French Polynesia is overwhelmingly Christian, chiefly Protestant, with the Maohi Protestant Church, descended from nineteenth-century London Missionary Society missions, forming the largest single denomination alongside a substantial Catholic minority, together accounting for the large majority of the territory's population, per estimates reflected in Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020.
Pre-Christian Polynesian religion centered on a pantheon of gods including Ta'aroa, the creator, and Oro, a war and fertility god whose cult dominated Tahiti and the Society Islands at the time of European contact, practiced through marae, open-air ceremonial stone platforms that remain among the most significant archaeological and spiritual sites across the islands today, and a strict system of tapu, sacred prohibition, governing social and religious life.
British missionary contact and Tahitian King Pomare II's conversion to Christianity in the early nineteenth century, following the London Missionary Society's arrival in 1797, triggered rapid Christianization of Tahiti's ruling Pomare dynasty and much of the wider population within a few decades, and French annexation from the 1840s onward introduced Catholic missionary competition, establishing the religious duality between Protestant and Catholic communities that persists today.