Papua New Guinea records more than 95 per cent of its population as Christian, spread across Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, Seventh-day Adventist, United Church, Pentecostal, Anglican and Baptist denominations, with Catholics the largest single group at around a quarter. It is also a country of more than 800 languages whose ancestral religions were as numerous as its language groups, and those traditions have not been replaced so much as layered over — which is why the census figure and the lived reality diverge sharply.
Eight Hundred Languages, and as Many Spirit Worlds
There was never a single Papuan religion. Each language group had its own cosmology, its own ancestors and its own ritual obligations, and the variety is among the greatest documented anywhere.
Some features recur. Ancestral spirits remain present and are involved in the fortunes of their descendants. Masalai — the Tok Pisin term for place-spirits — inhabit particular pools, rocks, groves and stretches of river, and are dangerous to those who trespass without knowledge. Sorcery, sanguma or puri puri, is understood as the ordinary explanation of death and misfortune. Exchange and feasting, particularly of pigs, carry religious weight, since obligation between the living and between the living and the dead is expressed in what is given away.
Initiation was often elaborate and prolonged, involving seclusion, scarification — the crocodile scarring of the Sepik is the best known — and the transmission of secret knowledge including flutes and sacred objects that women and uninitiated boys were forbidden to see.
The Spirit House
In the Sepik region the architectural expression of all this is the haus tambaran, the spirit house: a tall building with a soaring forward-sloping gable, decorated with carved and painted faces, which held the clan's sacred objects and served as the men's meeting place.
Entry was restricted, and the flutes, masks and carvings inside were the physical form of ancestral power. Missionaries recognised the haus tambaran as the centre of the system they were trying to replace, and in many villages the objects were burned or sold and the buildings abandoned.
A good number survive or have been rebuilt, sometimes for tourism and sometimes because the ceremonies continued. The carvings of the Sepik became one of the most collected bodies of art in the world, which means a considerable part of the religious material culture of the region now sits in museums in Europe, Australia and the United States.
The Missionaries Came in Two Waves
The coast was reached first. The London Missionary Society landed at Port Moresby in 1874 under William Lawes; the Scottish missionary James Chalmers worked the Papuan Gulf and was killed at Goaribari in 1901. Catholic missionaries of the Sacred Heart arrived in 1885, and the German Lutheran Johann Flierl established himself at Finschhafen in 1886.
By informal agreement and colonial arrangement, denominations took spheres, which is why particular provinces remain predominantly Lutheran, Catholic or United Church to this day. The Seventh-day Adventists arrived in the early twentieth century and grew to an unusually large share, and their dietary rules — no pork — collided directly with a society in which pig exchange was the central social and religious transaction.
The Highlands Converted Within Living Memory
The interior was a different story. The highland valleys, holding perhaps a million people, were unknown to outsiders until the 1930s, when the Australian prospectors Michael Leahy and Dan Leahy and the patrol officer Jim Taylor walked into them and found dense agricultural populations.
Missionaries followed within a few years, and the mass conversion of the highlands took place from the 1930s to the 1960s. This is the shortest interval between first contact and Christianisation anywhere on this scale, and it means that in many communities there are people whose grandparents performed the pre-Christian rites and who remember the accounts first-hand.
The compression explains a great deal about highland Christianity: it is fervent, it is central to community identity, and it sits directly on top of a ritual system that was functioning a lifetime ago rather than a millennium ago.
Cargo Movements
The encounter with colonial wealth produced a distinctive family of religious movements. Observing that Europeans received manufactured goods without visibly producing them, some communities concluded that the proper ritual would redirect that flow to its rightful ancestral recipients.
The label cargo cult has been applied loosely and often condescendingly, and anthropologists have long argued that these movements were better understood as attempts to grasp an unequal and unexplained relationship in the available religious vocabulary. Several became substantial political organisations. The Paliau Movement in Manus, led by Paliau Maloat from the 1940s, combined religious innovation with genuine social reform and eventually with electoral politics. Yali Singina in Madang led a movement with similar reach. The Pomio Kivung in East New Britain has persisted for decades.
The Churches Run the Schools and the Clinics
Churches in Papua New Guinea are not only religious bodies. Under long-standing agreements with the state, church agencies operate a very large share of the country's rural health services and a substantial proportion of its schools, funded partly by government and partly by their own denominations.
In parts of the highlands and the islands where government presence is thin, the nearest functioning aid post, the nearest secondary school and the most reliable source of information are all church institutions. This gives clergy an authority that extends well beyond the pulpit and makes the churches essential partners for any government programme, from vaccination to disaster relief.
Writing Christianity Into the Constitution
The 1975 independence constitution already opened by pledging to guard and pass on Christian principles alongside the noble traditions of Papua New Guinean ancestors — a formula that deliberately honoured both sources.
In 2024 parliament went further, amending the constitution to declare Papua New Guinea a Christian country. Supporters presented it as recognition of what the population already is. Opponents, including some church figures, argued that the country's constitutional protection of religious freedom was being compromised, that the amendment risked marginalising the small non-Christian minority, and that it did nothing about the social problems its proponents cited.
A King James Bible had already been installed in Parliament House in 2015, and the amendment is best understood as the completion of a project that had been advancing for a decade.
The Carvings Removed From Parliament
That project produced one episode that crystallised the tension. In 2013 the Speaker of Parliament, Theodore Zurenuoc, ordered the removal and destruction of traditional carvings from Parliament House, including a large carved lintel and a totem pole of ancestral figures, describing them as ungodly idols that had brought a curse on the nation.
The reaction was fierce. The National Museum, academics, artists and a number of church leaders condemned the act as the destruction of national heritage, and legal proceedings followed. The pieces had been commissioned at independence precisely to express the constitutional commitment to ancestral traditions.
The dispute was not between Christians and traditionalists. It was between two Christian positions — one holding that ancestral religion must be repudiated entirely, the other that it is the country's heritage and compatible with faith — and that argument is live in Papua New Guinea today.
Sorcery Accusations and the Law
The most serious religious problem in the country is the violence that follows accusations of sorcery. When a person dies unexpectedly, a family may seek the sorcerer responsible, and the accused — very often an older woman, a widow or an outsider without kin to protect her — may be tortured and killed.
The Sorcery Act of 1971 had recognised belief in sorcery as a potential legal defence, which in effect gave accusations legal standing. It was repealed in 2013 after a series of widely reported killings, and the death penalty was briefly extended to those convicted of sorcery-related murder. A national action plan against sorcery accusation related violence followed, and church, police and community networks have worked to rescue accused people and resettle them.
The problem has not gone away, and it is reported to have worsened in some highland areas. Clergy are frequently the people who intervene, which places them in a position where their pastoral authority is the only thing standing between an accused woman and a crowd.
The Small Minorities
Non-Christians are a very small share of the population. The Baha'i community is present in most provinces and is the largest non-Christian group by some counts. Muslims number a few thousand, a mixture of foreign residents and Papua New Guinean converts, with mosques in Port Moresby, Lae and a handful of provincial centres.
Both operate without significant restriction in law, and the constitutional amendment did not change their legal position. Whether the change in tone alters it in practice is the question raised at the time, and it will be some years before anyone can answer it. There is a wider account in our Papua New Guinea country guide, the neighbourhood in our Melanesia guide, and the placement question in which continent Papua New Guinea belongs to.
