Ethiopia is a majority-Christian country with a large Muslim minority. At the last national census, in 2007, 43.5 per cent of Ethiopians belonged to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, 33.9 per cent were Muslim, overwhelmingly Sunni, and 18.5 per cent were Protestant. Traditional religions accounted for 2.6 per cent and Catholics for 0.7 per cent. With a population now around 130 million, that means roughly 80 million Christians and 45 million Muslims. Ethiopia is also one of the oldest Christian nations in the world, having adopted Christianity in the fourth century, and it received some of Islam's earliest followers in the seventh.
A Map Drawn by Faith
Religion in Ethiopia follows geography closely. Orthodox Christianity dominates the northern and central highlands, the homeland of the Amhara and Tigrayan peoples, in regions such as Amhara, Tigray and much of Addis Ababa. Islam predominates in the hot eastern lowlands of the Afar and Somali regions, in the walled city of Harar and across much of eastern and central Oromia. Protestant churches are strongest in the west and south, in the former Southern region and western Oromia, where the Orthodox Church had historically been weakest. Traditional religions survive mainly among the peoples of the far south and south-west. Oromia, the largest region, is the most mixed, with large Muslim, Orthodox and Protestant populations. The country's size and varied terrain, set out in our guide to how big Ethiopia is, go a long way to explaining that pattern.
The Orthodox Highlands
Christianity became the religion of the kingdom of Aksum, in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, in the fourth century. King Ezana converted around the 330s under the influence of Frumentius, a Syrian Christian who had been brought to the court as a young captive. Frumentius was consecrated the first bishop of Ethiopia by Athanasius, the Patriarch of Alexandria, and Ezana's later coins replaced pagan symbols with the cross, making Aksum one of the first states anywhere to put a cross on its money. In the late fifth century, a group of monks remembered as the Nine Saints spread the faith further and translated scriptures into Ge'ez, the classical language that is still used in the liturgy today, much as Latin once was in the West.
Because Ethiopia was cut off from the rest of the Christian world for long periods, especially after the rise of Islam, its church developed distinctive traditions. The name Tewahedo, meaning "made one", refers to its belief in the single, united nature of Christ. Its Bible contains 81 books, including the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees, which most other churches do not accept. Many Christians keep practices close to those of the Old Testament, such as circumcision and dietary rules. For more than 1,600 years the Ethiopian Church was led by bishops sent from the Coptic Church in Egypt, until it became fully independent in 1959, a link traced in our article on religion in Egypt.
The church also claims to possess the Ark of the Covenant. According to the Kebra Nagast, the fourteenth-century national epic, it was brought to Ethiopia by Menelik I, son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and it is said to rest in a chapel at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum, guarded by a single monk who is the only person allowed to see it. Every Orthodox church holds a tabot, a consecrated replica of the tablets of the Law, and without one a building cannot be a church.
Lalibela and the Church Forests
The most famous expression of Ethiopian Christianity is at Lalibela, in the Amhara highlands. There, around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, eleven churches were carved downward out of solid volcanic rock, each cut free from the surrounding stone. Tradition credits them to King Lalibela, who is said to have wanted to build a new Jerusalem after Muslim conquests made pilgrimage to the Holy Land difficult, and features of the site carry names such as the River Jordan. The cross-shaped Bete Giyorgis, the Church of Saint George, is the best known. The churches, still in use, were among the first sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, in 1978.
Across the northern highlands, where most of the original forest has been cleared for farming, the land around Orthodox churches has been left untouched, because the church regards it as sacred. From the air these church forests appear as small round islands of dark green among bare fields. Tens of thousands of them survive, and ecologists now see them as a vital refuge for native trees, birds and insects.
A Calendar of Feasts and Fasts
Ethiopia follows its own calendar, of twelve months of 30 days and a thirteenth month of five or six days, which runs about seven to eight years behind the Gregorian calendar. The New Year, Enkutatash, falls on 11 September. Two great festivals of the Orthodox year are recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. Meskel, on 27 September, celebrates the finding of the True Cross by the Empress Helena in the fourth century. A huge bonfire, the Demera, is lit in Meskel Square in Addis Ababa and in towns across the country. Timkat, Epiphany, celebrated on 19 January, commemorates the baptism of Jesus. Priests carry the tabots from each church in procession, wrapped in rich cloth, to a pool or river, where the faithful are sprinkled with blessed water. Gondar's Timkat, held at the pool of Emperor Fasilides, draws huge crowds.
