(s), society, and government. In the article I tell the story of the formation of religious majorities and minorities and their complicated relationships under changing statehoods and political regimes.

Under the Russian Empire, religious communities lived in hierarchical isolation—connected vertically to the state but barely to one another. Soviet atheism replaced hierarchy with surveillance, transforming confessions into ethnic proxies and enforcing loyalty through coercion and invisibility. Today’s Armenia, by contrast, finds itself navigating a post-revolutionary landscape where official secularism aims to retreat from religion altogether—what I call an “alienating secularism.”

By treating all religions as equal in law but disengaging from their internal situations and political aspirations, the state still fails to create a balance between the religious communities. The Armenian Apostolic Church, long dominant and extremely important for the Armenian ethnic and national identity, now views itself as sidelined. Minority faiths, from Yezidis to Evangelicals, face fluctuating levels of acceptance depending on local politics, clerical attitudes, or even neighborhood dynamics. As Armenia confronts deepening regional instability, the state-religion balance is also challenged by external threats.

However, as my fieldwork reveals, there are also many examples of inter-religious solidarity at the grassroots level—for example, village churches helping one another build, and families crossing denominational lines in peace. These are seeds of hope for a covenantal pluralism in Armenia from the “bottom-up.” But in order for such seeds to really take root and grow, Armenia—a young but resilient democracy—also needs stability, education, civic will, and a new social imagination.