page_title: Religion in Chad
section_title: Christianity
hierarchical_section_title: Religion in Chad / Christianity
caption_attribution_description: English: Notre Dame de N'Djaména, catholic cathedral in N'Djaména (N'Djamena, formerly Fort Lamy), Chad, Central Africa.
context_page_description: Religion in Chad is diverse, with adherents of Islam and Christianity representing almost half of the population each. Smaller populations of non-religious people as well as adherents of other faiths are also present.
  Among Chadian Muslims, 48% professed to be Sunni, 21% Shia, 4% Ahmadi and 23% just Muslim. Muslims are largely concentrated in northern and eastern Chad, and animists and Christians live primarily in southern Chad and Guéra.
  Islam was brought in the course of the Muslim conquest of the Sudan region, in the case of Chad complete in the 11th century with the conversion of the Kanem-Bornu Empire.
  Christianity arrived in Chad with the French, by the end of the 19th century.
  The constitution provides for a secular state and guarantees religious freedom.
context_section_description: Christianity arrived in Chad in the twentieth century, shortly after the colonial conquest. Contrary to the dominant pattern in some other parts of Africa, however, where the colonial powers encouraged the spread of the faith, the earliest French officials in Chad advised against it. This recommendation, however, probably reflected European paternalism and favoritism toward Islam rather than a display of liberalism. In any case, the French military administration followed such counsel for the first two decades of the century, the time it took to conquer the new colony and establish control over its people. Following World War I, official opposition to Christianity softened, and the government tolerated but did not sponsor missionaries.
  Since World War II, Chadian Catholic Christians have had a far greater influence on Chadian life than their limited numbers suggest. The missions spread the ideology of Westernization—the notion that progress depended on following European models of development. Even more specifically, Roman Catholic mission education spread the French language. Even though Islam is the religion of the majority, Christians controlled the government that inherited power from the French. These leaders imparted a Western orientation that continued to dominate in the 1980s.
caption: Church in Fort Lamy
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