Jennifer Scheper HUGHES. The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas. [Series: North American Religions], New York: New York University Press. 2021. Pp 245. $35.00. ISBN 9781479802555 (Hc). Reviewed by Daniel l. SMITH-CHRISTOPHER, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles.

Jennifer Scheper Hughes begins this historical analysis with a striking observation.  According to the study of ice levels in the Antarctic Ice Core dated to roughly the time she is examining, namely late 16th and early 17th centuries, there is evidence of startling reduction in carbon dioxide levels, supporting the supposition of massive scales of human death in the “New World” after the arrival of Europeans and their illnesses.  Hughes uses the Spanish missionaries own name for these terrible decades: mortandad. She writes: “Altogether, it is clear to me that the Indigenous mortality crisis of the sixteenth century was the founding condition of the church in the Americas” (Hughes, 2).

This is a fine study on a seriously disturbing historical topic.  Hughes early on presents the grim statistics of the massive scale of death among Indigenous in Mexican territories.  Some 8 million dead by 1520 from smallpox, which certainly enabled the Spanish conquests, but then over 12 million dying from the larger outbreak of disease from 1576 to 1581, likely caused by forms of hemorrhagic fever, given the graphic descriptions of horrific and rapidly spreading symptoms of the sick and dying.  Hughes argues that understanding the impact of suffering and death on this scale is inseparable from a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of Spanish ideology, theology, and behavior in the same era.  In Hughes powerful phrase, for the Spanish: “Millennial hope dissolved into Apocalyptic despair” (Hughes, 5). In other words, the Spanish missionaries themselves were transformed in the way they understood their very presence in the new world, and the nature of their purposes there. 

Notably, however, although Hughes is not interested in a simplistic “Missionaries vs. Indigenous” paradigms that denies any agency at all to the despairing indigenous peoples, she certainly does not try to minimize horrendous Spanish policies or mistreatment of indigenous peoples: “Though infectious disease preyed upon colonial impoverishment and dispossession, the mass death of America’s indigenous peoples by epidemic disease was just one incarnation of the death worlds wrought by European colonialism.  Military conquest and systems of extractive labor, including slavery, also took a devastating toll.” (Hughes, 18).
The work is divided into two parts with two chapters each.  In Part 1, there are two chapters.  In Chapter One, “Theologia Medicinalis: Medicine as Sacrament of the Mortandad”.  In this chapter, Hughes analyzes the ways in which medical care was considered as related to spiritual care, and therefore became another form of control.  Part of this, of course, is a consideration of the limited understanding of medical care in the 16th century, even apart from Church control.  For all the hospitals that were, indeed, constructed, Hughes is not sanguine about the effectiveness of their attempts at medical care.

In Chapter Two: “Corpus Coloniae Mysticum: Indigenous Bodies and the Body of Christ”, Hughes makes a strong argument about how the expansion of the notions of the “Body of Christ” (from Paul’s limited use to the early Christian communion defined by participation in the actual Eucharist) to include mystically defined, and geographically and politically expansive, numbers of people actually served as a theological tool of hegemony in the new world.
In Part II, Chapter Three (“Walking Landscapes of Loss after the Mortandad: Spectral Geographies in a Ruined World”) Hughes discusses the impact of the massive death on concepts of the land itself, proposing a kind of ‘cartography’ of devastation.  She writes: “Ruined landscapes, ruined temples, and ruined bodies haunted Spanish missionaries through the long colonial period.” (Hughes, 133), yet at the same time, Hughes discusses some Church leaders preparing for a future even while others despaired – sometimes laying claim to newly ‘emptied’ lands of the formerly living peoples.

Finally, in Chapter Four: “Hoc est enim corpus meum/This is my Body: Cartographies of an Indigenous Catholic Imaginary after the Mortandad”, Hughes turns her full attention on the evidence about the remaining, surviving indigenous peoples themselves.  Here, there are impressive signs of resistance and a determination to maintain some hold on, and define, their own futures.  Often this was expressed in an appropriated Christianity reformulated for indigenous survival.  Hughes main evidence for this are indigenous drawn maps where the Indian cartographers assert their continued possession of territories.  Hughes writes: “We have seen how Spanish missionaries despaired of, abandoned, or betrayed the vision of an Indigenous Christian church.  Here I show how pueblos de Indios consolidated a rival vision for Mexican Catholicism.” (Hughes, 139).  In what is perhaps the most strikingly creative chapter of the book, Hughes reads maps as theological statements of Indigenous history. 

In her conclusion: “The Church of the Living: Toward a Counterhistory of Christianity in the Americas”, Hughes helpfully reprises the steps she has taken throughout this important work.  I would strongly recommend this work to anyone interested not only in early Mexican and New World history, indigenous history, and certainly indigenous Christianity, but also those interested in a different approach to Trauma Studies in history.  This is, in short, a very important work.