Religion and History in Chile

Chile remains majority Catholic, around 55 to 60 percent by most recent estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, though the share has declined substantially in recent decades as Protestant, chiefly evangelical, communities have grown to around 15 to 17 percent and religiously unaffiliated Chileans now form a large and rapidly growing minority approaching a quarter of the population. Spanish colonization from the mid-sixteenth century brought Catholic missionary activity across most of Chile, though the Mapuche people of the south successfully resisted conquest for over three centuries, preserving their own religious tradition centered on machi shamanic healers and a wider spiritual order called ngen, and Mapuche religious practice, including the Nguillatun fertility and thanksgiving ceremony, persists today alongside and sometimes blended with Catholic practice.

Chile's Catholic Church held close ties to conservative political power through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and under Augusto Pinochet's 1973 to 1990 dictatorship the Church's Vicariate of Solidarity became a significant, internationally documented institutional voice defending human rights and documenting abuses even as some individual clergy were themselves implicated in supporting or benefiting from the regime.