With regards to religious beliefs and practices, South Sudanese are
mostly pluralistic, with majority of them, about 85%, adhering to
indigenous belief systems, which involve totems, lower gods and high
God, and belief in the power of ancestors to look over the living.
Others believe in both the indigenous systems and Christianity. There is
also a very small percentage of Muslims. Traditionally, religion was
never a source of conflict, as it was always inseparable from ethnic
identity. In the indigenous religions, one is born into it, as one’s
religion is the same as one’s blood, and therefore no room for efforts
to convert others. But when the so-called religions of the book,
Christianity and Islam ascended, the concept of proselytization and
efforts to convert people became a question of placing the faiths in
hierarchy, with local religions thought by foreign missionaries as
inferior and the people needing their souls to be saved. This has long
pitted the people against one another, resulting, at least partly, in
protracted wars between the religion of the state in the old Sudan,
Islam, and believers in other faiths in South Sudan who did not want to
be forced into Islam. Otherwise, within South Sudan, religion is not
just a question of coming to terms with the cosmos, but as much a way of
life as it is a way of reckoning with the unknown, including the
mystery of life and death.