Panama's religious history begins earlier than almost anywhere on the American mainland: the diocese of Santa Maria la Antigua del Darien, erected in 1513, was the first on the continent, and from Panama City the friars and conquistadors staged south to Peru. The isthmus's indigenous peoples kept their own cosmologies through it all.
The Guna of the eastern islands and forests preserve Bab Igala, the Father's Way, a tradition of chanted origin histories performed by specialists in the gathering house, together with the neles, seers who diagnose illness in the spirit world, and the famous mola textiles whose layered designs carry protective imagery.
The Embera, Wounaan and Ngabe likewise sustain shamanic traditions alongside mission Christianity. The canal brought the world: Antillean labourers established Protestant congregations a century ago, and Panama today holds synagogues, mosques, Hindu temples, a Baha'i house of worship, one of only a handful of its kind, and Chinese temples, all within a state that has been constitutionally secular but culturally Catholic since independence. The late twentieth century added the region's familiar Evangelical surge, and in 2019 Panama City hosted World Youth Day, a reminder that for all its pluralism the isthmus still turns out in Catholic hundreds of thousands.