This paper will examine the historical narratives of WW1 massacres in the Ottoman Empire and the French mandate period among the Christian communities who found refugee in Syria in 1920s. As the past is given meaning in terms of the present, the reworkings of the memory will be analyzed in relation to the Christian insecurities and anxieties prevailing in today’s Syria. While the Syrian official Arab nationalist ideology emphasize the “collective suffering” aspect of the WW1 years and the following colonial experience, the categories employed in the memories of the present day Syrian-Christians about the massacres and the pre-WW1 life, the explanations given about the underlying reasons of the massacres and the French rule imply “difference”. They evoke feelings of indignation and mournfulness and hostility. The memories speak of the nature of the relations between Christians and Muslims in the past. They conjure up the contentious issues between different sects and the state in Syria. In Syria today, it is the religion in the form of sect that embodies the difference. Thanks to the long lasting populist-authoritarianism in the county and that, unlike the neighbouring states of Lebanon and Iraq, sectarianism is not built in the political system, the “difference” is articulated in a supremacist language of modernity. However, this supremacist particularism does not mean that the “generous inclusiveness” of the Syrian official ideology does not appeal to the newcomer Christians. On the contrary, the terms of particularism conform with the state-determined terms of membership to the Syrian nationhood. Showing significant similarities with the French colonial understanding of the governance of the Syrian society, the Syrian official ideology defacto differentiates the society on the basis of certain religious communities. The Christians act on this state-sponsored sectarianism, in other words they highlight the difference through a culturalist but definitely a non-political discourse. This paper will try to portray different manifestations of sectarianism in Syria and show the particular ways in which it is employed by the social actors. It will argue that the sect/religion becomes the “idiom” for the Christians to cast their aspirations as well as to negotiate relations of power in the local and national environment in the face of an Islamist and Kurdish challenge gaining ground in the county and the failure of secular Arab nationalism and socialism to create more equal decent societies. The paper is going to conclude with the contradictory trajectories of sectarianism.