Great Apostasy

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In Christianity, the Great Apostasy is the notion that mainstream Christian Churches have fallen away from the faith founded by Jesus and promulgated through his Twelve Apostles. A belief in a Great Apostasy has been characteristic of the Restorationist tradition of Christianity, which includes unrelated groups emerging after the Second Great Awakening, such as the Christadelphians, Swedenborgians, Non-Denominational, Latter Day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, Oneness Pentecostals, and Iglesia ni Cristo. These groups hold that traditional Christianity, represented by Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy, has fallen into error and thus, the true faith needs to be restored. The term has been used to describe the perceived fallen state of traditional Christianity, especially the Catholic Church, sometimes claiming that it changed the doctrines of the early church and allowed traditional Greco-Roman culture (i.e., Greco-Roman mysteries, deities of solar monism such as Mithras and Sol Invictus...

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