The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America Edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston and Stephen C. Dove Excerpt More information Garr ard-Burnett et al. 2 was the hegemony of the colonial Church, not only in terms of its institutions but also in its sway over hearts, minds, and fealty, that the reduction and marginalization of the Church became a chief preoccupation of nation-building statesmen in the nineteenth century. The colonial religious history of Latin America, marked by conquest, colonization, resistance, accommodation, and adaptation, closely parallels the region's secular history and shares many of the same themes. Although we fi nd it important to sketch out the institutional history of the Iberian Catholic Church in the New World-this being the "bones" that give structure to our historical understanding-this work also engages the more recent historiographical studies that examine the intersection of religion with race, ethnicity, gender, and secular culture. We also recognize that Christianity posed, and to some extent, continues to off er, important epistemological problems for non-Western peoples and their established belief systems. Thus, this volume explores the spiritual dimensions of what Hans Sieber called the "creolized religions" that emerge from the collision and conjunction of European, indigenous, and African cosmovisions. That said, there is no question that Catholicism was at the center of Spain and Portugal's conquests of the Americas. The stereotype of conquest in the name of "God, Gold, and Glory" is based in fact, but the role played by Catholicism and Catholic identity (as opposed to an individual Iberian's personal beliefs and pious practice) is much more complex than this basic equation suggests. Certainly, the Roman Catholic Church was as powerful a political player as existed anywhere in Europe in the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries, and this accounts in part for why the rationale for conquest and the rules for its conduct were cast in terms that melded religious and imperial motives quite seamlessly. To cynical modern eyes, it is diffi cult to reconcile the zealous Christian rhetoric of the conquistadors with the more peaceable sensibilities that we now associate with an ideal ethic of "Christian behavior." But for many Iberians in the sixteenth century, Christianity and, specifi cally, Catholicism was a militant faith, and Catholicism was so fully interwoven with what we now consider to be secular issues such as identity and citizenship that it was impossible to untangle the diff erent strands. Columbus left Spain on his fi rst voyage in 1492 just fi ve months after the North African Moors abandoned their last Iberian outpost in the southern city of Granada. The Spanish liberation of Granada signaled the end of the 700-year occupation of the peninsula by Muslim North Africans. The struggle to evict the Moors, known as the Reconquista , lasted several centuries, during which time the Spaniards identifi ed themselves fi rst www.cambridge.org