Kenya is a mainly Christian country: the 2019 Kenya Population and Housing Census counted 85.5% of the population as Christian, split between Protestants (33.4%), Catholics (20.6%), Evangelicals (20.4%), African Instituted Churches (7.0%) and smaller groups, while 10.9% were Muslim. Kenya has no state religion; the 2010 constitution guarantees freedom of worship, though it also provides for Kadhi courts that settle Muslim family cases. The main minorities after Islam are people of no religion (1.6% in 2019), followers of traditional African religions (0.7%) and Hindus (about 60,000 people, 0.13%), alongside small Baháʼí and Buddhist communities.
Kenya’s census groups churches into broad religious categories rather than listing every denomination, so the headings below follow those of the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS). The 2019 census counted 47.6 million people in all; its religion tables cover 47.2 million, and every share quoted here is a share of that figure.
Protestant Churches: 15.8 Million Kenyans and a Mission Begun at Rabai in 1844
The largest single census category is Protestant, with 15,777,430 people in 2019, or 33.4% of the country. Its story in Kenya begins on the coast. Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German Lutheran working for the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS), landed at Mombasa in 1844 and went inland to Rabai, about 12 miles north-west of the town. His wife Rosine died of malaria there on 9 June 1844, and their newborn child three days later. In 1846 Krapf and Johannes Rebmann set up the Rabai mission, the first CMS station in Kenya, and Krapf translated parts of the Bible into Swahili. The two men were also the first Europeans to see Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro, guided by Kamba people.
From that start grew the Anglican Church of Kenya, which was organised as the Diocese of Eastern Equatorial Africa in 1884 and became its own province in 1970, when Festo Olang’ became the first African archbishop of Kenya. It now has 41 dioceses and is led by Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit. Scottish missionaries arrived at Kibwezi in 1891 and laid the foundations of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, headquartered in Nairobi’s South C. The Africa Inland Mission settled in Ukambani, the Seventh-day Adventists and Lutherans built their own networks, and American Quakers walked from Kisumu to Kaimosi in western Kenya in August 1902 to found a mission. Their work explains a striking figure: with about 119,000 members in 2017, according to the Friends World Committee for Consultation, Kenya has more Quakers than any other country.
The mainline churches have also been political actors. Anglican preachers denounced the Mau Mau rising in the 1950s, but under President Daniel arap Moi, Bishop David Gitari’s 1987 sermon against election controls opened a long period in which church leaders pressed for civil rights and multiparty politics.
The Catholic Church from Malindi in 1498 to Nairobi’s Holy Family Basilica
With 9,726,143 members in 2019 (20.6%), the Catholic Church is the largest single denomination in Kenya, since the Protestant figure combines many separate churches. Its first contact with the coast came when Vasco da Gama’s fleet called at Malindi in 1498. The Portuguese began Fort Jesus in Mombasa in 1592, and by 1597 Augustinian friars there reported about 600 African converts. That first mission ended violently: in 1626 the Sultan of Mombasa, Yusuf ibn al-Hasan, who had been baptised in Goa as Dom Jeronimo Chingulia, renounced Christianity, and in 1631 he killed the prior, two priests and around 280 lay Christians, now remembered as the Martyrs of Mombasa. Portuguese influence on the coast was gone by 1740.
The modern mission began on 30 December 1889, when Spiritan Father Gommenginger and Brother Acheul founded a station at Ndera on the Tana River. Spiritans reached Mombasa in 1891 and on 12 August 1899 arrived in Nairobi on the new Uganda Railway, founding St Austin’s Parish. Michael Otunga, born in western Kenya, became the first Kenyan cardinal in 1973 and was Archbishop of Nairobi until 1997. The seat of that archdiocese is the Cathedral Basilica of the Holy Family in central Nairobi, the church shown at the top of this page. Today the church runs four ecclesiastical provinces, 25 dioceses and more than 1,100 parishes, along with a large share of Kenya’s schools and hospitals.
Evangelical and Pentecostal Congregations: 20.4% in 2019
Unlike the published 2009 tables, the 2019 census listed Evangelicals as a separate category, and 9,648,674 people chose it, almost exactly as many as named the Catholic Church. The category gathers Pentecostal and charismatic churches along with other evangelical bodies. Some researchers estimate that 30 to 35% of Kenyans worship in a Pentecostal style, a figure that overlaps several census categories because many members of older churches also attend charismatic services.
The speed of this growth has a darker side, and it has pushed the government to look at regulating churches. In 2023 police investigating Good News International Ministries, an apocalyptic group led by Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, uncovered mass graves in the Shakahola Forest of Kilifi County, where followers had been told to starve themselves to death. The Kenya Red Cross reported 410 people missing by 30 April that year, and autopsies on more than 100 bodies found starvation, strangulation and blunt trauma.
