Ghana is Christian in the south and Muslim in the north, and the fastest growing and loudest sector is Pentecostal and charismatic. That sector now shapes broadcasting, popular music, business language and political rhetoric to a degree that surprises visitors: a large share of national radio and television is religious programming, and prophecy about elections and public events is a recognised genre.
Underneath both world religions runs Akan religion, which has not gone anywhere. Nyame is the high god, distant and not directly petitioned in ordinary matters; the abosom, lesser deities attached to rivers, lakes and particular places, are approached through priests; and the ancestors, the nsamanfo, are addressed constantly, because the dead remain members of the lineage. The ritual calendar of Akwasidae and Awukudae, falling every forty two days, is kept by the chieftaincies, and the Golden Stool of the Asante is not a museum object but the seat of the soul of the nation, which is why a British governor's demand to sit on it in 1900 caused a war.
The Atlantic slave trade left its own religious geography. Elmina castle, built by the Portuguese in 1482, and Cape Coast castle, later the seat of British administration, have become sites of return and remembrance for people of African descent, formalised in the Year of Return in 2019 and the associated grants of Ghanaian citizenship to members of the diaspora.
Islam in the north arrived along the trans Saharan trade routes centuries before the coastal missions, and the mud and stick Sudanese style mosques of the Upper West, such as Larabanga, belong to a West African architectural tradition rather than a coastal one.