When the Sanctuary Empties Quietly: Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church and the Human Rights Crisis No One Wants to Name

By E Frashie Ethiopian Tribune Columnist

There is a particular sound a civilisation makes when it is being hollowed out. It is not the noise of tanks or the crack of gunfire. It is quieter. It sounds like processions redirected, sanctuaries bypassed, authority diluted, assets questioned, and traditions politely “updated” until they no longer anchor anything at all.

That sound is now audible across Ethiopia.

Much has been written about violence, persecution, and instability in the country, and rightly so. Blood has been spilled, churches attacked, civilians displaced. But violence, for all its horror, is rarely the final stage. It is usually the blunt instrument that accompanies something more methodical: the slow dismantling of institutions that once stood between power and the individual. In Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the world’s oldest continuous Christian institutions, is beginning to look less like a protected faith community and more like a structure being patiently taken apart, beam by beam.

Human rights analysis often struggles with such moments because no single act appears decisive. Instead, there is accumulation. And accumulation, when ignored, becomes inevitability.

The Colours of Humiliation

In Addis Ababa this January, Orthodox believers came out for Epiphany only to be warned that wearing green, yellow, and red, the colours that once wrapped both nation and faith, could invite harassment, detention, or worse. Some complied. Others did not. The police response was not symbolic. It was physical. Meanwhile, in Gondar, senior state officials appeared in the same colours, smiling for cameras, untroubled by consequence. Law, it seems, has learnt to recognise rank.

Human rights law calls this differential treatment. Ordinary people call it humiliation.

Epiphany is not merely a festival. It is a public confession of belonging. To constrain how it is celebrated, or who may embody it safely, is to signal that faith has become conditional. Even more telling was what did not happen: the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church did not appear publicly to bless his flock in the capital. His words were delivered at a distance, filtered, mediated, contained. Absence, in such moments, speaks louder than speech.

Human rights frameworks tend to catalogue abuses: unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, restrictions on assembly. But they often miss what communities instinctively understand—that when religious leadership is constrained, public expression policed, and symbolism selectively punished, the issue is no longer security. It is control.

The question then becomes: control to what end?

Blood in Arsi: When Selection Replaces Chaos

The answer begins to emerge not in Addis Ababa, but in the fields and villages of Arsi.

In late October and early November 2025, civilians in Ethiopia’s Arsi and East Arsi Zones were hunted, not caught in crossfire. According to statements issued by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, more than twenty-five Orthodox Christians were killed in a series of coordinated attacks. Churches were assaulted. Villages were emptied. Families fled with nothing but what they could carry. Survivors did not describe chaos; they described selection.

International observers often hesitate at such claims, asking for verification in active conflict zones. Yet what followed was telling. The World Council of Churches, not known for impulsive declarations, issued a pastoral letter expressing grave concern, explicitly noting that those killed were believed to be members of the Orthodox Christian community. The letter acknowledged the difficulty of independent verification, but did not dismiss the reports. On the contrary, it treated the lack of access itself as part of the danger.

When verification is impossible because fear has emptied the village, uncertainty becomes evidence of failure, not innocence.

U.S. government human rights reporting has already documented unlawful killings, arbitrary detention, and collective punishment across Ethiopia’s conflict-affected regions. What the Arsi attacks add is specificity. They show how violence, when paired with impunity, acquires direction. Communities reported little or no effective protection. Appeals went unanswered. Perpetrators were not held to account. The message to the faithful was unmistakeable: faith had become a liability.

This is not conjecture. It is now part of the congressional record in Washington.

For decades, the United States has embedded religious freedom into law, most notably through the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. That law does not require perfection from partner states, but it does require accountability when credible evidence of abuse emerges. In response to the Arsi killings and related patterns, members of Congress have introduced a resolution condemning Ethiopia’s current trajectory and calling for targeted accountability.

The resolution does not sever ties. It does not punish the Ethiopian people. It follows a well-established principle: sovereignty cannot be invoked to shield gross violations of fundamental rights.

Yet what makes this moment particularly revealing is the reaction it has provoked. Rather than addressing the substance of the concerns, civilian killings, targeted attacks, impunity, official responses have leant heavily on deflection. Conflict is complex. Ethiopia is fragile. Stability must come first.

History offers a colder lesson. Where faith communities are targeted and the state hesitates, instability does not recede. It compounds.

Schism as Strategy: Fragmentation Along Ethnic Lines

The violence in Arsi is not an outlier. It is the visible edge of a broader process. In recent years, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has been shaken by schisms that would once have been unthinkable. A breakaway synod in Oromia, formed outside canonical procedures, emerged amid allegations of political encouragement. A separate Tigrayan Orthodox structure declared itself autonomous following war and devastation, citing betrayal and exclusion. Both remain unrecognised by the wider Orthodox world. Both reflect something deeper than theology: the ethnicisation of faith and the politicisation of spiritual authority.

Schisms are often explained away as internal disputes. But when the state repeatedly inserts itself as mediator, arbiter, or quiet facilitator, the line between internal disagreement and external interference blurs. International human rights law is clear: freedom of religion includes the right of religious communities to govern their own affairs without state manipulation. Ethiopia’s constitution says the same. Practice, however, tells a different story.

When a prime minister’s office becomes a venue for resolving doctrinal crises, the sanctuary has already been breached.

International human rights law protects not only individuals, but communities, their ability to govern themselves, preserve continuity, and transmit belief across generations. Fragmentation imposed or encouraged from outside corrodes that right as surely as overt repression.

A Church divided against itself does not need to be banned. It can be managed.

This is where the Arsi killings matter most. They anchor the argument in blood. Without them, concerns about ideological dilution, spatial displacement, and asset vulnerability might be dismissed as paranoia. With them, the pattern sharpens. Violence clears space. Fear silences resistance. Division weakens defence. Administrative intervention finishes the job.