African Instituted Churches: the Akurinu, Legio Maria and 3.3 Million Members
About 3.29 million Kenyans (7.0%) belong to African Instituted Churches, bodies founded by Africans rather than foreign missions, which mix Christian scripture with local practice. The Holy Ghost Church of East Africa, whose members are known as the Akurinu, traces its origins to Limuru in Kiambu County between 1926 and 1930. Its founders say they climbed Mount Kenya, where one of them, Lilian Njeru, was told to throw away her ornaments and cover her hair; Akurinu still dress in white robes and turbans and pray with raised hands. The church was registered in 1959 and is strongest among the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru of central Kenya.
In Luo country by Lake Victoria, Legio Maria grew from visions reported by Catholics from around 1938 and broke away when followers proclaimed Simeo Ondetto the returned Son of God. It was registered as a church in 1966, the year co-founder Mama Maria died and was buried at Efeso Church in Siaya County, and it has since spread to Uganda, Tanzania and Congo. Outside these independent churches, the census counted 201,263 Eastern Orthodox Christians, which makes Kenya’s Orthodox Church the third largest Orthodox body in sub-Saharan Africa after the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches. Its archdiocese in Nairobi has added dioceses for Nyeri and Mount Kenya and for Kisumu and West Kenya since 2016.
Islam on the Swahili Coast and in North Eastern Kenya: 5.1 Million Muslims
Islam is far older in Kenya than Christianity. Muslim merchants were reaching the Swahili coast by about the 8th century, and archaeologists have found a Muslim town on Manda Island in the Lamu archipelago dating to the 10th century. When Ibn Battuta sailed down this coast in 1331, he praised the piety of its people and their well-built wooden mosques. Trade and marriage between Shirazi and Arab settlers and the local Bantu population produced the Swahili people and the Swahili language, a Bantu tongue with many Arabic loanwords.
The 2019 census counted 5,125,186 Muslims, or 10.9%. Most are Sunni of the Shafi’i school; about 7% of Muslims are Shia, many of them Ismailis and Dawoodi Bohras of South Asian descent, and there are smaller Ahmadi and Ibadi communities. Muslims are concentrated along the coast, in old towns such as Lamu, Malindi and Mombasa, and in the former North Eastern Province around Garissa, Wajir and Mandera, where the population is largely Somali. Nairobi also has a large Muslim population and several mosques.
The 2010 constitution, approved by 68.6% of voters in a referendum on 4 August 2010, keeps Kadhi courts under Article 170. They rule only on Muslim personal status, marriage, divorce and inheritance, and only when every party is Muslim and accepts their jurisdiction. Several church leaders opposed their inclusion during the referendum campaign. Since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, Muslim groups have complained of being targeted by security forces, while al-Shabaab attacks on Christians in the north-east have strained relations in that region.
Ngai, Mount Kenya and the Traditional Religions
Before Christian and Muslim teachers reached the interior, Kenyan communities practised their own religions, and their ideas still shape funerals, initiation and prayer. Most centre on a creator and on the continuing presence of the dead, who are thought able to bring good fortune or harm and must be honoured with proper burial and offerings. Traditional Kikuyu believers hold that Ngai lives on Mount Kenya and pray facing its peaks. The Mijikenda of the coast keep sacred forest shrines, the kaya, where sacrifices are made. Among the Maasai, Kisii, Turkana, Samburu and Pokot a minority still follow traditional religion alone.
In the census, the number who give traditional religion as their only faith is small and falling: 635,352 in 2009 and 318,726 in 2019, or 0.7% of the population. The shrinking figure partly reflects how people answer, since many Christians and Muslims also keep ancestral customs without listing them.
Hindus, Baháʼís and Kenyans with No Religion
Indian Ocean trade linked the Kenyan coast with Gujarat and other parts of India for centuries, but most Kenyan Hindus descend from labourers and traders who came from British India when the Uganda Railway was built from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria between 1896 and 1901. The 2019 census counted 60,287 Hindus (0.13%), most of them Gujarati, living in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Eldoret and Thika. Kenya has more than 15 Hindu temples, among them the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir and the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Nairobi, and the Hindu Council of Kenya has secured official recognition of Hinduism as a religion.
The Baháʼí Faith has been present since 1945, and its members took part in a national community health project in the 1990s. Buddhism has a small following centred on the Nairobi Buddhist Vihara. The 2019 census recorded 755,748 people with no religion, 1.6% of the total and more than traditionalists and Hindus combined. Even so, a 2012 Gallup survey found that 90% of Kenyans called themselves religious, placing Kenya among the ten most religious populations in the world.
Faith maps closely onto language and place in Kenya: Swahili spread with Islam along the coast, while missions wrote down Kikuyu, Kamba and Luo for the first time to translate scripture, a link explored further in our guide to the languages spoken in Kenya. To see the mountain at the heart of Kikuyu belief, read our piece on Mount Kenya, the place of light, or follow the coastal story to the port of Mombasa, where both Islam and Christianity first came ashore.