Seven in ten Jamaicans are Christian: the 2011 census counted 69% of the population as Christian, almost all of them Protestant (64.8%), led by the Church of God family of churches (26%), Seventh-day Adventists (12%), Pentecostals (11%), Baptists (7%) and Anglicans (3%), with Catholics at about 2%. The next largest group, 21.3%, said they had no religion. Jamaica has no state church; its constitution guarantees freedom of religion and outlaws religious discrimination. The main minority faiths are Rastafari (1.1%), the Afro-Jamaican Revival and Kumina traditions, and small Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Baháʼí communities.
Those national figures hide a strongly regional pattern. Jamaica is divided into 14 parishes, grouped into three historic counties: Surrey in the east, Middlesex in the centre and Cornwall in the west. Each part of the island was shaped by a different chapter of its history, from Spanish settlement and English conquest to slavery, emancipation and the arrival of indentured workers from Africa and India, and each still carries a different religious accent.
Kingston and St Andrew: Cathedrals, the Synagogue and the Birthplace of Rastafari
The capital holds the widest mix of faiths on the island, because almost every immigrant group that reached Jamaica ended up in Kingston. The Catholic Church, banned after the English took the island in 1655 and tolerated again only from the late 18th century, has its seat at Holy Trinity Cathedral downtown, a Byzantine Revival church by the American architect Raymond F. Almirall. It replaced a church wrecked by the 1907 earthquake and was consecrated in 1911; Pope John Paul II visited on 10 August 1993, and the state funerals of Prime Ministers Michael Manley and Edward Seaga were held there. Catholics number about 50,000 across three dioceses, based in Kingston, Mandeville and Montego Bay.
Kingston is also home to the island’s Jewish congregation. Jews first came under Spanish rule, arrived in larger numbers in the 17th century and built synagogues in Port Royal, Spanish Town, Montego Bay and Kingston. As the capital moved, the communities merged: the United Congregation of Israelites built Sha’are Shalom in 1885, rebuilt it in 1912 after the 1907 earthquake destroyed it, and in 1921 the Ashkenazi community merged with it to form a single congregation. Today about 200 people worship there. On Hagley Park Road stands the Sanatan Dharma Mandir, built in the 1970s and the only Hindu temple recognised by the government; the 2011 census counted 1,836 Hindus. Hinduism reached Jamaica in 1845 with Indian indentured labourers, and there were more than 25,000 Hindus by the mid-20th century, but conversion to Christianity and return migration to India shrank the community. Islam is older still on the island: many enslaved West Africans were Muslims, and the writers Bryan Edwards and Richard Robert Madden described enslaved men who could recite the Quran and write Arabic. Jamaica now has an estimated 1,500 to 6,500 Muslims and perhaps 8,000 Baháʼís.
Rastafari was born in this corner of the island in the 1930s. Leonard Howell, back in Jamaica from Panama and New York in 1932, began preaching in 1933 that the newly crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia was the Messiah returned, and was jailed for sedition for it. Its early following came mostly from the poorer sectors of society, it grew rapidly in the 1950s, and when Haile Selassie visited Jamaica in April 1966, thousands of Rastafari gathered to see his arrival at the airport. In 1958 Emmanuel Charles Edwards founded the Bobo Ashanti order, which grew up at Bull Bay near Kingston. The 2011 census counted 1.1% of Jamaicans as Rastafari.
Spanish Town and St Catherine: a 16th-Century Cathedral Site and Howell’s Pinnacle
Spanish Town, founded as Villa de la Vega in 1534, was the capital of Jamaica under both Spain and Britain until 1872, and it carries the oldest layer of Christianity on the island. The Spanish built one of the first cathedrals in the Americas here, and after the English conquest the Anglican church took over the site. Its successor is the Cathedral of St Jago de la Vega, shown at the top of this page, with its brick tower rising over the town centre. The Anglican Church arrived with the English conquerors and built parish churches across the island, yet only 3% of Jamaicans called themselves Anglican in 2011.
Spanish Town also had two early synagogues: the Sephardi Neveh Shalom, consecrated in 1704, and the Ashkenazi Mikveh Yisrael of 1796, which merged as their members followed the capital to Kingston. In the hills of St Catherine, Leonard Howell founded Pinnacle, a self-sufficient Rastafari commune that the colonial authorities and the politician Alexander Bustamante treated as a threat. Pinnacle became known across the island as a Rastafari centre, and Howell’s wife Tethen Bent is buried there.
