Religion and History in Palau

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

Palau, an archipelago of some 340 islands at the western edge of Micronesia, carries a more religiously mixed profile than most of its Pacific neighbors. Roman Catholicism, brought by Spanish and later German and Japanese colonial administrations, holds a plurality at roughly 47 per cent of the 2020 census, a third of those adherents foreign-born Filipino workers rather than ethnic Palauans. Evangelical Protestant churches account for about a quarter of the population, and Seventh-day Adventists a further twentieth.

The distinctive feature of Palauan religion is Modekngei, an indigenous movement founded in the early twentieth century under Japanese rule that fuses traditional Palauan animism and ancestor veneration with Christian elements, still practiced by roughly one in twenty Palauans and recognized by the government alongside the imported faiths. A small Bangladeshi-majority Muslim community, also about one in twenty residents, rounds out the picture. Palau was the last of the US Trust Territory's successor states to gain full independence, on 1 October 1994.