The Global War on Christianity Just Got a Whole Lot Worse

There’s a moment inTucker Carlson’s recent conversation with Narek Karapetyan and attorney Bob Amsterdam that won’t leave me alone. It comes early, almost casually, when Narek reflects on why Armenians refused to convert under Ottoman pressure: “98% of the Armenian population… said no.”

Said no–knowing it meant death, marches into the desert, the annihilation of whole villages. This isn’t just a statistic; it’s a window into a Christian soul shaped by centuries of sacrifice. And hearing it in 2025 feels unsettling, because the conversation quickly makes clear that the old pattern–pressure, coercion, suppression–didn’t end a century ago. It only changed costume.

You can feel Tucker trying to piece this together as he goes. He confesses he didn’t realize the Armenian Genocide was, in Narek’s words, “a religious genocide… they were killed because they were Christians.” And then the interview takes a turn, moving from history to what’s happening now, which, frankly, is what makes this conversation feel so alarming.

Narek describes a prime minister who, in his view, has become increasingly hostile to the Armenian Apostolic Church. He talks about archbishops jailed, clergy intimidated, and his own uncle imprisoned after a 37-second interview defending the Church. When Tucker asks, almost in disbelief, “He put archbishops in prison?” Narek just says, “Archbishops.” No drama, no embellishment. Just a fact he has lived.

He explains the prime minister’s alleged pressure to “change the narrative of the Church,” to soften or forget the Armenian genocide, to rework the national memory in order to appease outside powers. And while we don’t have every detail or every counterpoint here, the core claim–that a government is using its power to punish clergy and reshape a nation’s spiritual tradition–lands with a certain heaviness because it echoes things happening far beyond Armenia.

That’s where Bob Amsterdam enters the conversation, and suddenly the lens zooms out to something bigger and, in a way, more disturbing. He talks about Ukraine, where he says clergy from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are being tortured or prosecuted under broad security claims. He recounts trials, secret police, confiscated churches. He calls one piece of legislation “a bill that has no comparison in Europe since the Nuremberg laws.” That is an enormous claim, but Amsterdam insists it’s warranted–citing torture evidence, disappeared clergy, and what he describes as a “state church” replacing an ancient one.

Whether every detail stands up to external verification is something anyone with a responsible mind should examine. But even setting specifics aside, it’s hard not to notice the pattern Amsterdam is pointing to: governments using national crises to pressure, sideline, or absorb religious institutions that don’t fall in line. It’s a pattern Christians know well from history. It’s the reason we have feast days named after martyrs and not after government officials.

Yet perhaps the most jarring part of the interview comes when Tucker tries to understand why Western Christian leaders seem so quiet about all this. At one point, he blurts out, “How many Christian churches in the West have weighed in on this?” And Narek’s answer is gentle but telling: “We are getting support… but mostly words.”

Amsterdam pushes more forcefully. He talks about a “prayer breakfast” in Armenia celebrating unity while a major philanthropist sits in jail and three archbishops languish in detention. He says, “This man is being feted by American Christians… while clerics are in jail.” There’s a sense of deep disillusionment in his voice, the sense of someone watching religious language used as decoration while actual religious people suffer.

All of this builds toward Tucker’s now-viral question about Senator Ted Cruz and his recent statements on Nigeria. Tucker wonders why Cruz suddenly seems fiercely interested in Christians there while having “said nothing” about the suppression Amsterdam describes in Ukraine. Amsterdam doesn’t attack Cruz personally, but he admits, “Nothing. Nothing at all.” To him, it’s simply the truth: certain Christian causes are politically convenient, others are not, and the ones that aren’t tend to vanish from the conversation.

That’s the uncomfortable thread running through the whole interview–not that one politician fails some ideological purity test, but that Christian suffering has become selectively noticed. It enters public debate not when it is most severe, but when it fits. Tucker’s exasperation reaches its peak when he says, about Ukraine’s access to American religious events, “The biggest church in Ukraine is not invited… to the prayer breakfast for Ukraine.” It’s a moment so surreal he barely believes it as he says it.

Now, you don’t need to take every one of Amsterdam’s claims at face value to recognize the deeper truth trembling beneath them: across the globe, ancient Christian communities are being squeezed–by authoritarian governments, by cultural pressure, by war, by political fear–and the world’s great defenders of human rights are too busy, too compromised, or too ideologically rigid to say much about it.

Whether in Armenia, Ukraine, Nigeria, China, the Middle East, or Latin America, the pattern is the same: Christianity is tolerated when it behaves, and punished when it doesn’t. As Amsterdam puts it bluntly, “Our State Department has lost the meaning of faith. They have instrumentalized religion as a tool of foreign policy.”

From a Catholic vantage, that line is chilling, because it names a spiritual crisis that goes beyond geopolitics. When religion becomes merely a tool, Christians become merely obstacles. And obstacles are meant to be removed.

Tucker closes by suggesting that liberal democracy may be dying before our eyes. A Catholic might frame it differently: what’s dying is the ability of secular states to understand why the Church exists at all. If the Church is just another NGO, then jailing a few bishops seems like a regrettable administrative task. If the Church is a political foe, then of course one tries to control or replace it. But if the Church is, as Christians profess, the mystical Body of Christ, then its destruction is not just a human tragedy–it is a spiritual calamity.

The interview doesn’t offer easy solutions. It does something more important: it forces the conversation back to a place many would prefer to avoid. It pulls the suffering of forgotten Christian communities into the light, and it exposes the strange quietness of those who should be their champions. You don’t need to agree with Tucker’s politics or Amsterdam’s conclusions to sense that something is deeply off-kilter.

When Narek recalls that Armenians said “no” even when “all the men were killed” and the women and children were marched into the desert, you begin to see why this matters. The Christian story has always included those who lose everything rather than abandon the truth. What should trouble us is not that such people still exist, but that their suffering barely registers until someone forces us to look.

And if there is a global war on Christianity, as the interview suggests, the most shocking part is not the violence. It’s the indifference.