What Are the Main Branches of Christianity?
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Christianity has about 2.4 billion followers and no single organisation. Roughly half are Catholic, a little under a quarter belong to the many Protestant churches, and around a tenth are Orthodox, with the rest in smaller groups that fit none of those labels neatly. The branches share a core of belief about Jesus, and the differences that divide them are mostly about authority: who has the right to say what the faith is.
The first thousand years and the first split
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
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.
The Orthodox churches
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 Protestant Reformation and its families
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
What they share, and the groups outside the branches
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 of 325, which almost every church still recites. 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.
The takeaway
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.