Doctor of political sciences, energy security expert Vahe Davtyan writes:
"The campaign against the Armenian Apostolic Church, as well as the decision to close the Shoghakat TV channel, cannot be seen only in the framework of the contradictions between the authorities and the Catholicos of All Armenians. If the problem was only the person, then the blows would not be aimed at dismantling the institutions. Meanwhile, today the blow is being delivered to the system itself, the Church, as the last bastion of the spiritual sovereignty of the Armenian people.
Closing "Shogakat" is not a technical or financial step, but a symbolic action. It is the dismantling of an important institution aimed at pushing the Christian speech out of the public sphere, silencing the space where the chain of national identity and faith continued to remain unbreakable.
Finally, "Shogakat" can serve as a platform for dialogue. But it is closed because the goal is not the person, but the substantive dismantling of the institution, the Church.
At a deep level, we are witnessing an attempt at religious-geopolitical reshaping. Armenia (once again) turns into a testing ground, where the process of weakening the Christian identity is carried out under the slogans of "peace" and "tolerance". In fact, this is a new ideological engineering aimed at eroding the spiritual foundations of national statehood.
In this process, the behavior presented in detail in Dostoevsky's "Demons", in which "freedom" turns into a tool of spiritual destruction, infecting faith with doubt, morality with ideology, and service with modernist pseudo-reformism, is clearly visible in this process.
