Antigua and Barbuda

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Antigua and Barbuda, a two-island nation whose larger island Antigua was continuously under English and then British control from 1632 until independence, carries one of the longest unbroken Anglican traditions in the Caribbean: the Anglican Church of the Province of the West Indies remains the largest single denomination, though it now sits alongside a broader and roughly comparable body of Protestant churches, Moravian, Methodist, Pentecostal and Seventh-day Adventist chief among them, whose combined membership exceeds Anglicanism's alone.

A significant Roman Catholic minority and small Rastafarian, Baha'i, Hindu and Muslim communities complete the picture on islands whose sugar plantation economy, like much of the eastern Caribbean, was built on enslaved African labor whose descendants make up the great majority of the population today. Barbuda, the smaller and far less populous of the two islands, was long treated under a communal land ownership system distinct from Antigua's, a difference in local governance that has occasionally strained the two islands' political relationship even as their churches operate as a single ecclesiastical body.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The constitution guarantees freedom of religion and conscience and establishes no state church, consistent with the pattern across the former British Leeward Islands, so nearly four centuries of continuous Anglican presence has never translated into a formal constitutional privilege for the church. Article 9 of the Small Charges Act criminalizes the use of abusive, blasphemous, indecent, insulting, profane or threatening language, punishable by a fine or a month's imprisonment, but the provision is not enforced for blasphemy.

Antigua and Barbuda has never concluded a concordat with the Holy See; its Apostolic Nunciature was established by papal brief on 15 December 1986 and, as with the country's other diplomatic missions from Rome, is held by the prelate appointed to Trinidad and Tobago, the same shared nunciature arrangement several of its Eastern Caribbean neighbors use rather than a treaty of its own.