Armenian Apostolic

The Armenian Apostolic Church is one of the oldest national Christian churches in the world. Tradition holds that the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew brought the gospel to Armenia in the 1st century, and in 301 CE — under King Tiridates III and Saint Gregory the Illuminator — Armenia became the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion. The Church belongs to the Oriental Orthodox communion, which broke with the wider Christian world after rejecting the christological formula of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. It is led by the Catholicos of All Armenians, seated at the monastery of Etchmiadzin, believed to stand on the site of a vision of Christ. Worship preserves an ancient liturgy in Classical Armenian, and the Armenian alphabet — created by Mesrop Mashtots around 405 — was developed specifically to translate scripture. Roughly 9 million Armenians worldwide identify with the Church, both in the Republic of Armenia and across the global diaspora.

Countries by Armenian Apostolic Population (2)

1. 1. 🇦🇲 Armenia 95.2%
2. 2. 🇬🇪 Georgia 2.9%

Note: This list reflects only countries where the CIA World Factbook — our data source — explicitly uses the “Armenian Apostolic” label. Adherents in many other countries are rolled into broader buckets such as Protestant, Evangelical, or country-specific denominations, so this ranking undercounts global presence.