Lebanon has no religious majority. Muslims, divided roughly equally between Sunni and Shia, are estimated at around two-thirds of the resident population. Christians, the largest group of whom are Maronite Catholics, make up around a third, and the Druze about 5 per cent. Nobody knows the exact figures, because Lebanon has not held an official census since 1932. The count is politically explosive, since the state itself is built on religion: the constitution recognises 18 religious communities, and by long-standing convention the president is a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim.
A State Built on Eighteen Sects
Lebanon's recognised communities are twelve Christian churches, the Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Assyrian, Chaldean, Latin Catholic, Coptic and Protestant, together with five Muslim communities, Sunni, Shia, Druze, Alawite and Ismaili, and the Jewish community. Each has its own clergy and its own courts for marriage, divorce and inheritance. There is no civil marriage in Lebanon, so couples from different sects, or couples who want a civil ceremony, often travel to Cyprus to marry, and Lebanon then registers the marriage.
The division of power goes back to the unwritten National Pact of 1943, agreed at independence from France. It gave the presidency to the Maronites, the premiership to the Sunnis and the speakership to the Shia, and parliament's seats were divided six Christian to five Muslim, reflecting the 1932 census, when Christians were a slight majority. After the civil war, the Taif Agreement of 1989 kept the three top posts but moved power from the president to the cabinet and split parliament's 128 seats equally between Christians and Muslims. Many other offices are also allocated by sect. The commander of the army, for example, is always a Maronite.
Mount Lebanon: Maronites and the Holy Valley
The Maronite Church takes its name from Saint Maron, a Syrian monk who died in about 410. His followers, persecuted in the lowlands, took refuge in the mountains of northern Lebanon from the seventh century. The Qadisha Valley, the "Holy Valley", is lined with cave chapels and monasteries cut into its cliffs, and it is listed with the nearby Forest of the Cedars of God as a World Heritage Site. The Maronites entered full communion with Rome at the time of the Crusades, and they are an Eastern Catholic church with their own liturgy in Arabic and Syriac. Their patriarch lives at Bkerké, above the bay of Jounieh, and has often acted as a political voice for the community as well as its spiritual head.
Across that bay, a 15-tonne bronze statue of Our Lady of Lebanon, erected in 1908, stands on the hill of Harissa. Muslim as well as Christian families visit it, since Mary is honoured in the Quran, and since 2010 Lebanon has marked the Feast of the Annunciation on 25 March as a national holiday shared by Christians and Muslims.
Achrafieh, Koura and Zahle: The Other Christians
The Greek Orthodox are Lebanon's second-largest Christian community. Historically they were an urban, merchant community, concentrated in Beirut's Achrafieh district and in the olive-growing Koura district in the north, and they belong to the ancient Patriarchate of Antioch, whose patriarch now lives in Damascus. By convention the deputy speaker of parliament and the deputy prime minister are Greek Orthodox. The monastery and university of Balamand, above the Koura, are among the community's main institutions. The Greek Catholics, or Melkites, who split from the Orthodox in the eighteenth century to join Rome, are strongest in the Bekaa city of Zahle, often described as the largest Christian town in the region.
The Chouf: The Druze
The Druze faith emerged in Egypt in the early eleventh century as an offshoot of Ismaili Shia Islam. Its followers took refuge in the mountains of southern Lebanon and Syria. Since about 1043, the faith has accepted no converts, and its scriptures and doctrines are known in full only to initiated members, the uqqal. The Chouf mountains south-east of Beirut are its Lebanese heartland, long dominated by the Jumblatt family.
The Druze and Maronites shared Mount Lebanon for centuries, and their rivalry shaped modern Lebanon. After massacres in 1860, European powers pressed the Ottoman Empire to create the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, an autonomous province governed by an Ottoman Christian, which lasted from 1861 until the First World War.
