Saint Kitts and Nevis

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

Saint Kitts and Nevis, a two-island federation and the smallest sovereign state in the Americas by both land area and population, was the first English colony in the Caribbean, founded in 1623, and its religious institutions reflect nearly four centuries of continuous Anglican and later broader Protestant presence: the Anglican Church, Methodist and Moravian congregations, the last tracing to eighteenth-century missionary work among enslaved plantation laborers, together with a growing Pentecostal and evangelical presence, make up the large majority of a population whose sugar-plantation economy once made these two small islands among the most valuable colonial possessions in the Caribbean.

A significant Roman Catholic minority and small numbers of Rastafarians, Baha'is and Muslims round out the religious landscape. The federation's unusual constitutional structure, granting Nevis its own island legislature with a stated right to secede that has twice come close to a formal vote, has occasionally put island identity ahead of national identity in local politics, though the two islands' Protestant churches have generally functioned as a shared institution rather than dividing along the same lines as island politics.

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, even though the Anglican Church's presence here is older than in almost any other Caribbean territory. Saint Kitts and Nevis has never concluded a concordat with the Holy See, and the earliest documented papal representative to the country was appointed only in 1999, later than the Holy See's missions to most of its Eastern Caribbean neighbors, with the title of nuncio held, as elsewhere in the region, by the prelate serving Trinidad and Tobago.

Saint Kitts and Nevis has more recently become known internationally as the origin of the modern citizenship-by-investment industry, a program the country pioneered in 1984 that has since been copied by several of its Caribbean neighbors, a purely secular innovation that sits alongside, rather than displacing, the country's much older Anglican-founded religious institutions.