The Quieter Pulpit: What Ethiopia's Religious Leaders Learned From Tigray, and What They Must Not Forget

In October 2021, while the war in Tigray was at its most brutal, I wrote an article calling on Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to resign. I was not a politician, and I am still not one. I was a physician with theological training, a minister in a local church, and someone who had spent five years, ever since the Irreechaa massacre of October 2016, obssessed with a single uncomfortable question: how should a Christian respond when the state itself becomes an agent of suffering? And no, I wasn't a neutral observer when I asked this question.

The article travelled much further than I expected. Few readers thanked me. Many others thought a Christian, especially a Protestant, had no business saying such a thing about a Protestant prime minister in a time of war. Looking back, what struck me most was not the reaction to what I wrote but the silence around it. I was saying from a laptop, of course putting my life in danger, what very few people were saying from a pulpit. I wasn't trying to be a hero. I just happened to be rebellious.

The silence of the majority, however, was not neutrality. When the federal government and the Tigray regional government went to war in November 2020, the Inter-Religious Council of Ethiopia did issue a sober statement reminding both sides that when brothers fight, no one comes out the winner. But as the months went on, the dominant religious voice in Addis Ababa changed its key. The government framed the campaign as a "law enforcement operation," and much of the religious establishment adopted the framing as its own. There were prayer gatherings for the army, mobilisation of resources, and sermons that sounded more like rally speeches. What we heard far less of was lament for the massacres, for the churches looted and shelled in Tigray, for a region placed under siege and pushed towards famine. The war of 2020 to 2022 killed hundreds of thousands of people. Ghent University researchers estimate around half a million civilian deaths from violence, hunger and the collapse of health services.

There were exceptions, and they deserve to be named. Abune Mathias, Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and himself a Tigrayan, recorded a message in May 2021 describing what was happening in Tigray as genocide. He received remarkably little institutional backing for it. The Catholic Bishop of Adigrat, Tesfasellasie Medhin, publicly called on his own church to end its silence about atrocities in Tigray. These were lonely voices. To understand why they were so lonely, we have to go back a long way.

The church that stood beside the throne

Ethiopian Christianity is as old as almost any in the world. Since King Ezana embraced the faith in the fourth century, the Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian crown have lived in an intimate, mutually legitimising embrace. The Kebra Nagast gave the Solomonic dynasty its sacred lineage; the church anointed the king, and the king protected the church. Psalm 68:31, "Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God," was read not only as a promise to a people but as a charter for a state. As late as the 1955 Constitution, the Orthodox Church was the established church of the empire and the emperor was required to profess its faith.

Then the ground shifted violently. The Derg disestablished the church after 1974, deposed Patriarch Tewoflos, and later killed him. When the EPRDF came to power in 1991, the 1995 Constitution separated religion and state on paper, yet the patriarchate was again reshaped by the new rulers: Abune Merkorios went into exile, Abune Paulos was enthroned, and the church lived with a split synod for more than two decades until Abiy himself brokered its reunification in 2018.

The lesson the Orthodox hierarchy learned across these centuries is not hard to read. A church that has rarely known what it means to stand outside the palace learns to survive by standing near whoever is inside it. This is not a judgement on the faith of millions of devout Orthodox believers. It is an observation about institutional instinct. When the palace goes to war, that instinct says: stand with the state, speak of national unity, and leave the hard questions for later.

The Pentecostals come in from the cold

The Protestant and Pentecostal story runs almost in the opposite direction. The Pentecostal revival of the 1960s was met with suspicion and harassment under Haile Selassie and outright persecution under the Derg; Gudina Tumsa, the Mekane Yesus leader, was murdered in 1979. Evangelicals learned to keep their heads down. Under the EPRDF they gained legal space and grew enormously, but they kept a theological distance from power. "Politics is dirty" was not just a slogan. It was a survival strategy dressed as piety.

As Jörg Haustein and Dereje Feyissa show in their study of what they call "Pente" politics, this began to change in 2012 when Hailemariam Desalegn, a member of the Oneness Pentecostal Apostolic Church, became the first Protestant to lead the Ethiopian government. For the first time, the head of government was not Orthodox. Hailemariam governed within the EPRDF's secular and developmental frame, but a door had opened.

With Abiy Ahmed's rise in 2018, it swung wide. Here was a prime minister who belonged to the Full Gospel Believers' Church, whose speeches were laced with biblical cadence, whose ascent some prophets claimed to have foreseen, and who personally brokered the formation of a new evangelical council. Haustein and Feyissa rightly caution that Abiy is not a narrow "Pente" politician, and his religious vision is more eclectic than his critics allow. But for many evangelicals the distinction did not matter. After decades on the margins, they finally had "one of ours" in the palace.

