Malagasy religion is organised around the dead. The razana, the ancestors, are not remembered so much as maintained: they remain participants in the family, they are consulted, they are owed obligations, and misfortune is frequently read as a failure to meet those obligations. Around this sits fady, a system of prohibitions that varies by lineage and by place rather than being general, so that a food, a day, a direction or an animal may be forbidden to one family and unremarkable to its neighbours. Any account of Malagasy religion that describes only the churches has described the smaller part.
The population is majority Christian. The London Missionary Society arrived in 1818 and worked with the Merina court, producing a written Malagasy in the Latin alphabet and a Bible translation, and Catholic and Lutheran missions followed. The turn came under Queen Ranavalona I, who from 1835 banned Christian practice, expelled the missionaries and executed converts, some by being thrown from the cliff at Ampamarinana below the royal palace at Antananarivo. Her successors reversed it: Ranavalona II was baptised in 1869 and had the royal sampy, the talismans that guaranteed the kingdom, publicly burned. Both the persecution and the burning are foundational memories, read in opposite directions by different Malagasy.
The four largest Christian bodies work together through an ecumenical council that has repeatedly intervened in national political crises as a mediator.
A Muslim minority, long established through Comorian, Arab and Indian Ocean trade, is concentrated on the northwest coast.