Eritrea

Christianity reached the Eritrean highlands from the Kingdom of Aksum in the fourth century, and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church traces its lineage to that conversion, sharing liturgy, calendar and much early history with the neighbouring Ethiopian church before the two became formally separate patriarchates in 1993. Islam arrived along the Red Sea coast within a few decades of the faith's founding and became the dominant tradition of the lowlands and the coast through centuries of contact with Ottoman and Egyptian rule.

Italian colonization from the 1890s introduced Roman Catholic missions and a smaller Catholic community that has persisted since, while British military administration followed Italy's defeat in the Second World War. Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia in 1952 and then annexed outright in 1962, beginning a thirty year war of independence that ended in 1991 with Eritrean forces victorious, and a 1993 referendum confirmed formal independence.

Since then Eritrea has recognized only four religious communities, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Sunni Islam, the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Eritrea, and has required every other group to register or cease activity. The country's religious composition today still runs along the old highland Christian and lowland Muslim lines that predate the modern state.

The Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of the country's four government recognized faiths, but recognition has not meant independence from the state. In 2005 the government moved to strip Patriarch Abune Antonios of administrative control after he refused an order to excommunicate roughly three thousand members of a renewal movement within the church and publicly called for the release of political prisoners, including three priests detained the previous year. A synod convened outside normal church procedure deposed him in January 2006, and in May 2007 the government installed a replacement, physically removed Antonios from his residence and placed him under house arrest at an undisclosed location.

Antonios remained in custody, largely cut off from communication, for the rest of his life. He died in February 2022 at the age of ninety four, still formally deposed and still held by the state that had removed him. Rights organizations repeatedly called for his release and recorded his case as one of the longest running detentions of a religious leader anywhere in the world.

The episode illustrates a wider pattern in Eritrea, where even the four recognized churches answer to a government that influences their leadership and polices dissent within their own ranks.