Central African Republic

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Central African Republic is a majority Christian country, roughly 61 per cent Protestant and 28 per cent Roman Catholic, with a Muslim minority concentrated in the north and east, about 9 per cent, and small communities holding traditional or animist beliefs throughout. Religious identity became a fault line rather than a private matter during the civil war that began in 2013, when the mostly Muslim Seleka coalition seized power and was answered by mostly Christian anti-balaka militias, producing sectarian killing on both sides that displaced hundreds of thousands and left mosques destroyed across large stretches of the country.

Reconciliation between Christian and Muslim communities remains unfinished a decade after the worst of the fighting. The United States placed the Central African Republic on its Special Watch List for religious freedom in December 2023, a formal finding that the government has tolerated severe violations even as it has not directly perpetrated them, a distinction between toleration and perpetration that captures how much of the country's religious tension now runs through weak state authority rather than official policy.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Central African Republic's constitution guarantees freedom of religion and equal protection under the law regardless of religion, requires the head of state to take an oath of office without regard to religion, and separately prohibits religious intolerance and what it calls religious fundamentalism without defining either term. That undefined final clause has drawn attention precisely because the 2013 to the present civil war was fought substantially along the religious lines the constitution otherwise guards against.

No formal establishment exists in Central African law, and the country's legal framework treats religious neutrality as a founding principle rather than a response to the war specifically, since the relevant constitutional language predates the 2013 conflict. What the war changed was the gap between that guarantee and lived reality: a country whose law commits to equal protection regardless of religion spent a decade watching Seleka and anti-balaka forces organize violence substantially along the same religious lines the constitution names as protected.