An Easter Week Question: If God Is ‘One,’ Why Are There So Many Christian Denominations?

The history is complicated

Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

It’s Easter Week again, that annual time when people who would never darken the doors of a church will pull some decent clothes out of their closet and try to remember where the local cathedral or megachurch is, all from equal parts habit, tradition, and covering their bases…just in case. It’s also a time, at least here in the South, where churches will send out armies of volunteers with invitations to their Easter Sunday services, hoping to build their numbers from the majority of Americans who no longer claim any denomination or religious affiliation at all.

This begs an important question: if all Christians are, well, Christian, then why are there, as of 2021, roughly 45,000 different Christian denominations around the world? If Deuteronomy 6:4 says “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one,” and in John 17:21 Jesus prays that all believers “may be one,” why are there more denominations than there are Starbucks or McDonalds? In a word: people.

There’s an old joke about a Baptist guy who gets rescued from a deserted island after several years of being marooned. The rescuers find three huts on the island and ask the man what they are for. He tells them that the first one is his house and the…