Current statistics on religion in Tanzania are unavailable because religious surveys were eliminated from government census reports after 1967. Religious leaders and sociologists estimate that the Christian and Muslim communities are approximately equal in size, each accounting for 30 to 40 percent of the population, with the remainder consisting of practitioners of other faiths, indigenous religions, and people of no religion.
The study of the United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor for 2009 suggests that 62% of the population of Tanzania is Christian, 35% is Muslim, and 3% are members of other religious groups. While the CIA World Factbook states that 30% of the population is Christian, with Muslim being 35% and indigenous beliefs 35% this information is contradicted by an updated Pew Research Center Forum report from December 2012. The updated December 18, 2012 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life report spcecifically states that in 2010, 61.4% of Tanzania's population was Christian while 35.2% of Tanzania's population was Muslim and 1.8% are followers of indigenous tribal beliefs.
About 97 percent of the population on the Zanzibar Archipelago is Muslim. On the mainland, Muslim communities are concentrated in coastal areas, with some large Muslim minorities also in inland urban areas. Between 80 and 90 percent of the country's Muslim population is Sunni; the remainder consists of several Shi'a subgroups, mostly of Asian descent. The Christian population is composed of Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans, Pentecostals, New Apostolic Christians, Seventh-day Adventists, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and members of Jehovah's Witnesses. The Baha'i Faith is established in several hundred localities throughout the country. Foreign missionaries operate in the country.
The Constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the Government generally respects this right in practice. There have been cases of increased tension between secular and fundamentalist Muslims as the latter have called for Muslims to adopt a stricter interpretation of Islam in their daily lives.
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“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)