A Light Touch Registration Regime in Liberia

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The 1986 constitution, still in force after the civil wars of 1989 to 2003, declares that there shall be no state religion and that no person shall be denied civil rights or subjected to discrimination on account of religious belief, even as Christian language runs through public ceremony, the national motto and the inaugural oaths of successive presidents. Religious organizations are not compelled to register with the state to operate.

Most incorporate as nonprofit associations through the Liberia Business Registry to hold property and receive tax-exempt status, a light-touch regime that has left both churches and mosques largely free to organize on their own terms since the wars ended. That the constitution's formal no-establishment clause coexists so comfortably with pervasive Christian public language is itself a legacy of the settler founding: the wording of the law and the tenor of civic life were drafted by the same nineteenth century American-descended elite, so a genuinely secular text and a heavily Christian public culture were never in tension for the people who wrote it.