Zimbabwe is overwhelmingly Christian, around 85 percent per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, spread across mainline Protestant, Catholic, Pentecostal and African Independent Churches, alongside a substantial minority who blend Christian practice with indigenous Shona and Ndebele traditional religion centered on ancestor veneration and the Mwari cult, a supreme-being tradition focused historically on the Matobo Hills shrines in the country's southwest.
The Great Zimbabwe ruins, a medieval stone city that gave the modern country its name and flourished from roughly the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, served religious as well as political functions for the Shona kingdom that built it, and the Mwari cult's oracular shrines in the Matobo Hills continued functioning as a regional pilgrimage and consultation network across ethnic and political boundaries into the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Christian missionary activity expanded significantly under British colonial rule from the 1890s, and African Independent Churches, including the Zion Christian Church and various Apostolic movements blending Pentecostal Christianity with prophecy, healing and elements of indigenous custom, grew rapidly through the twentieth century into some of the country's largest religious movements.
Sources Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center with The God of the Matopo Hills: An Essay on the Mwari Cult in RhodesiaM. L. Daneel