Fiji's religious division follows the same line as its politics, and the line was drawn by colonial labour policy. The indigenous iTaukei are overwhelmingly Christian and predominantly Methodist, the Methodist mission having converted the chiefly hierarchy from the 1830s onward, so that conversion moved down through the ranked social order rather than across it. The Indo Fijian population, descended from indentured labourers brought between 1879 and 1916, is largely Hindu with a substantial Muslim minority and a Sikh presence.
The British administration then compounded the separation deliberately, restricting the alienation of iTaukei land, keeping the two populations in different economic roles and governing the iTaukei through their chiefs. Independence in 1970 inherited two communities of roughly equal size with almost no shared institutions other than the state.
The Methodist Church has been a political actor throughout. It supported the coups of 1987, which were carried out in the name of indigenous paramountcy, and campaigned for years afterward for Fiji to be declared a Christian state and for Sunday observance laws. Hindu temples were attacked in the periods around the 1987 and 2000 upheavals, in numbers that made temple arson a recognised category of crime.
The 2013 constitution settled the question in the opposite direction, declaring Fiji a secular state, providing that religious belief is personal and that religion and the state are separate, and prohibiting the invocation of religion to divide the nation. The Methodist Church has since moved away from the Christian state position, and its leadership has publicly apologised for its role in the coups.