Ghana is a mainly Christian country with a large Muslim minority: in the 2021 Population and Housing Census, 71.3% of Ghanaians identified as Christian, 19.9% as Muslim, 3.2% as followers of traditional religion and 1.1% as having no religion. Within the Christian majority, Pentecostal and charismatic churches (31.6% of the whole population) outnumber the older Protestant churches (17.4%), and the Catholic Church is organised into 20 dioceses. Ghana is a secular state; the 1992 Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and bans discrimination on religious grounds, and Christmas, Easter, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha are all national holidays. Christianity is strongest in the south and Islam in the north, because each arrived by a different route.
Nyame, Asase Yaa and the Abosom: Belief Before Islam and Christianity
Before the Qur’an or the Bible arrived, the peoples of what is now Ghana practised religions bound to lineage, land and kingship, and most followed one outline. At the top stood a supreme creator, called Nyame among the Akan, Nyogmo among the Ga and Mawu among the Ewe and Dangme. This creator is thought of as remote from daily life and is usually not worshipped directly.
Below the creator sit lesser gods, the abosom of the Akan, who are believed to reside in rivers, streams, trees and mountains and to act as intermediaries. In Akan belief, Asase Yaa, the earth, ranks second to Nyame. Closest of all to the living are the ancestors. Veneration of the departed is common to every traditional religion in Ghana, because the ancestors are believed to watch the living closely and to secure the prosperity of the lineage if they are honoured.
These beliefs did not vanish when the world religions arrived. Only 3.2% of Ghanaians named traditional religion as their faith in 2021, but its festivals remain public events: the Akan Adae ceremonies are held fortnightly, and towns still stage the annual Odwira festival.
Mande Traders and the Larabanga Mosque: Islam Reaches the North (1000s–1700s)
Islam was the first Abrahamic religion to reach Ghana. It came not by conquest but by commerce, carried by Mande-speaking merchants who entered from the north and north-west and by Hausa and Bornu traders from the north-east. The earliest Muslim presence in the area is dated to between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, with the religion established in the northern territories by around the fifteenth century. It is thought to have spread south after the collapse of the trading states of Bono and Begho.
The clearest surviving monument of this period is the Larabanga Mosque, in the Savannah Region, about 15 km north of Damongo and 4 km from the entrance to Mole National Park. Local tradition dates its founding to 1421. According to legend, a trader named Ayuba dreamed that he should build a mosque beside a “mystic stone”. Built in the Sudanese style from adobe, with two pyramidal towers and twelve buttresses, it is regarded as the oldest mosque in Ghana and is sometimes called the “Mecca of West Africa”. Its mud walls were most recently restored in 2023.
Islam spread from traders to rulers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Kingdom of Dagbon, Naa Zanjina, remembered as the first Muslim ruler of the Dagomba, accepted the faith in the seventeenth century. Under him, a Muslim community grew at the royal court in Yendi, where Dyula and Hausa clerics prayed for the Yaa Naa and the Nayil Liman, the king’s imam, became a court title. To the west, the Gonja kingdom, founded in 1675 by Sumaila Ndewura Jakpa, had a distinct Muslim trader class and converted largely during the eighteenth century. Its market town, Salaga, nicknamed “the Timbuktu of the South”, traded kola and held the region’s largest slave market. When civil war broke out at Salaga in 1892, many of its Muslim residents fled south, which helped plant Muslim communities in the forest and coastal towns.
Okomfo Anokye and the Golden Stool: Sacred Kingship in Asante (c. 1680–1900)
In the forest, religion was bound most tightly to the state in the Asante Empire. Its founder, Osei Tutu, ruled the Kwaman state around Kumasi from about 1680 and the Asante Empire from 1701, guided by his adviser and chief priest Okomfo Anokye (c. 1655–c. 1717). According to Asante tradition, Anokye caused the Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, to descend from the sky onto Osei Tutu’s lap. The stool is believed to house the spirit of the whole Asante nation, the living, the dead and those yet to be born. It must never touch the ground, and only the Asantehene may handle it.
In 1896 the Asantehene Prempeh I was deported by the British, and in 1900 the Governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederick Hodgson, demanded to sit on the Golden Stool and ordered a search for it. The demand provoked the War of the Golden Stool. Ashanti was annexed, but the stool was never surrendered.
From Elmina Castle to Akropong: Christianity on the Gold Coast (1482–1900)
Christianity arrived by sea. In 1482 the Portuguese built the Castelo de São Jorge da Mina at Elmina, the first European trading post on the Gulf of Guinea and today the oldest surviving European building in sub-Saharan Africa. Historians date the first Christian missionary presence on the coast to the Portuguese arrival, but for more than three hundred years the faith hardly spread beyond the European forts. The castle later became a major point in the Atlantic slave trade, under the Portuguese and then, from 1637 until 1814, the Dutch.
