Predominantly Catholic for centuries, Latin America is still largely Catholic today, but the religious continuity in the region masks great changes that have taken place in the past five decades. In fact, it would be fair to say that Latin American Christianity has been transformed definitively in the years since the Second Vatican Council. Religious change has not been obvious because its transformation has not been the sudden and massive growth of a new religion, as in Africa and Asia. It has been rather a simultaneous revitalization and fragmentation that threatened, awakened, and ultimately brought to a greater maturity a dormant and parochial Christianity. New challenges from modernity, especially in the form of Protestantism and Marxism, ultimately brought forth new life. In The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity, Todd Hartch examines the changes that have swept across Latin America in the last fifty years, and situates them in the context of the growth of Christianity in the global South.

Catholic priest and radical social critic Ivan Illich is best known for books like Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis that skewered the dominant institutions of the West in the 1970s. Although commissioned in 1961 by American bishops to run a missionary training center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Illich emerged as one of the major critics of the missionary movement. As he became a more controversial figure, his center evolved into CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentacion), an informal university that attracted a diverse group of intellectuals and seekers from around the world. They came to Illich's center to learn Spanish, to attend seminars, and to sit at the feet of Illich, whose relentless criticism of the Catholic Church and modern Western culture resonated with the revolutionary spirit of the times. His 1967 article, "The Seamy Side of Charity," a harsh attack on the American missionary effort in Latin America, and other criticisms of the Church led to a trial at the Vatican in 1968, after which he left the priesthood. Illich's writings struck at the foundations of western society, and envisioned utopian transformations in the realms of education, transportation, medicine, and economics. He was an inspiration to a generation of liberation theologians and other left-wing intellectuals. Todd Hartch traces the development of Illich's ideas from his work as a priest through his later secular period.

An account of American missionary activity abetted by Mexican nationalists. Lazaro Cardenas, president of Mexico 1934-40, is widely remembered as the most nationalistic and populist Mexican executive and was demonized by foreign investors scandalized by his nationalization programs, particularly in the oil industry. Less well known are his efforts to 'Mexicanize' indigenous populations and to reduce the power of the conservative Catholic hierarchy by encouraging anti-clericalism and Protestant evangelical activity. Common aims therefore united Cardenas and Cameron Townsend, an American Protestant missionary. With the support of Cardenas and like-minded Mexican officials, Townsend formed the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL, a training school for Protestant missionaries who undertook to learn indigenous languages and to translate the Bible into those tongues. The official justification of this project was that the Indians' new vernacular literacy would serve as a bridge to learning Spanish and thus to assimilation into the larger national population. If at the same time Townsend's linguists also served as evangelists of a fundamentalist form of Protestantism, so much the better; in doing so, the SIL effort would undermine the Catholic hierarchy, which was seen as a rival of the Mexican state and its plans for secular national development. This unusual yet enduring alliance of a national government not known for friendship to foreigners and an unlikely collection of North Americans who united scholarship, political savvy, and religious zeal is this book's topic. The author relates the development of the SIL from its close association with official Mexico in the early 1930s to thelate 1970s, when a growing anti-SIL alliance led by a new generation of Mexican anthropologists induced the Mexican government to curtail its support for the SIL. Hartch contributes objectivity to a topic that has been dominated by the polemics of either SIL supporters or opponents, recognizing the self-interest that actuated all parties, but also acknowledging that SIL, whether or not it meant to, empowered and enriched many indigenous communities through the provision of literacy. Todd Hartch is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Eastern Kentucky University.