Religion
Christians form 80.3% of the population, while 9.6% of the population maintain Indigenous beliefs. Islam is practiced by 10.1% of the country's population (2003 census). There are many missionary groups operating in the country, including Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics, Grace Brethren, and Jehovah's Witnesses. While these missionaries are predominantly from the United States, France, Italy, and Spain, many are also from Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other African countries. Many missionaries left the country due to fighting between rebel and government forces in 2002 and 2003. Many have now returned to the country.
Read more about this topic: Central African Republic
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.”
—Anita Brookner (b. 1938)
“All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to children by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the philosophers celebrate in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made—no matter how indirectly—to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping presence, who shall dare to come in?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)