Religion in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a secular nation and freedom of religion is enshrined in its constitution. As of 2023, the US State Department reported that more than 95% of the population is affiliated with Christian denominations. The remaining follow other non-Christian religions.
Overview
According to the 2020 Report on International Religious Freedom, an estimated 48.1% of the population are Protestant, including evangelical Christians and the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth through the Prophet Simon Kimbangu, and 47.3% Catholic. Other Christian groups include Jehovah’s Witnesses, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Greek Orthodox Church.62 of the Protestant denominations in the country are federated under the umbrella of the Church of Christ in Congo or CCC. It is often simply referred to as 'The Protestant Church', since it covers most of the 20% of the population who are Protestants. Islam was introduced and mainly spread by Arab merchants and slave traders.
Traditional religions embody such concepts as pantheism, animism, vitalism, spirit and ancestor worship, witchcraft, and sorcery and vary widely among ethnic groups. The syncretic sects often merge Christianity with traditional beliefs and rituals, and may not be accepted by mainstream churches as part of Christianity. A clear delineation of religious affiliation into these membership categories can give a misleading picture of Congolese reality. The number of persons who can be categorized as belonging exclusively to one group or another is limited. Overlapping affiliations are more common. As with class identity or with ethnic identity, an individual's religious identity may be situational.
Different spiritual traditions, agents, and communities may be sought out for assistance, depending on the situation at hand. For example, Christian students may employ sorcery with the objective of improving their individual exam scores or of helping their school's soccer team win in competition against their opponents. Sophisticated urbanites, faced with disease in a family member, may patronize indigenous healers and diviners. And Congolese practicing traditional African religions may also go to both established Christian clergy and breakaway Christian sects in search of spiritual assistance. In the search for spiritual resources, the Congolese have frequently displayed a marked openness and pragmatism.
Statistics
Estimates concerning religion in the DRC Congo vary greatly.Christianity
Catholicism
There are around 35 million Catholics in the country. There are six archdioceses and 41 dioceses. The impact of the Catholic Church in the DRC is enormous. Besides involving over 40% of the population in its religious services, its schools have educated over 60% of the nation's primary school students and more than 40% of its secondary students. The church owns and manages an extensive network of hospitals, schools, and clinics, as well as many diocesan economic enterprises, including farms, ranches, stores, and artisans' shops.The church's penetration of the country at large is a product of the colonial era. The Belgian colonial state authorized and subsidized the predominantly Belgian Catholic missions to establish schools and hospitals throughout the colony.
Protestantism
Protestant missionaries have been active since 1878 when the first Protestant mission was founded among the Congo. Early relations with the state were not warm. During the existence of the Congo Free State, some Protestant missionaries witnessed and publicized state and charter company abuses against the population during rubber- and ivory-gathering operations. That evidence helped lead to the international outcry that forced King Léopold II to cede control of the Congo Free State to the Belgian state.Situated outside of the governing colonial trinity of state, Catholic church, and companies, Protestant missions did not enjoy the same degree of official confidence as that accorded their Catholic counterparts. State subsidies for hospitals and schools, for example, were reserved exclusively for Catholic institutions until after World War II.
The colonial state divided up the colony into spiritual franchises, giving each approved mission group its own territory. At independence in 1960, some forty-six Protestant missionary groups were at work, the majority of them North American, British, or Scandinavian in origin. The missions established a committee to maintain contact and minimize competition among them. This body evolved into a union called the Church of Christ in the Congo, now simply the Church of Christ in Congo. The Church of Christ developed rules that permitted members of one evangelical congregation to move to and be accepted by another. It also established institutions that served common needs, such as bookstores and missionary guest houses.
Since independence, church leadership and control have been widely and successfully Africanized, though not without conflict. Most mission property has been transferred to autonomous Congolese churches, and many foreign missionaries now work directly under the supervision of a Congolese-run church. The new indigenous leadership has succeeded in expanding its churches in Africa's largest Francophone Protestant community.
Protestant churches are valued, as are their Catholic counterparts, not only for the medical and educational services they provide, but also for serving as islands of integrity in a sea of corruption. Explicit recognition of this role came in 1983 when Mobutu sent emissaries to Europe and the United States to encourage increased involvement by foreign mission boards in Zairian institution-building; a conference in Kinshasa with local and international Protestant officials followed. Not only was a renewed church involvement sought with struggling institutions, such as the formerly Protestant university in Kisangani, but churches were asked if they would be willing to station representatives within the major government ministries in order to discourage and/or report acts of corruption by state officials. Sensing the threat of co-optation, the Protestants respectfully declined.
