Burkina Faso holds a Muslim majority of roughly two thirds, a Christian minority that is mostly Catholic with a growing evangelical share, and a traditional religion that is practised both on its own and alongside the other two by a great many people who would answer a survey with a world religion.
The Mossi kingdoms that dominated this region from the fifteenth century are the reason the religious settlement looks as it does. They resisted incorporation into the Islamic empires to the north and west for centuries while trading with them and admitting Muslim scholars and merchants to their courts, so Islam entered as a presence rather than as a conquest and the Mossi political order was never defined against it. Christianity arrived late, with the White Fathers at the end of the nineteenth century.
The result was a society that was for decades cited internationally as a model of interreligious ease. Mixed families are ordinary, conversion within a family is not a rupture, and the Catholic archbishop of Ouagadougou and the grand imam appearing together at national occasions was routine. Cardinal Paul Zoungrana and later church leaders were mediators in national political crises.
That settlement has been under severe strain since 2015. Armed groups linked to al Qaeda and to the Islamic State have attacked churches during services, mosques whose imams preach the wrong doctrine, and traditional shrines, and have killed Muslim and Christian religious leaders alike. Around two million people have been displaced, large areas of the Sahel and Est regions are outside government control, and both churches and mosques have closed across those areas.