Jamaica is overwhelmingly Protestant and unusually dense with congregations, dominated by Seventh day Adventist, Pentecostal, Church of God and Baptist churches rather than by the Anglican establishment the colony began with. The Baptist share has a specific origin: the first Baptist preaching in Jamaica was done by George Liele, a formerly enslaved man who arrived from Georgia in the 1780s, and the Native Baptist churches that grew from that work were led by Black preachers a generation before the English Baptist Missionary Society arrived. Those churches were central to the Baptist War of 1831 led by the deacon Samuel Sharpe, the rebellion that is generally credited with hastening emancipation.
Beneath and beside the churches run African derived traditions. Revival Zion, which emerged from the religious excitement of the 1860s, combines Christian scripture and hymnody with spirit possession, drumming and healing, and its bands are led by a shepherd or mother with a distinctive dress and a consecrated yard. Kumina is more directly Kongo in origin, brought by indentured labourers recruited from Central Africa after emancipation, and retains an African derived ritual language, drum rhythms and ancestral possession.
Obeah is the practice of harming or protecting through spiritual means, and it has been treated in law as a crime rather than as a religion since the eighteenth century, a status rooted in colonial fear of what enslaved people could organise. Prosecutions have continued into recent times and the standing of the legislation has been repeatedly debated in parliament; the atlas does not state the current position here because it could not be confirmed to the standard this project requires.