Rastafari has no church, no founder who organised it and no body that can say what a Rastafari must believe. It has houses, or mansions, a term taken from the promise in John 14 that in the Father's house are many mansions, which is to say the plurality is understood as scriptural rather than as a failure to unify.
The Nyabinghi Order, or Theocracy Reign of the Nyabinghi, is the oldest and most traditional, taking its name from an East African anti-colonial resistance associated with a spirit of the same name. It is the most Africa-centred and the most insistent on repatriation, and its assemblies, called binghis, are built around drumming that ran on into ska and reggae.
Bobo Ashanti was founded by Charles Edwards, known as Prince Emmanuel, who established a community at Bull Bay outside Kingston in the 1950s. Its members are recognisable by turbans and long robes, keep a strict Sabbath and a disciplined communal life, and hold a trinity of offices in which Prince Emmanuel is priest, Marcus Garvey prophet and Haile Selassie king. It is the most separatist of the houses.
The Twelve Tribes of Israel was founded in Kingston in 1968 by Vernon Carrington, known as Prophet Gad, who instructed members to read a chapter of the Bible a day. Members are assigned to one of the twelve tribes by birth month. It is the most open of the major houses, admitting white members and retaining more conventionally Christian framing, and it was the house Bob Marley belonged to, which gave it disproportionate visibility abroad.
Many Rastafari belong to no house at all, and some have joined the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, following the emperor's own confession. Because there is no central authority, the differences between houses on Haile Selassie's divinity, on repatriation and on the use of cannabis are not deviations from an orthodoxy; there is no orthodoxy for them to deviate from.