State solicitation of Protestant action was logical. The state sought a counterweight to its critics in the powerful Catholic church. Protestant churches, and particularly the Church of Christ leadership, have been consistently supportive of Mobutu, making them an attractive potential partner. And the Church of Christ served the state in areas where state-church interests coincided. Both church and state looked askance at the formation of new uncontrolled religious movements and splinter groups. The government's requirement that religious groups register with the state and post a Z100,000 deposit in a bank in order to be legally recognized helped limit their development; so too did the lingering effects of the colonial franchise system.
When, for example, a charismatic preacher of the officially recognized but noncharismatic Church of Christ of the Ubangi broke away in 1988 to ally his own congregation with a charismatic but officially recognized church community in distant Kivu, the Church of Christ in Zaire stepped in to adjudicate. The governing body prevented the Kivu church from accepting the rebellious preacher and his congregation, leaving him with no outside allies or resources and effectively localizing his potential impact. Protestants and Kimbanguists made up 53% of the population in 2019 according to Target Sarl.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
arrived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1986 and has been growing rapidly, though it remains minor. The group first received recognition in 1986 under petition from members who had joined the Church while studying abroad in Switzerland and Belgium. The Church is thought to have 42,689 members in 145 congregations. In 2011, it announced its intention to build its first Congolese Temple in Kinshasa.Kimbanguist Church
The Kimbanguist Church, a growing Congolese religion, emerged from the charismatic ministry of Simon Kimbangu in the early 1920s. Kimbangu was already a member of the English Baptist Mission Church when he reportedly first received his visions and divine call to preach the word and heal the sick. Touring the lower Congo, he gained a large following drawn both from members of Protestant churches and adherents of indigenous religious practice. He preached a doctrine that was in many ways more strict than that of the Protestantism from which it evolved. Healing by the laying on of hands; strict observance of the law of Moses; the destruction of fetishes; the repudiation of sorcery, magic, charms, and witches; and the prohibition of polygyny were all part of his original message.The extent of his success caused increasing alarm among both church and state authorities. Numerous preachers and sages appeared, many of them professing to be his followers. Some of these preachers and possibly some of Kimbangu's own disciples introduced anti-European elements in their teachings. And European interests were affected when African personnel abandoned their posts for long periods in order to follow Kimbangu and participate in his services.
In June 1921, the government judged the movement out of control, banned the sect, exiled members to remote rural areas, and arrested Kimbangu, only to have the prophet "miraculously" escape; the escape further amplified his popular mystique. In September he voluntarily surrendered to the authorities and was sentenced to death for hostility against the state; the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, and Kimbangu died in prison in 1950. His movement, however, did not die with him. It flourished and spread "in exile" in the form of clandestine meetings, often held in remote areas by widely scattered groups of congregants. In 1959, on the eve of independence, the state despaired of stamping Kimbanguism out and afforded it legal recognition.
The legalized church, known as the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth by the Prophet Simon Kimbangu, has since succeeded in becoming one of the only three Christian groups recognized by the state, the other two being the Catholic Church and the Church of Christ in Congo. The Kimbanguist Church has been a member of the World Council of Churches since 1969. Estimates of its membership vary depending on the source. The church claims 5 million members, yet its own internal figures indicate no more than 300,000 practicing members. Individual congregations are scattered throughout much of the country, but the greatest concentrations have always been in Bas-Congo; some villages there have long been totally Kimbanguist.
Since being legalized, the Kimbanguists have bent over backward to curry favor with the state. The church's head, Simon Kimbangu's son, regularly exchanges public praise with Mobutu and has become one of the state's main ideological supports. Structurally, the church organization has been changed to parallel the administrative division of the state into regions, subregions, zones, and collectivities. The Kimbanguist Church deliberately rotates its officials outside their areas of origin in order to depoliticize ethnicity and centralize power, a policy taken directly from the state. An insistence on absolute obedience to the leader and a ban on doctrinal disputes also are shared by both institutions. In many ways, the Kimbanguist Church and the Catholic Church have exchanged places in their relationship with the state; the former outlaw has become a close ally and the former ally an outspoken critic.