Christianity in Panama

A survey in 2020 showed that 72.31% of the population were Catholic, 9.85% were Protestant, 8.87% were other Christian, 5.5% followed another religion and 4.36% had no religious beliefs.

Christianity was introduced to the country with the Spanish conquistadors and centuries of missionaries. Like the rest of Latin America, the Catholicism of the conquest began to shift as aspects of indigenous, African and other spiritualities were acculturated. In recent decades, however, Evangelical Protestant churches, especially those denominations strongest in North America, have been gaining ground.

Denominations

The National Institute of Statistics and Census carried out a survey in 2022 and found that while most of the country followed Catholicism, the Episcopalian community had 11,000 members, the Methodist Church had 1,500 members, and the Lutheran Church had 1,000 members; other denominations included Seventh-day Adventists, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostals.