Ivory Coast is divided roughly evenly between a Muslim north and a Christian south, with traditional religion practised across both, frequently by the same people who identify as Muslim or Christian. The northern Islam belongs to the Dyula trading network and the wider Mande Muslim world of the Sahel; the southern Christianity is a colonial mission product, Catholic in the main, with a large and growing evangelical and Pentecostal sector in Abidjan.
That division became lethal because it was mapped onto a question about citizenship. The doctrine of Ivoirite, advanced in the 1990s, distinguished authentic Ivorians from those of northern or immigrant descent, and since northerners are largely Muslim and often bear names shared with Burkinabe and Malian migrants, a dispute about nationality functioned as a dispute about religion. The conflicts of 2002 and of 2010 to 2011 ran along that line, and mosques and churches were both attacked.
The country holds two religious monuments of international note, and they are opposites. The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace at Yamoussoukro, built by President Felix Houphouet Boigny in his home village and consecrated by John Paul II in 1990, is the largest church in the world by floor area, modelled on Saint Peter's and built in a town of modest size at a cost that was intensely controversial. The Harrist Church, by contrast, was founded on nothing but a preacher walking along the coast.
Reconciliation efforts since 2011 have included joint work by the Catholic bishops, the Higher Council of Imams and the evangelical federation, and the balance of political power has shifted toward inclusion of the north.