Fasting is central to Orthodox life. The devout abstain from meat, dairy and eggs on Wednesdays and Fridays and during several longer fasts, including the 55 days before Easter, adding up to between 180 and 250 days a year depending on how strictly they observe. This is one reason Ethiopian cooking has so many vegetarian dishes, such as shiro, made from ground chickpeas, and lentil stews served on injera, the spongy flatbread made from the grain teff.
Islam: The First Refuge
Ethiopia has a special place in Islamic history. Around 615 CE, several years before the Prophet Muhammad's own migration to Medina, a group of his followers facing persecution in Mecca fled across the Red Sea to the Christian kingdom of Aksum. According to Muslim tradition, the king, known in Arabic as al-Najashi, listened to them recite the Qur'an's account of Mary, refused to hand them over to the Meccans and gave them protection. This event, known as the First Hijra, gave Muslims an enduringly positive view of Ethiopia, and the al-Nejashi mosque in the village of Negash, in Tigray, is traditionally considered one of the oldest mosque sites in Africa.
Islam later spread through trade along the Red Sea coast and in the south-east, and powerful Muslim sultanates rose in the lowlands. In the sixteenth century, the Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known as Ahmad Gragn, conquered much of the Christian highlands, until Portuguese soldiers helped the Ethiopian emperor defeat him in 1543. The walled city of Harar, in the east, became a great centre of Islamic learning. It has 82 mosques, some dating back to the tenth century, and more than 100 shrines within a small area, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Most Ethiopian Muslims are Sunni, and many follow Sufi orders.
The Rise of the Protestant Churches
Protestant churches have been the fastest-growing religious group in modern Ethiopia. Their share of the population rose from about 5.5 per cent in the 1984 census to 10.2 per cent in 1994 and 18.5 per cent in 2007. Missionaries worked mainly in the south and west, and the churches they founded became independent Ethiopian churches, collectively called P'ent'ay. The Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, meaning "place of Jesus", is now one of the largest Lutheran churches in the world, with more than ten million members. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, in office since 2018, is himself a Pentecostal, the son of a Muslim father and an Orthodox Christian mother, a family story common in Ethiopia.
Traditional Religions and the Beta Israel
Among the Oromo, Ethiopia's largest ethnic group, a revival of the traditional faith called Waaqeffanna, belief in the sky god Waaqa, has accompanied a revival of Oromo identity. Its best-known expression is Irreechaa, a thanksgiving festival held each autumn at Lake Hora Arsadi in Bishoftu, which draws hundreds of thousands, and sometimes over a million, people of all faiths. In the far south, peoples of the Omo Valley and the Konso highlands keep their own traditional beliefs.
Ethiopia was also home to the Beta Israel, a Jewish community that lived for centuries in the highlands around Gondar, practising a form of Judaism based on the Bible but without the later rabbinic texts. After Israel recognised them as Jews in the 1970s, almost all emigrated there, most dramatically in Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in May 1991, when about 14,300 people were airlifted to Israel in some 36 hours.
Religion in Modern Ethiopian Life
Ethiopia has long taken pride in coexistence between faiths, and Christians and Muslims often attend one another's weddings and funerals. Under Emperor Haile Selassie, overthrown in 1974, the Orthodox Church was the state church. The communist Derg regime that followed seized the church's lands and killed its patriarch, Abuna Tewophilos, in 1979. The 1995 constitution separates religion and state and guarantees freedom of belief. Tensions have grown in recent years, with outbreaks of violence against churches and mosques, and the war in Tigray from 2020 to 2022 damaged historic religious sites, including the al-Nejashi mosque at Negash. The neighbouring country of Eritrea, which shares the Aksumite heritage, is covered in our article on religion in Eritrea.