Religion

The courts and government practice uphold the constitutional right to freedom of speech, thought, and belief, and no legislation to curb those rights has been adopted, though Sir Arnold Amet, the immediately previous Chief Justice of Papua New Guinea and an outspoken proponent of Pentecostal Christianity, frequently urged legislative and other curbs on the activities of Muslims in the country.
The 2000 census showed 96 percent of citizens were members of a Christian church; however, many citizens combine their Christian faith with some pre-Christian traditional indigenous practices. The census percentages were as follows:

Roman Catholic Church (27.0%)
Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea (19.5%)
United Church (11.5%)
Seventh-day Adventist Church (10.0%)
Pentecostal (8.6%)
Evangelical Alliance (5.2%)
Anglican Church of Papua New Guinea (3.2%)
Baptist (2.5%)
Church of Christ (0.4%)
Salvation Army (0.2%)
Other Christian (8.0%)
Minority religions include Jehovah's Witnesses (20,000) and the Bahá'í Faith (15,000 or 0.3%), while Islam in Papua New Guinea accounts for approximately 1,000 to 2,000 or about 0.04%, (largely foreign residents of African and Southeast Asian origin, but with some Papua New Guinean converts in the towns). Non-traditional Christian churches and non-Christian religious groups are active throughout the country. The Papua New Guinea Council of Churches has stated that both Muslim and Confucian missionaries are active, and foreign missionary activity in general is high.
Traditional religions were often animist and some also tended to have elements of ancestor worship though generalisation is suspect given the extreme heterogeneity of Melanesian societies. For a discussion of one (West Papuan) society's traditional religion by way of example, see the article on the Korowai of West Papua.