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

by Jennifer Scheper Hughes

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479802555
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	08/03/2021
Series:	North American Religions , #11
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

List of Figures xiii

Note on Translations xv

Preface: Mortandad: Requiem xvii

Introduction: Ecclesia ex mortuis: Mexican Elegy and the Church of the Dead 1

Part I Ave Verum Corpus: Abject Matter and Holy Flesh

1 Theologia Medicinalis: Medicine as Sacrament of the Mortandad 35

2 Corpus Coloniae Mysticum: Indigenous Bodies and the Body of Christ 63

Part II Roads to Redemption and Recovery: Cartographies of the Christian Imaginary

3 Walking Landscapes of Loss after the Mortandad: Spectral Geographies in a Ruined World 103

4 Hoc est enim corpus meum/This Is My Body: Cartographies of an Indigenous Catholic Imaginary after the Mortandad 135

Conclusion. The Church of the Living: Toward a Counterhistory of Christianity in the Americas 175

Acknowledgments 181

Notes 185

Bibliography 213

Index 235

About the Author 245

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/31/2021

In this sharp study, historian Hughes (Biography of a Mexican Crucifix) examines the devastating epidemic of 1576 in what is present-day Mexico and its effects on the expansion of Christianity. The epidemic, a still-unidentified hemorrhagic fever that devastated native populations, was a formative moment for the church in the Americas, Hughes argues, because the emotional, physical, and theological experience of mass death shaped the way Spanish missionaries ministered to and sought to control those who made up “Christ’s New World body.” Yet while Europeans were “succumbing to despair” and neglected to toll the bells for the dead they had ministered to, Indigenous people “took up the labor of tending and ringing the church bells themselves.” In the aftermath, those who survived—both Spanish and Indigenous—tried to assert dominance. Rather than returning to the precontact past, however, Indigenous Central Americans enacted a vision of Catholic practice divorced from the “global imperial church” Spanish colonists envisioned. 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. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"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."

J. Michelle Molina

"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."

Hispanic American Historical Review - Rebecca Dufendach

"The book presents an indigenous-centered discussion of its themes, a practice which is increasingly prevalent but still quite uncommon... Scheper Hughes’s approach and style are critical for balancing the Eurocentric tendencies of scholarship on Central America, and is a welcome addition to the ongoing discussion."

Religious Studies Review

"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."

Ramón A. Gutiérrez

"This powerful book reorients American Christianity in time and space, grounding it firmly in the history of Indigenous peoples."

Christian Century Book Review

"The Church of the Dead is a stunning work that offers a powerful counter-history of Christianity in the Americas…Rather than being passive vessels for the Christian message, Hughes convincingly argues that Christianity may not have survived without the sacred labor of Native communities. Similarly, her attention to the spatial dimension of imperial domination and subaltern resistance through extensive cartographic analysis points to future areas of research for scholars working at the intersection of the history of Christianity, Religions of North America, and Indigenous studies."

Reading Religion - Joshua Mendez

"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."

Jessica Delgado

"[M]akes the convincing case for the position of late sixteenth-century Indigenous Mexicans as vital actors in the forging of American Christianity in the face of demographic catastrophe brought by the arrival of Europeans on Indigenous land."

Religion - Sierra L. Lawson

"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."

Ramón A. Gutiérrez

"Jennifer Scheper Hughes breathes new life into an important topic…Readers of this journal will be most impressed by Hughes’s theological readings of her primary sources."

American Religion