Armenia: The First Christian Nation the World Forgot
Despite being the cradle of biblical history and Christian heritage, Armenia faces cultural genocide while global churches remain silent
By Vic Gerami
Few nations on Earth hold as much significance for Christianity as Armenia. Its soil is woven into the earliest biblical stories, its mountains and rivers are landmarks of the faith, and its people embraced Christ long before most of the world. Yet when Armenians faced massacre and erasure in Artsakh, the so-called defenders of Christianity, from Evangelicals to Catholics to Protestants of every denomination, met the tragedy with deafening silence.
Biblical Armenia: Where Faith Began
The very roots of Christian scripture are tied to Armenia. According to the Book of Genesis, Noah’s Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat:
“And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.” (Genesis 8:4, KJV)
Mount Ararat, still visible from the Armenian capital Yerevan, is not just a geographic landmark but a spiritual symbol of survival, covenant, and God’s promise to humanity after the Flood.
Equally profound is the tradition that places the Garden of Eden in Armenia’s fertile lands. Genesis describes Eden as lying at the source of four rivers, the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates (Genesis 2:10–14). Ancient commentators from both Jewish and Christian traditions pointed to the Armenian Highlands as the possible location, where the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates still flow today.
Beyond biblical geography, Armenia holds a unique distinction. In 301 AD, it became the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity as its state religion. Led by King Tiridates III and converted through the ministry of St. Gregory the Illuminator, Armenia embraced the faith decades before the Roman Empire’s conversion. The Armenian Apostolic Church, with its distinctive stone monasteries carved into mountainsides, remains one of the oldest living Christian traditions.
A Forgotten People in the Face of Genocide
Given this sacred heritage, one might expect global Christendom to rush to Armenia’s defense in moments of peril. Instead, when Azerbaijan committed the Artsakh Genocide, the world turned away. Over the past several years, Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) have been blockaded, starved, displaced, and ultimately forced from their ancestral homeland. Today, Azerbaijan continues a campaign of cultural genocide, desecrating and destroying centuries-old churches, khachkars (stone-carved crosses), and monasteries that predate much of Europe’s Christian architecture.
These sites are not only Armenian heritage. They are treasures of the entire Christian faith. To lose them is to erase chapters of the Bible’s living history.
The Hypocrisy of the Christian West
Where is the outrage? Where are the Evangelicals who speak loudly of biblical values? Where is the Catholic Church, so swift to canonize saints yet hesitant to defend the land of Noah and Eden? Where are the Protestant denominations that fund missions abroad but remain silent as the first Christian nation is threatened with cultural extinction?
The Catholic Church in particular has compromised its credibility. In 2020, only months before Azerbaijan’s invasion of Artsakh, President Ilham Aliyev made an unplanned visit to the Vatican where he handed Pope Francis a check for 2.2 million euros, supposedly for the restoration of the Sistine Chapel. Azerbaijan has also donated millions more for the Vatican Library. These so-called cultural gifts are nothing less than hush money. Just recently, the Vatican hosted a propaganda conference portraying Azerbaijan as a model of religious tolerance, even as Armenian churches were being desecrated and destroyed.
It is a staggering hypocrisy. The very institutions that claim to defend Christianity’s legacy stand idle while one of its holiest cradles is systematically erased. Sermons about faith and family ring hollow when those who deliver them are silent about the destruction of the land where Noah built his altar and where Eden may have bloomed.
A Call to Conscience
If Christianity is more than words, it must mean defending its origins, its sacred sites, and the people who have preserved the faith since the apostles. Armenia is not a footnote in church history. It is the foundation.
To ignore Armenia’s suffering is to betray the very faith millions profess to uphold. Until the Christian world finds its voice, the shattered stones of Armenian churches will bear witness against the silence of those who should have spoken.
