The religions of the Solomons were religions of place and the dead: ancestral skulls kept in shrine houses, sharks and other creatures honoured as vessels of ancestors, especially in Malaita's lagoons where the shark callers' traditions are still remembered, and mana sought through sacrifice at the tabu places of each lineage.
Alvaro de Mendana gave the islands their biblical name in 1568, but Christianity arrived in earnest three centuries later with the Anglican Melanesian Mission, whose method of training islander teachers at distant schools produced both native evangelists and the mission's most famous martyr, Bishop John Coleridge Patteson, killed at Nukapu in 1871 in the shadow of the labour trade's abuses.
Catholic Marists, Methodists, the South Seas Evangelical Mission and the Adventists divided the archipelago into spheres whose denominational geography still shapes provincial identity. Conversion was overwhelmingly thorough, and the churches became the islands' most trusted institutions, a standing proved during the ethnic tension of 1998 to 2003, when clergy, the Melanesian Brotherhood foremost, walked between armed camps. Today the census counts nearly everyone Christian, yet kastom remains a living force: land descends through lines the shrines remember, chiefly and church authority interlock in the villages, and revival movements periodically sweep the islands, folding old spiritual power into new Pentecostal fire.