St Thomas, Portland and St Mary: Kumina Drums and the Morant Bay Baptists
St Thomas and Portland, the eastern parishes of the county of Surrey, together with neighbouring St Mary, are the heartland of Kumina. Kumina developed in St Thomas in the 19th century among labourers brought from the Kongo region of Central Africa after the abolition of slavery. It centres on healing ceremonies with drumming, dance, animal sacrifice and spirit possession, and unlike Zion Revival it does not treat the Bible as its main authority. From St Thomas it spread to Portland, St Mary, St Catherine and Kingston. Myal, an older Afro-Jamaican spirit tradition, blended with it in the second half of the 19th century.
St Thomas is also where Baptist faith and protest met in 1865. Paul Bogle, a Baptist deacon, led the protesters at Morant Bay in October of that year; after the Morant Bay rebellion was put down under martial law, he was hanged on 24 October 1865. He is now one of Jamaica’s National Heroes. The colonial law that banned Obeah and Myal remains on the books, though it has rarely been enforced since independence in 1962. In 1940, the authorities also used the Jamaica Gazette to ban a Rastafari meeting at Port Morant in the same parish.
Cornwall: Baptist Montego Bay, Falmouth and the Moravian South-West
The western county of Cornwall, made up of St James, Trelawny, Hanover, Westmoreland and St Elizabeth, was sugar country, and its history of religion is bound up with slavery and its end. The Moravians came first. On 7 December 1754 three missionaries landed on the coast of St Elizabeth at the invitation of planters and set up their base on the Bogue estate, deliberately working in the countryside among the enslaved population rather than in the towns.
English Baptists followed, and their chapels led by Black deacons became centres of organised resistance. Samuel Sharpe, a deacon at the Burchell Baptist Church in Montego Bay, led the rebellion that began on 25 December 1831 and drew in up to 60,000 of Jamaica’s 300,000 enslaved people. The rising was crushed and Sharpe was hanged in 1832, but it pushed Parliament towards abolishing slavery across the British Empire. In Falmouth, William Knibb, minister of the Baptist church from 1830, saw white planters burn his chapel, one of about a dozen Baptist chapels destroyed after the revolt; his congregation grew from 650 to 1,280 members over the following decade and planted six daughter churches. Jamaica awarded Knibb the Order of Merit in 1988.
The west also saw a violent clash between Rastafari and the state: after a violent altercation at a petrol station in Montego Bay in April 1963, police and soldiers detained Rastafari across Jamaica in what became known as the Coral Gardens incident, killing and torturing many; the government issued an official apology in 2017. The Catholic Church has a diocese at Montego Bay, and in Trelawny a small Orthodox mission, St Moses the Black, is one of the two congregations of the Jamaican Orthodox Mission founded in 2015.
The Middlesex Heartland: Church of God Mandeville and Revival Watt Town
The central county of Middlesex, made up of St Catherine, St Mary, Clarendon, Manchester and St Ann, holds many congregations of the evangelical churches that now lead the census. The 26% recorded under Church of God covers several related denominations. One of them, the Church of God in Jamaica, lists 111 congregations in six regions, and the largest region, with 27 congregations, covers Manchester and St Elizabeth; another 21 sit in St Catherine, Manchester and Clarendon. Mandeville, the main town of Manchester, is also an Adventist centre: Northern Caribbean University, founded in 1907 and run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, has its main campus there.
St Ann holds the most sacred site of Revivalism, a faith that grew out of the Great Revival of 1860 and 1861, when Africans in Jamaica blended mission Christianity with African practice. Its centre is Watt Town, and the 2011 census counted 36,294 Revivalists. In 2024 UNESCO inscribed the pilgrimage to Watt Town on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognising the journey Revivalists make to the site.
Taken together, the regions explain the national figures: Anglican and Catholic cathedrals where colonial power sat, Baptist chapels on the old sugar estates of the west, African-derived traditions in the east, Rastafari in Kingston and St Catherine, and evangelical congregations spread thickly through the centre. For the physical setting of each region, see our guide to Jamaica’s geography, and for the capital where most minority faiths gather, read about Kingston, the capital of Jamaica.