The Tigray war and the schism in the Ethiopian Orthodox church

On 4 November 2020, while much of the world’s attention was focused on the US presidential election and the Covid-19 pandemic, a war broke out between the federal government of Ethiopia and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the ruling party of the Tigray region. The immediate catalyst for the conflict was a political and constitutional disagreement between the parties leading the central and regional government of Tigray. However, the war also represents the culmination of centuries of contradictions rooted in power relations between the centre and the peripheries of the country, contested narratives of national and ethnic identities, contrasting state-building trajectories, competing ethnicities and nationalisms vying for state power, divergent views and interpretations of the past, and incongruent visions for Ethiopia’s future.

Far removed from the warfronts, religious actors and institutions have been key players and an important part of the conflict dynamics. Though the war’s origins lie in political disagreements, religion—particularly Christianity—has been at the forefront of public discourse on the conflict, shaping public perceptions and responses to the many disputes across the country.

During the Tigray war, Ethiopians from diverse religious traditions invoked religion either to provide justification for the conflict—framing it as a holy war or divine judgement—and to support the federal army and allied armed groups, or to denounce or downplay the war crimes and atrocities committed by the warring parties. Similarly, politicians tapped into the country’s religious traditions and employed religious rhetoric to frame the conflict in spiritual terms, soliciting the backing of influential religious leaders and institutions and garnering popular support and legitimacy for the war.

One consequence of the Tigray war has been the separation of the Tigrayan Orthodox Tewahedo Church (TOTC) from the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC). A similar schism emerged between the Russian and Ukrainian churches, exacerbated by the support Patriarch Kirill I, leader of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, gave to Russia’s war on Ukraine. The Ukrainian church had already begun the process of distancing itself much earlier in 2019, but in 2022 the Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church announced its split and in 2024 Ukrainian MPs voted to ban the Russian Orthodox church in their country. Following the decision Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “A law on our spiritual independence has been adopted.”  

The TOTC, like the Ukrainian church, cites the EOTC’s role during the Tigray war as the primary reason for severing its relationship with the “mother” church. To outsiders, this may seem paradoxical, given that Tigray is the origin and centre of Orthodox Christianity, and the conflict with the EOTC lacks a clear theological or historical basis. For the TOTC, however, the EOTC’s siding with the government, its downplaying of war crimes and atrocities, its failure to condemn attacks on churches and priests and obstructing calls for a ceasefire amounted to a betrayal of the church’s sacred role and a failure to uphold its fundamental teachings.

A further complicating factor during the Tigray war was the presence of two patriarchs within the EOTC: one Tigrayan and one Amhara, each representing diverging interests, constituencies, and perspectives on the conflict. Although Patriarch Abune Mathias denounced the events in Tigray as genocide, the synod, along with church leaders and prominent archbishops both within Ethiopia and abroad, distanced themselves from his views and sought to suppress his testimony. Patriarch Abune Mathias described the war as “barbarism” and an “attempt to erase Tigrayans from the face of the earth.” But the church itself was reported as saying his comments were outside the “established framework”.  

Ethnicity Trumps religion  

The division of the TOTC from the EOTC highlights an often-neglected but enduring fault line in Ethiopia’s social and religious dynamics: ethnicity and its derivative, ethno-religious nationalism, are salient issues that play critical roles in mediating and shaping relationships among Ethiopia’s people.

The schism between the TOTC and EOTC is not rooted in theological differences or issues related to church tradition. Rather, it is a socio-political matter, precipitated by the war and the evolving, often conflictual, relationship both institutions have with the state and its current politics. The division took on an ethnic dimension when the TOTC perceived the EOTC as aligning with the central government rather than showing solidarity with the church’s followers in Tigray. This and similar incidents—such as the attempt to establish the Oromo Orthodox Synod—reveal that the EOTC is neither a neutral nor a monolithic entity but rather a collection of churches and institutions organised around specific communities and their interests.

While ethnicity has long been present in the background, it often comes to the forefront during periods of war and social upheaval, when the threads of the social fabric are stretched and tested. At such times, fluid social identities become rigid, and the “Us-Them” binary consciousness and boundaries are sharpened. Ethiopia is no exception.

During the Tigray war, the TOTC emerged as a symbol of Tigrayan nationalism, becoming a focal point for Tigrayan resistance against the war. In contrast, the EOTC came to embody pan-Ethiopian nationalism, which aligns more closely with Abiy Ahmed’s unitarian vision and his efforts to consolidate power around the central government.

