Woldegiorgis G. Teklay

27 May 2026,18:00 CET (registration see below)

This presentation explores how clergy across major faiths, with particular emphasis on members of the Orthodox Church, employed hate speech and harnessed theological authority and sacred narratives to legitimise the federal government’s war efforts by analysing publicly stated statements and sermons that framed the conflict in moral and apocalyptic terms. The presentation forms part of ongoing PhD research and draws its data from mainstream media, as amplified by social media, through integrated qualitative methods and digital ethnography.During the height of the Tigray War in Ethiopia (2020–2022), hate speech functioned simultaneously as a linguistic practice, a narrative construction, an institutional strategy, and a digitally mediated social action. It circulated widely across political speeches, parliamentary sessions, cabinet declarations, religious sermons, broadcast media, and social media platforms, producing material consequences such as social polarisation, moral exclusion, and the legitimisation of violence. Prominent religious figures from diverse denominations publicly supported the war campaigns and portrayed the opposing side using dehumanising terms such as ‘evil’, ‘setan’, and ‘monsters’. Theologically, hate is opposed to beauty and is considered aesthetically evil. It functions as a rejection of the divine image inherent in every person and distorts the intrinsic unity between beauty, truth, and goodness. This distortion manifests through reductionist caricatures and the idolisation of false beauty, which together erode the capacity to recognise others as bearers of divine glory, contradicting the teachings of the perpetrators. Such speech acts fracture interpersonal bonds and disrupt covenantal relationships with the divine, contributing to a broader spiritual blindness that impairs moral perception and communal harmony. In the context of war, as observed in Ethiopia, the weaponization of hate by the religious figures was part of the mobilisation, legitimisation and justification of mass violence against targeted group/s.

Woldegiorgis G. Teklay is a PhD candidate in media anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. He was educated in journalism and communications (MA, BA) in Ethiopia, taught journalism courses at Mekelle University, and has been practising journalism since 2017, both in Ethiopia and in exile.

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