The Mexican Reformation [Hardcover]

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 Juarez. This movement, eventually known as the Iglesia de Jesus, 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. This book is an important and perceptive contribution to the historiography of Mexican religiosities and of the diverse and plural manifestations of Christianity in Latin America. It is also a very insightful enquiry into the criteria that should guide such an intellectual research. Joel Morales Cruz is a learned and discerning scholar whose critical theoretical reflections deserve serious attention and recognition. -Luis N. Rivera-Pagan Emeritus Professor of Ecumenics Princeton Theological Seminary The Mexican Reformation is an informative and compelling narration of the amalgamation of the history of Mexico and the religious reformation that ensued from the encounter and hybridization (castizaje) of cultures and traditions sans a defined genealogy. Cruz's fascinating account offers the reader the history of an autochthonous Protestant reformatiols"