Church of the Dead

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 aliveMany 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.

In this sharp study, historian Hughes examines the devastating epidemic of 1576 in what is present-day Mexico and its effects on the expansion of Christianity ... Hughes draws on art, architecture, and landscapes to paint a consistently rich, accessible portrait of the era. This impressive work persuasively challenges ideas about the inevitability and nature of the 'Christianizing' mission in the Americas., Truly magnificent. Deftly overturning narratives of triumphant Christianization, Hughes shows us a colonial church born out of loss and devastation and shaped fundamentally by Indigenous survivors. It is both a scholarly tour de force—meticulously researched and methodologically sophisticated—and a beautiful work of mourning and memorial., Argues eloquently and persuasively that Catholicism in Mexico was forged in and through death. Attentive to the affective aspects of colonial rule, Scheper Hughes studies missionaries’ despair as they witness their ‘new world’ body of Christ dying, a view indigenous peoples utilize to solidify control over their new world. In a brilliant move, she points to what has been hiding in plain sight: future-oriented indigenous Catholic communities demanding that Crown and Church live up to the possibilities that pueblos de indios now envisioned as their due as members of the body of Christ., A brilliant and timely book, reminding us of how America’s First Nations dealt with epidemic disasters far more lethal than the 2.5 million lost to COVID-19. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire led to some 20 million deaths from smallpox and what the natives called “cocoliztli” (salmonella). How the Mexica implored the aid of their gods, and how they tried to religiously understand the collapse of their society, is the shocking story Jennifer Scheper Hughes tells., The Church of the Dead is a unique history of Christianity in the Americas because it centers death as a founding principle but examines the surviving practices as exceptionally autonomous in Indigenous communities. Best suited for theologians and historians, it breathes affective life into our understanding of past pandemics, at a time when everyone struggles with the reality of COVID-19.

Jennifer Scheper Hughes is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside and author of Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present.