Jamaica
POPULATION 2,680,029
PENTECOSTAL 33.29 percent
SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST 10.84 percent
BAPTIST 7.27 percent
ANGLICAN 3.6 percent
RASTAFARIAN 0.93 percent
OTHER 23.12 percent
NONRELIGIOUS 20.95 percent
Country Overview
Introduction
Jamaica, an island in the western Caribbean approximately 90 miles south of Cuba, features a rich and diverse religious legacy. Roman Catholicism was taken to Jamaica in 1494 by Christopher Columbus on his first expedition to the island. When Great Britain conquered the island in 1655, Anglicanism became the sole religion until the coming of Moravian missionaries in the 1750s. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, other groups such as Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists began missionary activities among the slaves. The Baptists became numerically the most successful.
Myal, a new religion based on an African cosmology, took root in Jamaica from the mid-seventeenth century. Open to outside influences, it absorbed Christian elements, in the process becoming known as the New Baptist movement and then Revivalism. Although European Christian denominations, which were more socially acceptable, accounted for the nominal membership of the overwhelming majority of Jamaicans, it was the less esteemed Revivalism that answered to their spiritual needs. By the mid-twentieth century adherents of Revivalism discovered Pentecostalism, a group that shared the practice of spirit possession while at the same time had the respectability of origin in the wealthy, white United States.
