What is described here as Mbuti religion reached the wider world through one book more than through any prior record. Colin Turnbull, an Oxford trained anthropologist, lived among Mbuti communities of the Ituri forest in the 1950s, and his 1961 study The Forest People set out an understanding of the forest itself, Tore, as an active, benevolent presence rather than a distant god to be petitioned. Turnbull's account of the molimo, the night ceremony in which a sacred trumpet is used to wake the forest when misfortune has struck the camp, became the standard description of Mbuti religious life, reprinted and taught for decades.
That standing has not gone unquestioned. Later anthropologists, working with Mbuti and neighbouring Efe and Sua communities over longer periods, argued that Turnbull's warm, largely harmonious portrait understated both the tension between forest based Mbuti and neighbouring village farmers and the variation among different Mbuti bands, who do not all describe Tore or the molimo the same way. The category Mbuti religion used in comparative reference works is therefore closer to a composite drawn chiefly from Turnbull's fieldwork than to a single tradition every band would recognise as its own account, and later fieldworkers have pushed back on how representative that composite is.
What remains well attested is the practice itself: molimo ceremonies, led by men, using a trumpet whose location outside ceremony is kept secret from women and children, are documented across multiple Ituri forest communities, even where the theology attached to them differs in emphasis from band to band.