A nation was baptised, not a congregation.
Armenia declared itself Christian around 301 under King Trdat III, before any other state did. The church that resulted has never been one institution among others in Armenian life; when there was no Armenian state, and for most of the last sixteen centuries there was not, the catholicosate was the thing that held the nation's legal and educational life together.
The date 301 is the church's own and is carved into the national self-description; a number of historians put the conversion nearer 314, after Constantine's edict, on the grounds that the earlier date makes the sequence of Roman and Persian politics awkward. Either way Armenia is the earliest state adoption of Christianity on record. The consequence that matters is institutional: under Persian, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and Russian rule, and under Soviet rule after that, the catholicosate did the work a state would otherwise do. The church's claim on Armenian identity is correspondingly total, which is exactly what makes the current quarrel between the catholicos and the Armenian government so bitter.
The same ground, other faiths
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