The Mexican Reformation

Book excerpt: Common wisdom holds that Latin America is a uniformly Roman Catholic continent and Protestant churches only entered as a result of British or U.S. expansionism following the Spanish-American independence movements. Closer inspection, however, reveals a far different and more exciting reality. As The Mexican Reformation reveals, the Catholic Church in the colonial era was far from monolithic, exhibiting a diversity of expressions and perspectives that interacted with and were sometimes at odds with one another. In the mid-nineteenth century, one such group sought to reform the Catholic Church in line with some of the policies set forth by the government of Benito Ju‡rez. This movement, eventually known as the Iglesia de Jesœs, would lay the foundation for the emergence of Protestant churches in Mexico. Its roots in the worldview of the baroque and in the challenges of the Catholic Enlightenment provide an insight into the evolution of a distinctly Mexican Protestantism within its social and political contexts as well as a window into the processes underlying the development of religious expressions in Latin America.