Tswana religion turned on Modimo, a high god approached not directly but through badimo, the ancestors, who guarded the moral order of household and chiefdom; rainmaking was a royal duty, initiation schools made adults of the young, and the diviner's bones read the causes of affliction. The London Missionary Society arrived early in the nineteenth century, Robert Moffat translating scripture at Kuruman on the road north and David Livingstone marrying his daughter and pushing beyond, and conversion soon became entangled with chiefship.
Rulers who accepted the mission, most famously Khama III of the Bangwato, banned rain rites and initiation in their territories, so that Christianity spread as much by royal law as by preaching. The protectorate years left Botswana with mission churches but no settler established religion, and after independence in 1966 the country's prosperity and peace gave its religious life an unusually calm cast.
The fastest growth since has been in Pentecostal congregations and in Zionist and Apostolic churches whose healing, uniforms and night vigils answer older spiritual needs, while the census records a steady minority who name no religion at all, among the region's highest. Badimo observance persists beneath denominational labels, in funerals, ancestor obligations and the quiet consultation of traditional doctors.