The Sanctuary Without Walls: Spatial Displacement and Ideological Erosion

Yet the most unsettling developments are not always the most visible. They occur not through bans, but through redirection. Increasingly, Orthodox believers are encouraged, sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly, to leave consecrated spaces for worship, teaching, fundraising, and “spiritual programmes” held in hotels, conference halls, and public squares. These are presented as inclusive, modern, accessible. But accessibility can also be erosion.

In the Orthodox tradition, worship is inseparable from place. The Tabot, the Eucharist, incense, iconography, canon these are not aesthetic choices but theological boundaries. To relocate faith life away from them is not neutral adaptation; it is transformation.

A believer who learns to pray without the sanctuary will eventually learn to live without it.

This is where the human rights conversation must widen. International law protects not only belief, but practice, community, and continuity. When a state environment normalises the displacement of religious life from its sacred architecture, it quietly weakens a community’s ability to resist future encroachment whether legal, financial, or administrative.

Overlaying this spatial shift is an ideological one. Motivational movements, leadership seminars, and so-called “New Age” philosophies increasingly intersect with Orthodox spaces and personalities. Their language is seductive: unity, inclusivity, common values, transcendence beyond doctrine. All religions are presented as variations of the same truth, all traditions as interchangeable paths.

Dialogue between faiths is not the problem. Ethiopia has long lived such coexistence. The problem arises when particularity itself is treated as an obstacle, when doctrinal boundaries are reframed as intolerance, and sacramental discipline as backwardness.

Human rights discourse often celebrates pluralism, but pluralism that erases difference is not pluralism. It is homogenisation. And homogenisation is a gift to any state that prefers manageable spirituality to rooted faith.

Once a Church is reduced to values, it can be regulated like an NGO.

Assets and Appropriation: The Material Foundations of Independence

This brings us to the most sensitive, and most avoided issue: assets.

The fears circulating amongst Orthodox believers about financial interference and asset vulnerability must be understood in this context. Institutions are rarely stripped of resources before they are morally and socially weakened. Fragment first. Normalise detachment next. Reallocate later.

Across Ethiopia and its diaspora, Orthodox believers increasingly voice fear that the Church’s material base is being targeted, or at least prepared for targeting. These fears are often dismissed as rumours. Yet history teaches that institutions are rarely stripped of assets before they are weakened socially and morally.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has historically derived its independence from its material footing: land, endowments, schools, social institutions, and the financial contributions of millions of believers. A fragmented Church, divided into competing synods and ideologically diluted communities, is ill-equipped to defend that inheritance.

Even unproven allegations of interference with Church bank accounts resonate because they align with a recognisable pattern. When public trust in state institutions is low, and when the state has already demonstrated willingness to intervene in religious governance, fear becomes rational.

Human rights observers often ask for proof of intent. But intent is rarely documented in memos. It is inferred from sequence.

First the sanctuary empties. Then the account is frozen.

Human rights analysis should not ask only whether looting has occurred, but whether conditions have been created in which it could occur with minimal resistance.

Meskel Square: The Sacred Made Neutral, the Neutral Made Managed

Symbolism matters here. Meskel Square, once a consecrated civic heart, has been reimagined as a neutral space where all religious rituals are equally hosted by state design. On paper, this sounds inclusive. In practice, it dissolves the distinction between sacred memory and administrative convenience. Inclusivity is the language. Desacralisation is the effect. A sacred square turned neutral today becomes a regulated venue tomorrow. A regulated venue becomes state property.

The danger is not that other faiths gather there. It is that no faith truly owns it anymore.

What is at stake here is not privilege. It is survival survival of a religious community as a self-governing, materially independent, spiritually coherent body.

The Convergence: From Accumulation to Trajectory

What is unfolding, then, is not a single human rights violation but a convergence: restrictions on expression, politicised schisms, ideological dilution, spatial displacement, targeted violence, and creeping asset vulnerability. Each on its own can be debated. Together, they form a trajectory.

This is what many Ethiopian Orthodox believers mean when they speak of “the writing on the wall”. Not prophecy in the mystical sense, but pattern recognition born of history. They remember emperors and regimes that tried to subordinate the Church and failed. They also remember quieter moments when compromise preceded collapse.

The Arsi killings force the question that polite diplomacy avoids: how many warnings must accumulate before action is taken? How many pastoral letters, congressional resolutions, and documented deaths are required before the international community acknowledges that something structural is under way?

Human rights law was not written for comfortable cases. It exists for moments like this when violence, repression, and institutional erosion converge, and when waiting for absolute certainty becomes a moral failure.

Human rights institutions tend to intervene when blood is visible. By then, the deeper work is often done.

What Now? Silence as Permission

The question now facing Ethiopia and those who claim partnership with it is whether religious freedom will be treated as a living principle or as a rhetorical relic. International law does not require perfection. It requires good faith, non-interference, and accountability. What it does not tolerate is the systematic weakening of a faith community under the guise of modernisation, security, or inclusivity.

Silence in the face of targeted killing is not neutrality. Silence in the face of slow dismantling is complicity.

For Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, the fear is not merely of persecution, but of replacement, replacement of sacrament with sentiment, canon with conference, inheritance with managed spirituality. For human rights observers, the danger is missing the moment because it does not yet fit the familiar template of repression.

By the time the sanctuary stands empty, the blood will have dried, the assets will have moved, and the language of concern will sound quaint.

The writing is already on the wall. The question is who is still willing to read it.

 

E Frashie is a columnist for the Ethiopian Tribune, writing on human rights, religious freedom, and institutional integrity in the Horn of Africa.