Despite centuries of mutual symbiosis between church and state, religion in general—and Christianity in particular—has played a minimal role in Ethiopian politics over the last five decades (1974–2018). The Derg government (1974–1991) was explicitly anti-religious, confiscating church lands and properties, killing, exiling, or persecuting religious leaders, and ultimately installing leaders pliable to its rule. During the armed struggle (1974–1991), the TPLF pursued a pragmatic policy aimed at neutralising the Orthodox church in Tigray. While the TPLF’s approach was not as hostile as the Derg government, it involved stripping the church of its ownership of vast tracts of land, diminishing its role at the centre of Tigrayan communal life, and subjugating it to legitimise its rule.

When the EPRDF coalition came to power in 1991, the anti-religious policies of the Derg era were reversed, and the church regained some of its properties and status. Freedom of religion and association was granted and later enshrined in Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution. However, this did not lead to the re-emergence of religion in public life. Instead, the EPRDF government continued the practice of taming and controlling the church by appointing Abune Paulos, a Tigrayan, as Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. This appointment was controversial, as it broke with the church’s longstanding tradition that a patriarch should not be replaced while his predecessor is still alive.

The appointment was a pivotal event that played an important role during the Tigray war. The previous patriarch left the country and settled in North America, becoming a patriarch-in-exile for the Ethiopian Orthodox churches in the diaspora. Until the fall of the EPRDF, these diaspora churches—particularly in North America and Europe—were divided along ethnic lines, with some accepting the legitimacy of the patriarch in Ethiopia and others recognising the authority of the exiled patriarch. The diaspora churches also became a significant arena for mobilising opposition to the EPRDF government, ushering in decades of uneasy relations between the Ethiopian government and the diaspora.

When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali came to power in 2018, he introduced new momentum into Ethiopia’s religious dynamics. Unlike his predecessors, Abiy is open about his religious convictions in public. He is a Pentecostal Christian, a faith he embraced, according to his own testimony, after a near-death experience during the Ethiopia-Eritrea war in the late 1990s, when he was serving as a radio operator. He has allowed it to shape his public discourse, his politics and vision. Indeed, one of his former advisors was interviewed by the Economist’s Africa correspondent, Tom Gardner, for his book, The Abiy Project, in which he said: “It’s [Pentecostal Christianity] the biggest driving force in his life. He genuinely believes he is God-anointed.”

Although Abiy officially acknowledges the constitutional separation of religion and state, he has, in practice, afforded faith a greater presence in the public sphere and, in some instances, blurred the lines between religion and politics. Muslim and Christian faith leaders for example have been mobilised to support and defend the construction of Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Abiy also has a Blairite tendency to rely on faith leaders to act as informal representatives to their communities.  In terms of how his own faith influences things, Abiy’s politics, exemplified by his “Medemer” philosophy and the establishment of a unitarian political party (the Prosperity Party – the name is drawn from the Prosperity Gospel), emphasise unity and seek to undo the multi-ethnic federalism instituted by the previous government. Ethiopia’s federal system has been criticised for undermining Ethiopia’s national character and unity.

It was no coincidence that Abiy’s first priority was to bring the exiled patriarch home and reconcile the two divisions of the EOTC. To achieve his goal of garnering support from the vocal and influential church in the diaspora, Abiy relied on the services of Daniel Kibret, a deacon who later became a social advisor to the Prime Minister’s Office. Daniel Kibret, a significant divisive figure and ardent ideologue of the Tigray war, once called for genocide against Tigrayans and is arguably one of the central figures responsible for the diverging paths of the TOTC and EOTC. Despite the peace agreement signed in 2022 in Pretoria between the federal government and the TPLF, there has been no rapprochement between the TOTC and the EOTC.  

When the war in Tigray began, few anticipated religion leaving its marginal place in Ethiopian politics to assume a central role in unfolding events. However, religion never truly left the public space; it merely lingered in the background, ready to re-emerge as a major force shaping and mediating events and relations among Ethiopians. In a country where religious, ethnic, linguistic, and political complexities are a given, Abiy’s pursuit of a politics of unity has paradoxically led to the rise of ethnic nationalisms and the strengthening of ethnic identities. The use of force to resolve these intractable differences has only escalated conflicts and wars across the country, precipitating a new dynamic between religion and politics, with the formation of new religious communities.