One exception was Philip Quaque (1741–1816), born in Cape Coast, who in 1765 became the first African ordained in the Church of England and then served as chaplain at Cape Coast Castle.
The lasting foundations were laid in the nineteenth century by Protestant missions. The Basel Mission sent its first four missionaries to the Danish settlement at Christiansborg, Accra, in December 1828, but disease killed the pioneers and most of those who followed. Andreas Riis, a Danish minister who arrived with a second group in 1832, was the lone survivor of his party, and in 1835 he moved inland to Akropong in the Akuapem hills, where he founded the church that is now Christ Presbyterian Church, the first Presbyterian congregation in Ghana. In 1843 he recruited 24 West Indian missionaries from Jamaica and Antigua.
Methodism began on 1 January 1835, when the Wesleyan missionary Joseph Rhodes Dunwell landed at Cape Coast. Thomas Birch Freeman, who arrived in 1838, carried the Methodist message to Kumasi and beyond. The Catholic Church returned in an organised form when the Apostolic Prefecture of the Gold Coast was created on 27 September 1879, and Seventh-day Adventist missionaries arrived in 1888. In 1894 the Anglican Holy Trinity Cathedral was completed in Accra, designed by Aston Webb; it became a cathedral when the Diocese of Accra was created in 1909.
The missions’ biggest legacy was education. The Methodist Wesleyan High School, founded at Cape Coast in 1876 and now called Mfantsipim, is recognised as the oldest secondary school in Ghana. Because Western-style schooling came almost entirely through the churches, a Christian education became the route into colonial employment. Many Muslim families avoided mission schools for fear of conversion, which left a lasting educational gap between south and north.
Prophet Harris to the Church of Pentecost: Ghana’s Twentieth-Century Revival
The twentieth century turned Christianity from a coastal, school-based religion into a mass movement, and much of that growth came from African-led churches. In 1913–1914 the Liberian evangelist William Wadé Harris walked from Liberia along the coast of Ivory Coast and into the Gold Coast in a white robe, carrying a bamboo cross, and baptised more than 100,000 people in eighteen months. His convert Maame Harris Tani later led the Twelve Apostles Church of Ghana.
Pentecostalism followed. The British missionary James McKeown began work in the Gold Coast in 1937; in 1962 a ruling by President Kwame Nkrumah gave his church the name Church of Pentecost. It reported 5,226,271 members worldwide in 2025. Independent and Pentecostal churches grew rapidly after independence in 1957: by one estimate, independent African churches grew from 1% of the population in 1960 to 14% by 1985, while Pentecostal churches rose from 2% to 8%.
Islam changed too. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at was formally established in 1921 after Muslims in Saltpond invited the missionary Abdul Rahim Nayyar, and by 1957 it had about 100,000 converts. From the 1940s the Dagbani-speaking cleric Afa Ajura led a reformist, Salafi-leaning movement within Sunni Islam that gained wide support from the 1970s. A Pew survey found that 51% of Ghanaian Muslims identify as Sunni, 16% as Ahmadi and about 8% as Shia, with the rest non-denominational.
The 1992 Constitution, the National Mosque and the 2021 Census
Religious leaders played a public role in Ghana’s return to democracy. In 1991 the Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the Christian Council of Ghana, founded in 1929, called on the military Provisional National Defence Council to restore constitutional rule. The constitution approved by referendum on 28 April 1992, with 93% support, made Ghana a secular republic, and its Article 17 forbids discrimination on grounds of religion or creed.
The 2021 census counted 30,832,019 people, and its religious figures trace the routes described above. The Christian share has barely moved for two decades, from 69% in the 2000 census to just over 71% in 2010 and 71.3% in 2021, but the balance within it has shifted towards Pentecostal and charismatic churches. Islam is the majority religion in the Northern Region and the largest religion in the Upper East Region, with a large minority in the Upper West; in the south, Muslims live mostly in Zongo neighbourhoods, communities founded by migrants from the Sahel who use Hausa as a common language. Muslim organisations have disputed past census counts as too low.
The Ghana National Mosque in Kanda, Accra, begun in 2012 on land allocated by Jerry John Rawlings, was opened on 16 July 2021 by President Nana Akufo-Addo; with room for 15,000 worshippers, it is the second-largest mosque in West Africa. Its first Friday prayer was led by Sheikh Osman Nuhu Sharubutu, National Chief Imam since 1993, who was reported to have turned 100 in 2019. A proposed interdenominational National Cathedral, designed by Adjaye Associates for a site next to Osu Cemetery in Accra, remains unfinished amid debate over its funding; a July 2025 government statement put its cost to the state at about US$97 million.
To see how these religious patterns sit alongside Ghana’s many languages, read our guide to the languages spoken in Ghana; for how the secular state is run, see the government of Ghana; and for a neighbour on the same coast with a very different Christian-Muslim balance, compare religion in Nigeria.