The story of Christianity begins in ancient Israel where a bunch of Jews were pissed about the Romans occupying their sad Jew asses. They had a prophecy about a messiah coming to make Israel great again and about once a week a self-professed messiah would appear. Eventually one of them showed up and he got crucified (I do 100% believe that Jesus was a historical figure). His sect probably would have died off, but he happened to have a somewhat broader and much less political appeal (less Jewish nationalism, more general ethics) and offered a version of Judaism that focused on the spirit of the religion over the inane rules (Pharisees). Combine that with the Romans predilection for plundering their conquered cultures for new gods and the role of Paul as a Roman promoter (taking out some of the harshest rules, too, like cutting part of your dick off) and it was poised to boom across the Roman world, losing its status as an ethnoreligion.
Eventually some brutal thug, Constantine, decides to adopt Christianity as his religion of the week because he needed a propaganda coup with the large Christian minority and saw an opportunity to grift, all while also pimping sun worship. Constantine (a man so vile he killed his own mother) wrangles together a bunch of priests, who were all feuding at the time, and tells them that he'll basically give them a state monopoly on religion if they sort their shit out. In that moment, the religion was subverted. Thus the Church is born in its first real incarnation, not as part of a voluntary organization spread out among the poor and dispossessed of society but as a tool for state oppression. The Church then has a bunch of autistic shitfits over different nonsense your average Christian (of any sect) would never even think of, and every time they do some bunch gets kicked out (Arians, Copts, Nestorians, etc.) to go make a new church.
Later down the line, the Bishop of Rome, just one of five of the big state church dictators, gets uppity and wants to become capo di tutti capo over the others, and they tell him to rightly fuck off, and so Catholicism is born from Eastern Orthodoxy. Catholicism then goes on to invent purgatory, confessionals, penance where the PRIEST decides what your afterlife punishment is and how to make it right (!!!!) and some other noxious doctrines designed to extort blackmail and ransom. Eventually this shit gets so awful that the more conscientious priests start to rebel against it. They try all through the Middle Ages, but when printing comes along, that's when they're able to spread the message fast enough that they can't kill it in the cradle.
Your big Protestant groups at that point are Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists. The Anglicans are just Catholics, it's a purely political split like Sunni vs Shiite and the religion is a joke religion that shouldn't exist. The Lutherans have the reasonable goal of fixing the worst abuses in the church and kicking Globohomo: Sword and Shield Version back to Rome. The Calvinists have the based goal of burning it all down to the ground and going back to basics, but they're also huge Bible thumpers and are really mean and ban everything fun. The Anabaptists (Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, etc.) are chill hippies that want to live in peace and overturn the rotten world they live in to make a more humane society. Of these, I sympathize with the Calvinists and Anabaptists the most. The big irony is that for as popular as Tradcath faggotry is in the modern Far Right/Kiwi Farms, the Calvinists were the direct equivalent of that in their own day in terms of wanting to restore their degenerate society to some standards. Also like them, they went way too autistically far with it and became noxious in their own right.
Later on, these religions start to recombine in ways that make the descent more confusing, it's no longer a tree really. These new sects, which I will incorrectly and lazily group together as "Evangelicalism," emerge as a sort of second round of fundamentalism, but by that point we weren't killing each other over this shit so it didn't matter as much. These are the good churches. In time some of them got fagged up (usually they have "United" in the name somewhere), but most remain the most genuinely religious and socially conservative churches in the West. Eventually a branch of them, Pentecostals, emerged as a sort of Protestant mysticism and it spread like wildfire across the Third World, quickly stealing Catholicism's market share in places like Guatemala and Brazil.
Mormonism breaks off as a fourth Abrahamic religion, its story complicated to get into but it amounts to being an attempt by Second Great Awakening Yankees to create a religion of America and also bring back the magic of the ancient Hebrew/Muslim world. It's pretty badass and cool of a subject.
In terms of structure, you basically have big churches that claim a monopoly on absolute truth, and then little churches that don't. Big Church cucks tend to be extremely arrogant about their large churches, because they were raised in a large church and so that automatically makes that large church correctly (regardless of if there's any evidence for it, or however long the list of sordid misdeeds by past churchmen has been). Big Church also suits the European mentality of cringing slavish devotion to authority and tradition, but not the American mentality of individualism and democratic institutions, which is why you can see the quality of America decline in direct proportion to how many Catholics and Jews sit on the Supreme Court and how many Irish, Polacks, and guidos were allowed to come off the boat.
In terms of experience, you also get a difference between what I see as the following styles of worship:
Awe
Contemplation
Ectsasy
Awe churches would be your Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, etc. They are the ones that have complex liturgies, calendars chock full of stupid bullshit, fancy robes and magic sticks the priests carry around, elaborate churches that look like pagan temples. They sell themselves on authority and tradition and confuse splendor for virtue. I tend to find them way more arrogant than other denominations and they attract LARPers.
Contemplation churches emphasize dignity, quiet thought, reflection, meditation. These are the ones that have simple liturgies, hymns that are sung by congregation with maybe a piano for accompaniment. They usually have a sermon that is like a lesson. Your Calvinists fall into this category and many Evangelicals do, Anabaptists tend to as well. These churches are pretty boring, but they come across as the most sincere in their expression of faith.
Ecstasy churches may be mystical or not, but either way they focus on strong emotional experience and tend to be more geared towards expressions of joy. Pentecostals live on this, and so do a lot of Evangelical churches like many Southern Baptists. Instrumental music is common and the music tends to be triumphal, sermons have more oratory and their style of worship is much more spontaneous and improvisational, like a people actually stirred. It is the finest expression of the American spirit in religion I have seen.
Socially/politically, all denominations have wings that are fagged up and wings that are not. You've got modern Quakers and you've got modern Amish. You've got those German Catholics and then you've got African Catholics. You've got United Methodists and you've got Southern Baptists. Overall, the Bible Belt Evangelical types tend to be much more socially conservative, but their minds are also ate up with Israel worship, a uniquely Evangelical affliction.
In all, I like ecstasy churches and I respect contemplation churches. Awe churches deserve scorn.
Mormons have a pretty good level of resiliency though. They take prepping very seriously and every one I know has their basement full of preserved food so they're safe if a disaster strikes.
The Hutterites are scary. They're secular, but very, very organized. Each community is effectively a family-run company town, where everyone works towards the same goal. A couple years ago the Hutterites bought an entire village to convert into a colony as it was cheaper then setting up the infrastructure for one from scratch. If we start sending people into space, colony ships with Hutterites would be among the most stable.
The Hutterites are used as a standard for maximum human fertility. Only group to actually hit the very limit.
