What Are the Main Branches of Christianity?

For most of its first millennium the church was one body with several great centres, Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, that gradually drifted apart in language, custom and politics. The West spoke Latin and looked to the bishop of Rome, the pope; the East spoke Greek and saw the pope as first among equal patriarchs, not as a ruler over them. A dispute over a single word added to the creed, and a wider one over papal authority, ended in 1054 with each side excommunicating the other.

That East-West Schism produced the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches. Smaller Eastern churches, the Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian and Syriac among them, had already separated in the fifth century over how to describe the divine and human natures of Christ; they are grouped today as Oriental Orthodox and number around 60 million.

The Catholic Church is the largest single religious body in the world, with about 1.3 billion members under the pope, who is bishop of Rome and, in Catholic teaching, the successor of St Peter with authority over the whole church. Its distinctive features include seven sacraments, the belief that bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ at Mass, the veneration of Mary and the saints, a celibate priesthood in the Western rite, and a body of teaching that draws on tradition and the church's own authority as well as scripture.

Catholicism is not uniform in practice. Several Eastern Catholic churches keep Orthodox-style worship and married priests while accepting the pope, and Catholic life in Manila, Lagos, Warsaw and Paris looks quite different on the ground. What unites it is the structure: one hierarchy, one set of doctrine, one ultimate authority.

Eastern Orthodoxy is a family of about fifteen self-governing churches, most of them national, Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian and so on, in communion with each other and recognising the Patriarch of Constantinople as an honorary head without power over the others. Together they have around 220 million members, concentrated in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East.

Orthodox worship is the most visibly ancient: long sung liturgies, icons everywhere, incense, and a calendar many churches still keep by the old Julian reckoning, which is why Orthodox Christmas often falls on 7 January. Parish priests may marry; bishops may not. Doctrine is held to have been fixed by the first seven ecumenical councils, and the Orthodox regard the Catholic additions since, including the pope's claims, as innovations.

The second great split began in 1517, when Martin Luther challenged the sale of indulgences and then the authority of the pope itself. Protestants held that scripture alone was the final authority, that salvation came by faith rather than by works or sacraments, and that every believer could read the Bible and approach God without a priest. The movement fragmented almost immediately, because a faith with no central authority has no way to settle its own disputes, and it has kept fragmenting since. The main families:

• •Lutheran: Luther's own tradition, strong in Germany and Scandinavia
• •Reformed or Presbyterian: from Calvin in Geneva and Knox in Scotland, with churches governed by elders
• •Anglican: the Church of England and its worldwide communion, keeping bishops and much Catholic form with Protestant doctrine
• •Baptist: adult baptism by immersion and independent congregations, the largest Protestant family in the United States
• •Methodist: from John Wesley's eighteenth-century revival, with an emphasis on personal holiness
• •Pentecostal and charismatic: from the early twentieth century, emphasising the Holy Spirit, healing and speaking in tongues, now the fastest-growing part of Christianity worldwide

Across all three branches the common ground is large: one God in three persons, Jesus as the Son of God who died and rose, the Bible as scripture, baptism, and the Nicene Creed, first agreed in 325 and expanded in 381, which almost every church still recites in its longer form. Ecumenical dialogue since the 1960s has narrowed several old disputes; Catholics and Lutherans signed a joint statement on justification in 1999, the very issue the Reformation broke over.

Some groups that grew out of Christianity are not counted within the branches by the others because they differ on those shared basics. Jehovah's Witnesses reject the Trinity, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adds further scripture and teaches a different understanding of God. Whether they are Christian churches or new religions is one of the oldest arguments about where a category ends.

A century ago most of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America, and the story of the branches was largely a European one. That has changed completely. Through the twentieth century the faith grew fast in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia while church attendance fell across much of Europe, and today the majority of Christians live in the global south. Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo now have some of the largest Christian populations of any country, and the typical Christian is no longer European.

The shift has reshaped the branches too. Many of the fastest-growing churches fit none of the old labels neatly: independent African churches founded by local prophets, such as the Kimbanguist church in the Congo, and huge Pentecostal congregations in Lagos, Seoul and Sao Paulo that belong to no historic denomination. The Anglican Communion now has far more active members in Africa than in England, and its internal disagreements over authority and sexuality often divide along that line. The splits of 1054 and 1517 still shape the map, but the centre of gravity has moved south.

If you have Catholic or Protestant friends and Orthodox ones, you may have noticed they sometimes celebrate Easter weeks apart. Both sides follow the same basic rule, inherited from the early church: Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, which church tradition fixes on 21 March. The difference is which calendar they read that rule from. Western churches use the Gregorian calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, while most Orthodox churches still calculate Easter by the older Julian calendar, which has drifted out of step with the seasons.

The Julian calendar is now thirteen days behind, so the Orthodox version of 21 March falls on 3 April in the modern calendar. The two churches also use slightly different tables for the moon. As a result, Orthodox Easter is usually later, by one week or as much as five, and only sometimes falls on the same day, as it did in 2025. The difference is a small, visible survival of the long separation between East and West, and proposals to agree a common date have been discussed between the churches repeatedly without being settled.

One ancient branch rarely appears in the usual three-part picture. The Church of the East grew up in the Persian Empire, beyond the reach of Rome and Constantinople, and drifted apart from the churches of the Roman world after the Council of Ephesus in 431, whose rulings on how to speak of Christ it did not accept. Its opponents called it Nestorian, after a bishop of Constantinople condemned at that council, a label the church itself regards as misleading. Free of imperial politics, its monks and merchants carried the faith east along the trade routes of Central Asia.

In 635 a missionary whom Chinese records call Alopen reached the Tang capital, Chang'an, and a stone monument set up there in 781, now in a museum in Xi'an, records in Chinese and Syriac a century and a half of Christian churches in China. At its height the church had bishops from Mesopotamia to China and southern India, where the St Thomas Christians of Kerala long followed its liturgy. It declined amid the upheavals of the fourteenth century, and its heirs today, among them the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church, are small communities in Iraq, Iran and abroad.

The branches do not all use a Bible with the same contents. The New Testament of 27 books is shared almost everywhere, but the Old Testament varies. Protestant Bibles follow the Hebrew scriptures of Judaism, with 39 Old Testament books and 66 in all. Catholic Bibles add seven more, among them Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach and the two books of Maccabees, along with longer versions of Esther and Daniel, for 73 in all. These books survived in the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures that the early church used, and Catholics call them deuterocanonical, meaning belonging to a second canon.

Luther kept these books in his German Bible of 1534 but gathered them in a separate section as the Apocrypha, good to read but not equal to scripture, and the Council of Trent answered in 1546 by declaring them fully canonical. Even the King James Version of 1611 originally printed them between the Testaments; most Protestant editions dropped them in the nineteenth century. Orthodox Bibles include a few further books, such as a third book of Maccabees and the Prayer of Manasseh, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has the widest canon of all, which includes the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees.

Christianity's three main branches came from two splits: the East-West Schism of 1054, which separated Catholic from Orthodox, and the Reformation from 1517, which produced the Protestant families. They differ chiefly over authority, the pope, the councils or scripture alone, and share the creed, the Bible and the central claims about Jesus.