When two currents met in a war

In November 2020 these two histories converged. An Orthodox hierarchy with a centuries-old habit of standing beside the throne met an evangelical movement tasting proximity to power for the first time. The result was a church that, at the top, largely spoke the language of the state.

The cost was enormous, and it was paid by the church itself. Tigray is the cradle of Ethiopian Christianity. Aksum is there. Yet Tigrayan Orthodox believers watched their churches attacked while the Holy Synod in Addis Ababa spoke mostly of national unity. The rupture became formal when the Tigrayan archbishops broke with the Synod and, in 2023, consecrated their own bishops. The church of Ezana is now divided along the very lines the war carved.

The evangelicals did not escape either. I have heard more than one leader admit privately how hard it has been to face their Tigrayan brothers and sisters since the war. One leader in the country's largest evangelical denomination was heard saying it plainly: "We have lost the hearts of our members in the North." That sentence should be engraved somewhere in every church office in Addis Ababa. It is what happens when the pulpit becomes a platform.

A different silence

Nearly four years after the Pretoria agreement, the guns are louder again. Since 23 September 2026, federal forces have been fighting the TPLF, which has joined six other opposition groups in an alliance seeking to oust Abiy. Federal and allied forces retook Mekelle in early October. Ethiopia has told the UN Security Council that Eritrea sent troops across the border and that it is acting in self-defence; Asmara calls this a declaration of war. Behind it all hangs Abiy's insistence that Ethiopia must secure access to the Red Sea. The armies that fought side by side against Tigray in 2020 are now pointing their guns at each other, and the old fault lines of 1998 are open again.

And the religious leaders? This time, as far as I can see, the cheerleading of 2020 has not returned. No major Orthodox or evangelical body has repeated the triumphalist sermons of that era. The Catholic bishops have joined Pope Leo XIV's appeal, insisting that only a peace rooted in truth, justice, forgiveness and reconciliation can heal the nation. Religious and civic leaders in Tigray have been pleading for dialogue since the fighting resumed in earnest early this year. Unsurprisingly, the leaders seem to have learned their lesson. Nobody wants to be the denomination that lost the North twice.

This is progress, and I welcome it. But I want to sound a note of caution.

Silence is not the same as faithfulness

The opposite of taking sides is not saying nothing. A church that learned not to bless one army has not yet learned what it is for. If the lesson of Tigray is simply "keep quiet and avoid trouble," we will have exchanged one failure for another: the sin of partisanship for the sin of indifference.

What would faithfulness look like instead? Let me suggest a few things, none of them new.

First, refuse to baptise any side, and say so. Not the federal government, not the TPLF, not Asmara. The cross, as I wrote in 2021, implicates oppressors and liberators alike. All of us stand there as sinners.

Second, be a voice for the voiceless on every side of the front line: the Tigrayan mother who has lived through two wars in six years, the Afar and Amhara villagers in the path of the fighting, the young Ethiopian conscript, and yes, the Eritrean conscript too. Eritrean Christians, who buried their own deposed patriarch, Abune Antonios, after years of house arrest, are our neighbours, not our enemies. "Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves" (Proverbs 31:8) has no ethnic or national qualifier.

Third, pray, and urge every actor towards peace, publicly and by name. Prayer that never mentions the war is not neutrality; it is avoidance.

Fourth, pursue truth and justice. Atrocities from the last war remain largely unaccounted for. A church that wants credibility in this war must be willing to say that truth matters and that justice delayed is not justice forgotten.

And finally, do all of this without forgetting the law that sums up every other law: love your neighbour as yourself. Truth without love becomes another weapon. Justice without love becomes revenge. Peace without truth and justice becomes a ceasefire waiting to collapse, and Ethiopia has already lived through that.

I understand why many leaders prefer the quiet route. Some of the most important peacemaking happens behind closed doors, in elders' councils and in phone calls no one will ever report. Quiet diplomacy is real and good. But the convictions behind it must not be quiet in the hearts of those who practise it. Remember the patriarch who spoke when it cost him. Remember the bishop of Adigrat. Remember the members in the North whose hearts were lost. Hold those memories quietly if you must, but hold them.

In 2021 I wrote that whenever I tried to think politically, I was confronted with a cross, and I could not argue with a cross because I had been saved by it. Five years and another war later, that is still where I stand. The church in Ethiopia does not need to choose between the palace and silence. It needs to stand where Christ stood: outside the city gate, among the displaced, the forsaken and the minorities, calling every side home.

Naol Befkadu, MD, is a physician and theologian, and the founder and chief editor of Horn Theology, a publication on faith and public life in the Horn of Africa.

• Reference: Jörg Haustein and Dereje Feyissa, "The Strains of 'Pente' Politics: Evangelicals and the Post-Orthodox State in Ethiopia," in Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa (2022).