This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Global gathers sixteen nations across Australia and the Pacific, running from the oldest continuous religious tradition the atlas holds to islands more thoroughly Christian than almost anywhere on earth.
Australia's Aboriginal peoples carry Dreaming narratives passed down tens of thousands of years and tied to sites including Uluru, predating the Christianity colonization brought from 1788. New Zealand shows a different survival: Maori concepts of tapu, mana and atua fused with mission Christianity rather than yielding to it, producing Maori founded churches, Ringatu and Ratana, that shaped national politics for most of the twentieth century.
Most of the smaller Pacific states are near total Christian conversions with their own founding stories. Tonga, the only Pacific nation never colonised, still runs its 1875 constitution's ban on Sunday trade and labour as a living law. Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands each report Christian affiliation above ninety five per cent, and Tuvalu's own constitution names the country a sovereign nation founded on Christian principles outright, while Papua New Guinea did the same by amendment in 2024. Fiji shows conversion running along ethnic lines instead of uniting them: Methodist iTaukei and Hindu Indo Fijian communities split its politics for decades before the 2013 constitution declared the state secular.
Older religion persists inside the Christian majority rather than beneath it. Vanuatu's kastom stands as a parallel system beside the churches, and Tanna island's John Frum and Prince Philip movements, awaiting a wartime American figure and mourning a British duke as a Tannese spirit, are the best known cargo movements anywhere. Palau's Modekngei fuses native animism with Christian elements under formal government recognition.