page_title: Religion in Algeria
section_title: Religious minorities
hierarchical_section_title: Religion in Algeria / Religious minorities
context_page_description: Religion in Algeria is dominated by Muslims with over ninety-nine percent of the population adhering to Sunni Islam of the Maliki school of jurisprudence. The remainder include Christians, Jews, Ahmadi, Shia Muslims, and Ibadi Muslims. Estimates of the Christian population range from 60,000 to 200,000. Algerian citizens who are Christians predominantly belong to Protestant groups. There are under 200 Jews still living in Algeria by some estimates according to the US department of State.
context_section_description: Christianity came to North Africa in the Roman era. Its influence declined during the chaotic period of the Vandal invasions but was strengthened in the succeeding Byzantine period, only to disappear gradually after the Arab invasions of the seventh century. There is also a small growing Pentecostal and evangelical community.
  The Roman Catholic Church was reintroduced after the French conquest, when the Diocese of Algiers was established in 1838. Proselytization of the Muslim population was at first strictly prohibited; later the prohibition was less vigorously enforced, but few conversions took place. The several Roman Catholic missions established in Algeria were concerned with charitable and relief work; the establishment of schools, workshops, and infirmaries; and the training of staff for the new establishments. Some of the missionaries of these organizations remained in the country after independence, working among the poorer segments of the population. In the early 1980s, the Roman Catholic population numbered about 45,000, most of whom were foreigners or Algerians who had married French or Italians. In addition, there was a Protestant community. Because the government adopted a policy of not inquiring about religious affiliation in censuses or surveys to avoid provoking religious tensions, the number of Christians in the early 1990s was not known. Algerian Christians reside mostly in the main cities such as Algiers, Bejaia, Tizi Ouzou, Annaba, and Oran, and the Kabylie region. 
  The government of Algeria has been known to target the Protestant Church of Algeria, closing down dozens of churches in three waves since 2008. This activity included eighteen churches closed between November, 2017 and October, 2019. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom included Algeria in its 2019 report of the world's most severe religious freedom violators for a number of discriminatory actions, including these closures.
  The Bahá'í Faith in Algeria dates from 1952. Though the religion achieved some growth and organization through 1967 including converts, the period of the independence of Algeria when the country adopted Islamic practices in rejection of colonial influences and subsequently the religion was effectively banned in 1968. However more recently the Association of Religion Data Archives and Wolfram Alpha estimated the population of Bahá'ís at 3.3–3.8 thousand Bahá'ís in 2005 and 2010.
  The Jewish community of Algeria is of considerable antiquity, with some members claiming descent from immigrants from Palestine at the time of the Romans. The majority are descendants of refugees from Spanish persecution early in the fifteenth century. They numbered about 140,000 before the Algerian War, but at independence in 1962 nearly all of them left the country. Because the 1870 Crémieux Decrees, which aimed at assimilating the colonists of Algeria to France, gave Jews full French citizenship, most members of the Jewish community emigrated to France. The small remaining Jewish population appeared to have stabilized at roughly 1,000. It was thought to be close to this number in the early 1990s. Although no untoward incidents occurred during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, a group of youths sacked the only remaining synagogue in Algiers in early 1977.
  A 2015 study estimates some 380,000 Christian believers from a Muslim background in the country, most of whom subscribe to some form of evangelical Christianity.
caption: Notre Dame d'Afrique (Our Lady of Africa) is a Roman Catholic church that is the basilica of Algiers
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