Cameroon is often called Africa in miniature for its geography, and the religious map follows the same compression. The south and west are Christian, divided between Catholic missions and the Presbyterian and Baptist traditions that came through Douala and the coast, with Baptist work beginning under Jamaican and British missionaries in the 1840s. The north is Muslim, and its authority structures date from the Fulani jihad of Usman dan Fodio in the early nineteenth century, which established emirates here as it did across northern Nigeria. The lamidats, the Fulani chiefdoms, still combine political and religious office.
Traditional religion is practised widely and openly rather than covertly, and in the western highlands it is inseparable from chieftaincy. Among the Bamileke and the Bamum the fon or sultan is a ritual figure, the skulls of ancestors are kept and fed, and the secret societies attached to the palace hold specific ceremonial functions. Some of those societies are closed and their business is not published; the atlas records that they exist and are closed rather than describing what is done in them.
The country has been under two sustained pressures. Boko Haram has attacked the Far North since 2014, striking mosques as well as churches, since its targets include Muslims who reject it. The anglophone conflict in the northwest and southwest since 2016 has damaged church institutions, closed mission schools and hospitals, and displaced clergy, with religious leaders on several occasions the only parties talking to both sides.