South Sudan is a majority Christian country — most estimates put Christians at around 60 per cent, split mainly between Catholics and Anglicans — with a large share of the population practising traditional religions, often alongside Christianity, and a Muslim minority of roughly six per cent. No reliable religious census exists, and every figure quoted for the country should be treated as an approximation. What is not in doubt is the position of the churches, which are the oldest continuously functioning national institutions the territory has.
The Religions That Were Already There
Before any missionary arrived, the peoples of the southern Nile basin had elaborate religious systems, and they have not gone away. Among the Dinka, the supreme being is Nhialic, associated with the sky and with rain, approached through lesser divinities called jok and through clan-divinities inherited in the male line. Deng, associated with rain and lightning, is among the most important.
The Nuer conception, documented in detail by the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard in the 1930s and 1940s, centres on kwoth, spirit, understood as both a single God of the sky and as manifesting in particular spirits of the air and of the earth. Evans-Pritchard's Nuer Religion became one of the foundational texts of the anthropology of religion, partly because he argued that Nuer thought was theologically sophisticated at a time when that was not the assumption.
Sacrifice is central in both traditions, and the animal is almost always an ox. Cattle are not merely wealth in these societies; they are the medium through which relations with the divine, with ancestors and with other lineages are conducted. A man's identity is bound to a favourite ox whose name he takes.
Prophets, and a Rod Returned After a Century
Nuer religion produced prophets — individuals seized by a spirit of the air who acquired authority across lineages that no ordinary chief possessed. The most significant was Ngundeng Bong, who died in 1906, and who built a great earthen mound at Weideang with his followers and issued prophecies that are still recited.
His brass rod, the dang, was taken by a British officer after a punitive expedition and ended up in Britain. It was returned to Nuer leaders in 2009, and the handover was a substantial political event, attended by senior figures of the southern movement. The episode says something precise about South Sudanese religion: the old prophetic tradition retains authority in parallel with the churches, and among the same people.
How the Missionaries Acquired a Monopoly
Catholic missionaries arrived in the 1850s, when Daniele Comboni founded a mission to Central Africa; his Verona Fathers established stations along the Nile at enormous cost in lives to disease. Anglican missionaries of the Church Missionary Society followed under the Anglo-Egyptian administration.
The decisive intervention came from colonial policy rather than evangelism. Under the Closed District Ordinances and the Southern Policy formalised around 1930, the British administration deliberately separated the southern provinces from the north: Arabic and Islamic proselytising were restricted, Arab traders required permits, English was promoted, and the mission societies were allocated spheres in which they alone ran schools and clinics.
The intention was to protect the south from northern domination, or possibly to attach it eventually to British East Africa. The effect was to make Christianity the language of southern education and to create an educated southern elite that was Christian, English-speaking and estranged from Khartoum — which is the origin of the division that produced two civil wars and eventually a border.
1964: Every Foreign Missionary Expelled
In February 1964 the Khartoum government expelled all foreign missionaries from the southern provinces — some 300 people — accusing them of fomenting rebellion. Mission schools were nationalised and Friday replaced Sunday as the day of rest.
The expulsion was intended to break southern Christianity. It did the opposite. With the foreigners gone, leadership passed to southern Sudanese clergy and catechists, and the church became a genuinely indigenous institution rather than an imported one. Growth accelerated.
Why Christianity Grew Fastest During the Wars
The largest expansion of Christianity in the region occurred during the second civil war, from 1983 to 2005 — precisely the period of maximum violence, displacement and famine.
Several things drove it. The imposition of sharia on the whole of Sudan in 1983 made Christianity a marker of southern resistance. Traditional religion was territorially anchored — tied to particular shrines, cattle camps and clan lands — and displacement severed people from it, while the churches operated wherever the displaced went, including in the camps around Khartoum and in Kenya and Uganda. Church networks also delivered relief, education and the only functioning administration in much of the liberated territory.
By the end of the war, Christianity had shifted from the religion of a mission-educated minority to the majority faith of the southern population, and the churches had acquired moral standing that no political movement matched.
