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Christianity in the Arab world traces its history back to the first century. Typically Arab Christians belong to one of the Eastern Orthodox churches. Like Arab Muslims, Arab Christians refer to God as Allah. The use of the term Allah in Arab Christian churches predates its use in Islam by several centuries. In more recent times (especially since the mid 1800's), Arabs from the Levant region have been converted from these churches to Protestant ones, most notably Baptist and Methodist churches. This is mostly due to an influx of Western, predominantly American missionaries.
The largest numbers of Arab Christians can be found in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and especially the United States. Lebanon is believed to be about 30% Cristian (mainly Maronite with sizable numbers of Greek Orthodox, Syrian Catholic and other churches), Syria is just under 15% Christian, about 6% of all Palestinians are Christian in some form or another and there are tiny communities of Roman Catholics in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Most of the members in North Africa however, are foreign missionaries or workers or converted Arabs.
A second major group of Christian Arabs are the Copts, including some six million Arab-speaking people in Egypt and hundreds of thousands more abroad. This church has historically been seen by Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches as heretical, and vice versa, although in recent years there have been considerable strides to reconciliation with the Eastern Orthodox communion.
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