Beirut: Mosque Beside Cathedral
In the centre of Beirut, the Maronite Cathedral of Saint George stands wall to wall with the Mohammad al-Amin Mosque, whose blue domes and 65 m minarets were completed in 2008. The mosque was the project of Rafik Hariri, the Sunni billionaire prime minister who rebuilt downtown Beirut after the civil war. He was assassinated by a massive car bomb in February 2005 and is buried beside it. The Sunni community is concentrated in the coastal cities of Beirut, Tripoli and Sidon, and in parts of the north and the Bekaa Valley.
Beirut also shows the Armenian presence. Survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915 settled in the Beirut suburb of Bourj Hammoud, still largely Armenian, and the Armenian Apostolic Catholicosate of Cilicia has its seat at Antelias, north of the city. Lebanon's Jewish community, which once numbered several thousand, now has only a few dozen members, but the Maghen Abraham synagogue in Beirut was restored in the 2010s.
The South and the Bekaa: Lebanon's Shia
The Shia community, historically the poorest and least politically powerful, lives mainly in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut, known as the Dahiyeh. Its political rise began in the 1970s under the Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr, founder of the movement that became the Amal party. He disappeared on a visit to Libya in 1978. Hezbollah, founded in 1982 with Iranian support during the Israeli invasion, grew into both a political party and an armed force more powerful than the national army. Its war with Israel in 2024, which ended in a ceasefire in November of that year, devastated much of the south and the Dahiyeh.
Shia religious life is most visible during Ashura, the commemoration of the death of the Prophet's grandson Husayn. In the southern town of Nabatieh, it is marked each year with processions and a passion play.
Voting, Registering and Leaving by Sect
Religion follows Lebanese citizens through official life. Every citizen is registered by sect, normally the father's, and that registration decides which religious court handles their marriage, which parliamentary seats they can stand for and, in practice, many public jobs. Parliamentary constituencies have seats reserved for particular sects, although everyone in the district votes for them. A 2009 ruling by the interior ministry allowed citizens to remove their sect from the civil register, and a small but growing number have done so. Secular movements, such as the Beirut Madinati list that contested the 2016 municipal elections, have argued for abolishing the sectarian system altogether, as the Taif Agreement itself envisaged.
Older Layers: Byblos, Baalbek, Tyre
Lebanon's religious history is much older than any of its modern communities. Byblos, north of Beirut, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited towns in the world, and its Phoenician temples were dedicated to the city's goddess. In the Bekaa, the Roman temples of Baalbek, including the colossal Temple of Jupiter and the remarkably well-preserved Temple of Bacchus, are a World Heritage Site. Tyre and Sidon appear in the Gospels as places Jesus visited, and the village of Qana in the south claims, against rival sites in Galilee, to be the Cana of the wedding at which he turned water into wine.
War, Crisis and Emigration
The sectarian system was meant to prevent conflict, but it could not contain the civil war of 1975 to 1990, which was fought largely along religious and political lines and killed about 150,000 people. It began in April 1975 with an attack on a bus carrying Palestinians in the Christian suburb of Ain el-Remmaneh, and for fifteen years Beirut was split by the Green Line between a mainly Muslim west and a mainly Christian east, a no-man's-land so overgrown that it took its name from the vegetation. Since the war, the system has been blamed for paralysis and corruption. Parliament failed to elect a president for more than two years before Joseph Aoun, the army commander, was chosen in January 2025. Lebanon's banking system collapsed in 2019, and on 4 August 2020 a huge explosion of ammonium nitrate at the port of Beirut killed more than 200 people and destroyed much of the surrounding city.
Each crisis has driven emigration, which has also changed the religious balance. Christians emigrated in large numbers during the twentieth century, to the Americas, Australia and West Africa, and the Lebanese diaspora is often estimated to be several times larger than the population of Lebanon itself. For comparison with the religious mix across the border, see our overview of religion in Syria, and for the capital at the centre of it all, our guide to Beirut.