Wunlit, and the Peace the Churches Made
In 1999, at Wunlit in what is now Lakes State, the New Sudan Council of Churches convened a conference between Dinka and Nuer leaders whose communities had been killing each other in a conflict-within-the-conflict that had cost enormous numbers of lives and destroyed the cattle economy along the Nile.
The process used the churches' organisational reach and the traditional forms together. Delegates crossed the river under guarantees of safety; chiefs and elders spoke for days; and the settlement was sealed with the sacrifice of a white bull, the customary Dinka means of ending a blood feud. The Wunlit Covenant held for years, and it remains the most successful peace agreement in South Sudanese history, made by clergy using rites older than the church.
Independence, and the War That Followed It
The 2005 peace agreement was negotiated with church involvement, and the 2011 referendum that produced independence was near-unanimous. The new state adopted a constitution guaranteeing religious freedom and declaring that all religions are treated equally.
Within two and a half years it was at war with itself, in a conflict between factions aligned largely with Dinka and Nuer identities rather than with religion. Churches were not the target, but they were not spared either: worshippers were killed in Juba, and clergy were attacked in the countryside.
Throughout, the South Sudan Council of Churches has functioned as mediator, monitor and critic. It is one of the very few bodies in the country with a presence in every state and credibility with more than one faction.
The Retreat Where a Pope Knelt
In April 2019, the Vatican hosted a two-day spiritual retreat for South Sudan's political leadership, including President Salva Kiir and his rival Riek Machar. At the end of it, Pope Francis — then 82 and with serious difficulty walking — knelt and kissed the feet of the assembled leaders, asking them to keep the peace.
The images circulated worldwide and inside South Sudan. In February 2023 Francis travelled to Juba with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshields — a joint pilgrimage by the heads of three separate traditions, undertaken together precisely because the country's Christians are divided among them.
Who the Churches Actually Are
Four bodies dominate. The Catholic Church, organised in dioceses across the country and descended from the Comboni mission, is the largest single denomination. The Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan, Anglican, is comparably large and in some regions larger. The Presbyterian Church of South Sudan and the Sudan Interior Church, the latter evangelical in origin, make up most of the remainder, alongside a growing number of Pentecostal congregations in the towns.
Individual clergy carry unusual weight. Bishop Paride Taban, the first South Sudanese Catholic bishop of Torit, retired to found the Holy Trinity Peace Village at Kuron in a remote and heavily armed corner of the east, deliberately settling members of rival pastoral groups in one community with shared schooling, water and grazing. It has functioned for years as a working demonstration that the cattle raiding cycle is not inevitable.
Muslims in a Christian-Majority State
South Sudan's Muslim minority is concentrated in the towns, particularly Juba, Malakal and Wau, and includes both southerners whose families converted during the Turco-Egyptian and Mahdist periods and northern-origin traders long settled in the south.
They have generally been treated without hostility since independence, and government ceremonies routinely include both Christian and Muslim prayers. Eid is a public holiday alongside Christmas and Easter. Given that the country's founding conflict was framed in religious terms, the absence of retaliation against southern Muslims is a point South Sudanese officials make deliberately.
The Old Rites Have Not Gone
Surveys and pastoral reports agree that a large share of South Sudanese Christians continue to practise elements of traditional religion — consulting diviners about illness, sacrificing cattle at funerals and marriages, observing clan taboos, and appealing to ancestors.
Clergy respond to this in different ways. Some denounce it; others, particularly in the Catholic and Anglican churches, have worked to incorporate what can be incorporated, using vernacular liturgies, local music and cattle imagery in preaching to peoples for whom the ox is already the central sacrificial animal. The Good Shepherd translates unusually well in a cattle-keeping society.
The result is a religious landscape where the categories used by outsiders — Christian, traditional, Muslim — describe overlapping practices rather than separate populations. The country's short history and geography are set out in our South Sudan country guide, the river system these communities live along in our Nile guide, and the remainder in ten facts about South Sudan.
