Nauru

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

Nauru, a single raised coral island of barely 21 square kilometers, is the world's smallest independent republic, its interior gouged into a lunar plateau by a century of phosphate strip mining that once made it, briefly, one of the richest countries on earth per capita and left it afterward reliant on foreign aid and, controversially, on hosting Australia's offshore asylum-processing center. About 93 per cent of Nauruans are Christian, split closely between the Nauru Congregational Church, descended from London Missionary Society work, and the Roman Catholic Church, with smaller Assemblies of God and Pacific Light House communities and a Confucian, Buddhist or Taoist minority among ethnic Chinese residents.

Independence from the joint Australian, New Zealand and United Kingdom trusteeship came on 31 January 1968, and Nauru joined the United Nations only in 1999, one of the last states to do so, a delayed step onto the world stage for a country whose phosphate wealth had already risen and substantially declined by the time it took that formal seat.

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's preamble acknowledges "God as the almighty and everlasting Lord and giver of all good things" and public officials swear their oath of office by God, but no church holds constitutional establishment, and Article 11 guarantees freedom of conscience, thought and religion, including the freedom to change religion, subject to reasonable restrictions for defense, public safety, order, morality or health. Religious groups must register with the government to hold an official capacity, chiefly to have their clergy officiate legally recognized marriages, though groups may hold services, proselytize and meet without registering.

To register, a group must have a membership of at least 750 people, own land and a building, and have a Nauruan citizen resident in the country as its head religious leader, a threshold that, applied against a total national population in the low thousands, sets a genuinely high practical bar for a new faith to acquire the formal standing needed to conduct its own weddings.