The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas

North American Religions Series

by Jennifer Scheper Hughes

Tells the story of the founding of American Christianity against the backdrop of devastating disease, and of the Indigenous survivors who kept the nascent faith alive

Many scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its early period it was very much on the brink of failure. In 1576, Indigenous Mexican communities suffered a catastrophic epidemic that took almost two million lives and simultaneously left the colonial church in ruins. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of Christianity in the Americas.

The Church of the Dead offers a counter-history of American Christian origins. It centers the power of Indigenous Mexicans, showing how their Catholic faith remained intact even in the face of the faltering religious fervor of Spanish missionaries. While the Europeans grappled with their failure to stem the tide of death, succumbing to despair, Indigenous survivors worked to reconstruct the church. They reasserted ancestral territories as sovereign, with Indigenous Catholic states rivaling the jurisdiction of the diocese and the power of friars and bishops.

Christianity in the Americas today is thus not the creation of missionaries, but rather of Indigenous Catholic survivors of the colonial mortandad, the founding condition of American Christianity. Weaving together archival study, visual culture, church history, theology, and the history of medicine, Jennifer Scheper Hughes provides us with a fascinating reexamination of North American religious history that is at once groundbreaking and lyrical.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2021

Reviews

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Cocoliztli Epidemic hit the Indigenous people in the Mexican highlands, specifically the Aztecs, in 1576. There were conflicting views about what the illness could have been, though recent research indicates the presence of salmonella. Small pox was also passed around, thanks to European colonists. There are recorded mentions of fever and bleeding as well, so it could have been something new and never seen again, or simply a combination of a lot of things that were uncommon to Native populations. I was really looking forward to learning more about that in this book.

This book speaks heavily on the consequences of this massive amount of deaths on the colonizers. The labor force was decimated, affecting both colonizers and Natives. Colonizers raced in to snatch up the land, and force assimilation on the Natives. The spread of Christianity is also mentioned in this book, because the colonizers wanted to spread religion. The decimation of the Native population put a damper on the spread of religion and the forces assimilation they were trying to accomplish. Christianity as a whole is a genocidal religion at the cultural level. It is really interesting to consider what the religious landscape would look like in colonized areas, if people minded their own business and stopped trying to force people to believe what THEY think is right.

This book is currently free to download and listen to with your Audible Plus membership. The book isn't a terribly long listen, less than eight hours, so if you are looking for something that isn't terribly long, this may be a good one to select. I downloaded this book specifically to learn more about the Cocoliztli Epidemic of 1576, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn a lot more than just that. This was an informative and thought provoking book, and I am planning to look and see if there are more books by this author.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly fascinating book. Well thought through and well documented, it bolsters the emerging understanding that the future of mission is indigenous. Because the past of mission was also indigenous.

"American Christianity remains a religion shaped and defined by the ravages of colonial rule...wherever inherited colonialist modes and mores persist is a church that has no future, a church that has been resoundingly criticized and condemned.

Christianity in the Americas endured the colonial cataclysm because pueblos de Indios made it so, even if their church took forms that were not always recognizable... This book has tried to imagine a story of historical origin that explains what appears to be a relatively widespread consensus among Indigenous and Indigenous-descended communities in Mexico: that Christianity could be rescued, retrieved, and redeemed from structures of power, domination, and suffering, and then used to defend and protect the sacred from European colonial destruction." (pp176-177)

I used it as background for my Historia del Cristianismo course and wished it was available in Spanish for my students. I also would have loved to approach it as one approaches the reading of a novel.

[Jesus Regalado · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Hughes tackles the traditional narrative that indigenous Mexicans had no say in their conversion to Catholicism. In the backdrop of the Cocolitzli outbreak of 1576 the Spanish missionaries gave up on their mission. Leaving the indigenous faithful to build their own church. It was a very well-written and dense book. As a Hispanic person I found it personally edifying. I look forward to reading more of Dr. Hughes's scholarship.

[Daniel Farabaugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an informative but very dense work. It had many interesting things to say and can to some really good conclusions. It was a bit more narrow in focus then I wanted to for my purposes.

[Robby Jones]

dnf

[MaKayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

learned a lot, very informational and the name was eye catching. suggested from the podcast “This Podcast Will Kill You”