The Pipil, Nahua speakers who dominated western El Salvador, carried Mexican gods south, Tlaloc's rains and Xipe Totec's flaying feast among them, and their descendants' towns still keep cofradia processions in which older obligations persist under the saints. The colony grew around indigo and cattle, its Catholicism parochial and its dioceses poor, and after independence the coffee state subordinated the church without breaking it.
The twentieth century made Salvadoran religion world famous in the hardest way. The 1932 matanza that slaughtered tens of thousands of mostly indigenous rebels was remembered by survivors partly as a war on their culture; two generations later, catechists formed in liberation theology's base communities became targets in the civil war of 1980 to 1992, and the murdered, Rutilio Grande in 1977, Archbishop Oscar Romero at the altar in 1980, four American churchwomen that December, six Jesuits with their housekeeper and her daughter in 1989, became the era's martyrs.
Since the war Evangelical and above all Pentecostal churches have grown explosively in the neighbourhoods the state and the older church reached weakly, offering exit and protection in gang country, and El Salvador now stands close to Honduras and Guatemala on the edge of an Evangelical plurality, while Romero, canonised in 2018, watches from murals in both camps.