As always, thank you for your excellent and very enlightening reply. It seems that virtually every branch of Christianity has had and continues to have cults that shoot off from it, Rastafarianism being one of the better-known examples.
While that’s true, the situation here is literally the opposite: the Ethiopian Orthodox converting non-Christian Rastafarians away from their decadent and indulgent false religion to the true religion of Christ our God.
To be clear, Rastafarianism didn’t consist of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians who decided to reject 1600 years of Christian teaching in order to smoke massive amounts of marijuana and perform obnoxious Reggae music, but rather, consisted of Jamaicans who heard of Emperor Haile Selassie, and, contrary to the wishes of the Emperor, decided that he was God, for reasons derived mainly from the color of his skin and the connections between Ethopia and ancient Israel. Among Ethiopians the small Rasta community that immigrated there is not well regarded.
Neither the Emperor, nor the Ethiopian church, refused to take action, however - actions to evangelize the people of the Carribean, including the Rastas, were undertaken, and these have been very successful in converting many Rastas to Christ.
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Now that being said, Ethiopia did have, for several centuries, two schismatic, heretical sects which competed with the Orthodox for control of the church, both of which had seriously deranged teachings, however, through the grace of God, the Orthodox party associated with the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and most members of the Imperial household triumphed. But the schism was probably the worst one to happen to an Oriental Orthodox church since the Maronites broke away from the Syriac Orthodox Church in (many believe this was because the Maronites opted to embrace the Monothelite heresy being promoted at the time as a means of achieving EO-OO reconciliation, which resulted in St. Maximos the Confessor losing his tongue, and which also resulted in Pope Honorius I being the only legitimate Bishop of Rome (not counting anti-Popes) to ever be anathematized as a heretic by the Roman Catholic Church post-mortem).