This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Liberia is Africa's oldest republic, founded in 1847 by freed African Americans and Afro-Caribbean settlers, and its religious life still carries that founding's stamp: roughly 85 percent of the population is Christian, spread across Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal and Lutheran churches whose hymnals and denominational names trace directly to the American churches the settlers brought with them. A substantial Muslim minority, about 12 percent, is concentrated among the Mandingo and Vai peoples in the north and west.
Indigenous beliefs persist, often practiced alongside Christianity or Islam rather than displaced by either, through secret societies such as Poro and Sande that remain active in rural community life. That layering, an American-descended Christian establishment atop an older indigenous religious substrate, distinguishes Liberia's religious history from every other country on the continent, since nowhere else in Africa did a settler community transplant its own churches wholesale onto a population it did not conquer so much as settle alongside.