The legal recognition of religious minorities by the state is often assumed to signal a transition from persecution to equality. In socialist Yugoslavia, however, formal registration did not necessarily translate into substantive religious freedom or social parity. Following the post-1945 restructuring of church-state relations and the establishment of a socialist legal framework governing religious life, neo-Protestant communities such as the Nazarenes and Seventh-day Adventists were registered as lawful religious associations. This bureaucratic incorporation distinguished Yugoslavia from more overtly repressive communist regimes, yet it simultaneously embedded these groups within mechanisms of regulation and oversight. While registration granted limited institutional visibility and a defined legal status, it also enabled administrative control, surveillance through state commissions for religious affairs, and pressures to align religious activity with socialist norms. Leaders often navigated precarious positions between cautious accommodation and subtle resistance, while believers continued to face social stigma, discrimination, and restrictions linked to conscientious objection and nonconformist religious practice. In certain instances, particularly among pacifist communities, legal recognition coexisted with periodic prosecution. Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic research, this paper argues that state recognition in socialist Yugoslavia functioned less as emancipation than as a framework of regulated inclusion. Legal acknowledgment masked enduring inequalities embedded in everyday religious life and reshaped internal community hierarchies, theological self-understandings, and modes of dissent. By situating the Yugoslav case between openly coercive and liberalising models of governance, the paper contributes to broader debates on the paradoxes of recognition, demonstrating how formal equality may simultaneously produce social inequalities.