The peoples of the White Nile plains built some of the most closely studied religious worlds in Africa. The Dinka address Nhialic, divinity above, through clan divinities, cattle dedications and the hereditary masters of the fishing spear, whose prayers accompany every crisis of the community. The Nuer know Kwoth, spirit, at once one and many, and their prophets, seized by named divinities, could gather feuding sections into a single moral community. Christian missions arrived up the Nile in the early twentieth century, Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic, and the colonial government assigned each a sphere; but conversion was modest until the civil wars with the north.
In the long displacement after 1983, Christianity spread rapidly, its scriptures and hymns in Dinka and Nuer giving a language for suffering and identity against an Islamising state, and by the 2011 referendum the new nation understood itself as broadly Christian with deep traditional roots. The churches were among the only institutions to survive the wars intact, brokering local peace covenants and the people to people processes that ended some of the worst feuds. Since 2013 they have played the same role inside the new country's own civil conflict, while prophets of the old divinities have again risen to prominence in the cattle camps.