Latvia is the country where the confessional map of northern Europe is legible in a single frame. Lutheranism came with Swedish rule and German landowners and holds the centre and west. Roman Catholicism holds Latgale in the east, because that region stayed under Polish Lithuanian rule through the period when the rest of the territory was being Lutheranised, and the difference has outlived every empire since. Orthodoxy follows the Russian imperial and Soviet centuries and the Russian speaking population that came with them. The three are of broadly comparable size and observance is low across all of them.
The Baltic peoples were the last in Europe to be Christianised, and the conversion here was a conquest, carried out by the Livonian Order from the port of Riga founded in 1201. That lateness matters for what survived: Latvian folk song preserved a very large body of pre Christian imagery, and the collection of it became a national undertaking.
Church and state relations are handled by individual statute rather than a single framework. Latvia concluded an agreement with the Holy See in 2000 and has since passed separate laws for each of the largest denominations, an arrangement that gives a small number of historic churches a defined legal position that newer bodies do not have.
The most consequential recent act was political. In 2022 the Saeima legislated to declare the Latvian Orthodox Church fully independent of Moscow, settling by parliamentary majority a question that canon law regards as belonging to the churches themselves. The move was welcomed domestically and criticised as state interference in religious governance.