Christianity is the third-largest religion in Pakistan, with the 2023 Census recording over three million Christians, or 1.37% of the total population in Pakistan. About 90 to 95% of Pakistani Christians are Dalits from the Chuhra caste who converted from Hinduism. The province of Punjab has the largest population of Christians in the country. The majority of Pakistan's Christians are members of the Catholic Church or the Church of Pakistan, with the remainder belonging to other Protestant groups.

Around 75 percent of Pakistan's Christians are rural Punjabi Christians, while some speak Sindhi and Gujarati, with the remainder being the upper and middle class Goan Christians and Anglo-Indians.

As Punjabi Christians are mainly Dalit Christians, descendants of lower-caste Hindus who converted during the colonial era in India. Their socio-economic conditions facilitate religious discrimination. Blasphemy allegations have led to several cases of mob violence against Christian households and churches.

Thomas the Apostle is credited with the arrival of Christianity to the Indian subcontinent, establishing the community of Saint Thomas Christians on the Malabar Coast; Saint Thomas Christian crosses (Mar Thoma Sleeva) have been found all over the Indian subcontinent, including one near the city of Taxila in what is now Pakistan.

In 1745, the Bettiah Christians, the northern Indian subcontinent's oldest surviving Christian community, were established by the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin under the patronage of King Dhurup Singh; the Hindustan Prefecture was raised in 1769 at Patna and later shifted to Agra, which was elevated to the status of a Vicariate in 1820. The Capuchins, through their Agra Diocese and Allahabad Diocese, expanded their ministry and established in the 1800s Catholic churches in colonial India's northern provinces including Rajasthan, UP, CP, Bihar and Punjab, the latter of which now includes Pakistan.

In 1877, on Saint Thomas' Day at Westminster Abbey, London, Rev. Thomas Valpy French was appointed the first Anglican Bishop of Lahore, a large diocese of the Church of India, Burma and Ceylon, which included all of the Punjab, then under British rule in colonial India, and remained so until 1887; during this period he also opened the Divinity College, Lahore in 1870. Rev. Thomas Patrick Hughes served as a Church Missionary Society missionary at Peshawar (1864–84), and became an oriental scholar, and compiled a 'Dictionary of Islam' (1885).

The Christians of colonial India were active in the Indian National Congress and the wider Indian independence movement, being collectively represented by the All India Conference of Indian Christians, which advocated for swaraj and opposed the partition of India. The meeting of the All India Conference of Indian Christians in Lahore in December 1922, which had a large attendance of Punjabis, resolved that clergymen of the Church in India should be drawn from the ranks of Indians, rather than foreigners. The AICIC also stated that Indian Christians would not tolerate any discrimination based on race or skin colour.

Following the death of K. T. Paul of Salem, the principal of Forman Christian College in Lahore S. K. Datta became the president of the All India Conference of Indian Christians, representing the Indian Christian community at the Second Round Table Conference, where he agreed with Mahatma Gandhi's views on minorities and Depressed Classes. On 30 October 1945, the All India Conference of Indian Christians formed a joint committee with the Catholic Union of India that passed a resolution stating: "In the future constitution of India, the profession, practice and propagation of religion should be guaranteed and that a change of religion should not involve any civil or political disability."