Religion in Nigeria

Nigeria has not asked a census question about religion since 1963, so every published figure on its Christian, Muslim, and traditional-religion populations is a survey-based estimate, not an official count. Pew Research, the Association of Religion Data Archives, and other bodies produce estimates that diverge by several points, generally placing Islam and Christianity close to parity and indigenous belief systems as a smaller, persistent minority.

A demography without a census

Nigeria has not asked its citizens a census question about religion since 1963. A further attempt in 1973 produced results that were never published amid allegations of data falsification, and the question has been left out of every headcount since, including the 1991 and 2006 censuses and the count planned for the current cycle ^S2. The National Population Commission has treated religious affiliation as too politically sensitive to measure directly, given how heavily it weighs on the distribution of federal appointments, revenue allocation, and political representation between the north and south ^S2. Because of this gap, every religious demographic figure published about Nigeria today is a survey estimate or a statistical projection, not a government count, and readers should treat any single percentage as one data point among several competing ones rather than as settled fact ^S1^S2

Estimated composition

Published estimates diverge by research body and methodology, sometimes by several percentage points, because each relies on different underlying surveys ^S1^S2^S3. Pew Research Center, drawing on Nigeria's Demographic and Health Surveys from 2013 and 2018 together with its own 2024 Global Attitudes polling, put Muslims at 56.1% of the population and Christians at 43.4% as of 2020, with about 0.6% following other faiths or professing no religion ^S1. An earlier Pew estimate built on 2010 data found the two faiths nearly level, at 49.3% Christian to 48.8% Muslim ^S3. The Association of Religion Data Archives, drawing on the World Religion Database, projected a near-even split for 2025 of 46.3% Muslim to 45.8% Christian, while the CIA World Factbook and Statista have both placed Muslims in a clearer majority, in the 53–54% range ^S2^S3. Pew's own projection models a modest widening of the Muslim share by 2050, to roughly 58.5% against a Christian share nearer 39%, attributed to differing regional fertility and population growth rather than to conversion between faiths ^S1

Traditional and indigenous belief systems

Adherents of Yoruba, Igbo, and other indigenous belief systems are consistently the smallest of the three broad categories in every published estimate, but the size of that minority varies widely by how each survey defines it, from under 1% in some Pew tallies to roughly 6–7% in estimates that group indigenous worship together with other minority faiths and the religiously unaffiliated ^S1^S3^S4. Part of the spread is definitional rather than a genuine disagreement about practice: many Nigerians who identify to pollsters as Christian or Muslim also maintain customs rooted in older traditions, including consulting diviners and honouring ancestral or deity shrines, so formal-adherence figures likely understate how widely these traditions are still practised ^S4. Yoruba òrìṣà worship, centred on deities including Ṣàngó and Ọ̀ṣun, remains actively practised among the yoruba people, with public expression each year at events such as the osun osogbo festival ^S4

Christianity

Christianity's modern presence in Nigeria traces to missionary activity that reached the southern coast before spreading inland; Protestant denominations took particular hold among the yoruba people of the south-west, while Roman Catholicism became especially prominent in Igbo-majority areas of the south-east ^S4. The igbo people and neighbouring south-eastern communities remain a stronghold of Catholic and mainline Protestant practice today, alongside a large and growing Pentecostal and evangelical sector across the south more broadly ^S4

Islam

Islam's establishment in what is now northern Nigeria long predates British colonial rule, and the region's Islamic institutions were consolidated further by the nineteenth-century jihad that founded the sokoto caliphate, an Islamic state governing dozens of emirates across the far north ^S4. The overwhelming majority of Nigerian Muslims practise Sunni Islam, though a Shia minority is documented, described as concentrated in Sokoto State ^S4. Islamic religious life among the hausa people and Fulani communities of the north also shapes major public events, including the horseback processions of the durbar festival held around the Eid festivals ^S4

Religious diversity in global context

Despite the uncertainty in exact percentages, Nigeria consistently ranks among the world's most religiously diverse large populations. On Pew Research Center's Religious Diversity Index, which scores 201 countries from 0 to 10 across seven broad religious categories using more than 2,700 censuses and surveys, Nigeria scored 5.8, placing it 34th globally and second only to the United States among the ten most populous countries ^S5. Pew's decade-over-decade comparison found Nigeria's overall religious composition relatively stable between 2010 and 2020, even as the estimates produced by different research bodies for any single year continue to vary ^S5^S1

Reading the numbers responsibly

No figure in this article should be read as an official Nigerian government statistic, because none exists past 1963 ^S2. The consistent pattern across Pew, ARDA, the CIA World Factbook, and Statista is that Christianity and Islam are roughly comparable in overall size nationally, with indigenous belief systems a smaller but culturally durable third category whose formal count is especially sensitive to survey design ^S1^S2^S3^S4. Any claim of a precise national majority for one faith over another should be treated as contested unless the counting body and its method are stated alongside it ^S2