Ecuador once went further in tying a state to a devotion than any other republic. Gabriel Garcia Moreno, president through much of the 1860s and 1870s, rebuilt the country as an explicitly Catholic state: a concordat gave the church control of education and the censorship of books, citizenship was restricted to Catholics, and in 1873 the national congress formally consecrated the republic to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. No other country has consecrated itself to that devotion as an act of state. Garcia Moreno was assassinated two years later, and the Liberal Revolution of 1895 under Eloy Alfaro reversed the settlement, introducing civil marriage, divorce, secular education and the expulsion of foreign clergy.
What survived both projects is a Catholicism with a visible Andean layer. The Inti Raymi observances at the June solstice, the pilgrimages to the Virgin of El Cisne in Loja and to the Virgin of Quinche, and the mountain shrines all stand on older ground, and the colonial art of the Quito School put local materials, faces and imagery into European forms. The historic centre of Quito, with the Compania de Jesus at its heart, was among the first sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1978.
In the Amazon lowlands the Shuar, Achuar and Amazonian Kichwa maintain practices centred on the ceremonial use of ayahuasca and on dreaming, and on relationships with beings that are treated as persons rather than as resources. Ethnography conducted among these peoples reshaped how anthropology understands animism generally.
Evangelical churches have grown quickly, particularly in the coastal cities.