This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Americas gathers thirty six nations from Argentina to the eastern Caribbean, sharing one colonial import, Catholic or Protestant Christianity carried by European conquest, met by three distinct kinds of survival rather than by simple replacement.
Indigenous religion adapted rather than vanished under Catholic rule. Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe devotion and Day of the Dead observance fuse Aztec and Maya practice with imposed Catholic forms; Peru's Inca sun cult persists in Andean festivals pairing Catholic saints with mountain and earth deities; and Bolivia went further in 2009, giving Pachamama offerings and Aymara ceremony constitutional standing alongside the church.
Enslaved Africans built a second kind of survival, carrying Yoruba and Dahomean religion across the Atlantic and fusing it with the Catholicism forced on them. Haiti's Vodou is remembered for a 1791 ceremony that helped catalyze the uprising which founded the hemisphere's only successful slave led revolution, and it became an official state religion in 2003; Cuba's Santeria let practitioners keep orisha veneration under cover of sanctioned saint devotion; Brazil's Candomble and Umbanda serve millions who often identify as Catholic at the same time.
Indian indentureship after the 1840s built a third pattern: Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname hold Hindu and Muslim populations dense enough to make Divali, Hosay and Eid national rather than communal occasions, Suriname's the most evenly balanced religious plurality in the hemisphere. The United States and Canada stand apart, unestablished and free enough to have originated Mormonism and Pentecostalism, while Argentina's constitution still commits its government to sustain the Roman Catholic faith.